Secure mobile sales force automation: the case of independent sales agencies

Sales agents depend on mobile support systems for their daily work. Independent sales agencies, however, are not able to facilitate this kind of mobile support on their own due to their small size and lack of the necessary funds. Since their processes correlate with confidential information and include the initiation and alteration of legally binding transactions they have a high need for security. In this contribution we first analyze the target domain using qualitative and quantitative methods and propose an IT-artifact that supports independent sales agencies. It is build as a service platform that supports multi-vendor sales processes. Afterwards, we examine use cases of sales representatives of independent sales agencies using this system and derive their security requirements. Using these, we propose a security extension to the IT-artifact and evaluate this extension by comparing it to existing solutions. Our results show that the proposed artifact extension provides a more convenient and secure solution than already existing approaches.