I went to see someone at LSBU today, an academic supervisor no less.
We spoke for a quite a while and he has managed to instil some focus on this whole exercise. Essentially we went back to basics and said, what is web technology, what is its application and how can that be used. Then what are the outcomes to the business and how is this percieved from the view of the staff, organisation and customers. If we survey or interview from here and analyse we can start to map out a dissertation.

To be honest it is a little short of my grand visions of open source and business models that challenge the viewpoint of Porter and HBR but it makes a LOT more sense.

I think that with a little more research I can get some grounding here and am going to go back to some of those Porter ideas and see where I can build on from here.  A very good week for opening my eyes.