With the conventional legacy POS payment transaction method, vendors are bound to a payment institute in their region and can only use relatively expensive dedicated or slow dial-up lines to their financial institute. This chapter covers the work to produce an architecture that shows how to reengineer traditional point of sales terminal payments in order to adapt these for payment over the Internet through Web services. With the use of Web services for payment transactions, vendors will get more freedom to choose their provider and the services they take without having to throw away their legacy applications. Given the globalization of the economy, vendors can negotiate services and fees with payment providers all over the world. Literature research and prototype tests and evaluation in this project show that transactions fees and performance of POS terminal payments transactions trough Web services can be competitive to conventional payment transactions methods and create flexibility for vendors POS terminal application. Vendor’s available Internet connections and the Web services standards in the market can be used for payment transactions. With Web services, the system can be created and changed relatively quickly and simply if the right skills are available.
Top2. Research Methodology
Various approaches can be used for the research. The advantages of each methodology depend on the environment of the application and organization (different domain and focus). A variety of research methods are used in most information system research projects. The information system research approach used in this project is based on the method described by Burstein and Gregor (1999) because it presents a group of research methods. They demonstrated the importance of recognizing the “System Development” approach and relevant criteria for guiding the validity and worth of such work. Following the “System Development” approach form Burstein and Gregor (1999), Figure 1 (Nunamaker et al.1990, cited by Burstein et al. 1999) is used.
Figure 1. Information System research to phenomenon of interest (source: Burstein)
This form of research can be regarded as an action research which is suitable for this project because “System Development” recognizes other research fields next to system development, supports rapidly changing environments, the use of the prototype and the natural way of approach. The term “action research” is used because the researcher is an active participant in the SD process. Burstein and Gregor (1999) point out that the result of action research is usually associated with the creation of knowledge about the system, while at the same time attempting to change it.
The process is iterative, i.e., the cycle of action and reflection continually generates new insights. Unified process, is used for development of the system. Linda Knight (et al. 2001) has examined the relative strengths and limitations of existing system development methodologies, from the traditional Waterfall to Rapid Application Development and some of the newest rapid response methods. These methods are focused on the system design.
Following the System Development approach, experimentation and observation in the project is to approve the literature research, design and architecture. Evaluation of the design and architecture is done by the use of the use cases. By building a prototype the integration of the particular reviewed technologies are proven and the system can be tested by novice users.
The suggested criteria of the System Development approach described by Burstein and Gregor (1999) are used for evaluation of the system development work. The issues used are; significance, internal validity, external validity, objectivity and reliability.