A „Rainmaker‟ Process for Developing Internet-based Retail Businesses

Various systems development life cycles and business development models have been popularized by information systems researchers and practitioners over a number of decades. In the case of systems development life cycles, these have been targeted at software development projects within an organization, typically involving analysis, design, programming, testing, and deployment. For business development models, phase-based approaches for developing generic businesses have been proposed. With the recent surge in popularity of online businesses, and particularly webbased hosted services for online start-ups, a gap has emerged in the information systems literature for development processes specifically tailored to developing internet-based retail businesses. In this paper, we present such a process, which we dub the „Rainmaker‟ process for developing internet-based businesses. We demonstrate, through a real case study, how the Rainmaker model can be successfully applied.