All good things come to an end...

The semester is coming to an end and it is time to look back at the ground that we have covered. We have discussed everything about IT, including governance, change management, outsourcing, strategy, hardware and software, and countless other topics. Through it all, we have seen companies go (Blockbuster) and come back from the dead (GM) and highlighted the pervasive nature of IT in our corporate and personal lives. Looking back, what stands out for you from the semester? Was it a blog, a podcast, a case, a video, or a panel? Is there a thought or moment that captures the essence of the semester? I look forward hearing your reflections!

Vendor Selection, Planning, and Serendipity

In class today, we had a contrast between the vendor selection process of Cisco versus that of Harley Davidson.  what do you think should drive your vendor selection process - alignment with your organization, cost, or functionality?  And what were your thoughts on the success and failure of the two cases?

We also approached the subject of serependity versus planning.  It is clear that serepndity does play a huge role in your personal success as well as the success of your firm.  What are your thoughts on planning versus pure dumb luck?

Outsourcing - Final thoughts and reflections

With today's panel and Lecture 13 (next week), we are wrapping up our course discussion on IT outsourcing.  As you look back over the past three weeks, we have covered a lot of territory, from vendor selection to motivations to expectations to measuring ROI.   We, of course, could not get to everyone's questions in class today, so here are a few that I thought we should debate and talk about (some of these are from you!) - what do you think about these issues?

• At some point, will outsourcing be more expensive than insourcing?
• If expectations are so important, how do you mediate them?  Is governance the "silver bullet" (it was no accident that we talked about decision/input rights the same week as the panel!)
• How do you handle the "culture class" when deadline with offshoring partners (and sometimes nearshore ones)
• What stops firms from outsourcing core and strategic functions?
• What about rural sourcing, crowdsourcing, and the other emerging complexities of outsourcing governance?

I look forward to hearing your thoughts on outsourcing and your reflections!

Outsourcing - Part II

As we shift from motivation to implementation, our case discussions were focused upon who gets to make the decision, how to choose a vendor, and how the outsourcing relationship is managed. What do you think of the following..

• As a business manager, how much do you want to be involved in the outsourcing decision? Do you want the decision rights or just input rights?
• Which is better - best of breed or single sourcing?  What has been your experience with outsourcing?
• What do you think are the challenges in managing vendors (or clients)?

What stands out for you in outsourcing now that you have a chance to reflect some more?

Motivations for Outsourcing

The topic of the class over the next few weeks will be outsourcing.  We start today by talking about motivation - Cathay was outsourcing to drive down costs and Cisco was outsourcing to spur innovation.  From your experiences, what reasons have you seen for rationale for outsourcing in your company?  And in the news, what outsourcing deals have you seen announced and what was their rationale?

Even close to home, some recent analysis has suggested that one reason for the BP oil spill was due to the outsourcing relationships (scroll to the bottom of this article).

And all of this leads us to ask - where do organizational boundaries end?  And what does it mean for a company to geaux virtual?

Four Stories of Radical Transformation

We heard four great stories of radical transformation from our panelists in class this morning.  Alysia Green (Chevon); Dr. Stephanie Mills (OLOL); Dan Ohlerking (HPC); and Kevin Stone (AA) shared with us about how their organizations approach radical innovation.   Over the course of their presentations, I received over 50 texts containing some great questions, only a handful of which we were able to address.  So, let's continue this discussion here.

A few themes emerged from the discussion...

• IT is about business and speaking the language of business - it is about connecting information to process to people (sounds a lot like socio-technical systems theory!)
• Change management is crucial as you try to "manage the heart" of the change
• Resistance pervades all organizations, so you have to understand your business, the drivers, and the metrics
• The depth of change that IT has made is profound - we saw it even in our conception of what it means to go "to church"
• Data matters - all organizations have it, so now what do we do with it?
• IT is about relationships (network-based strategy!)
• Mobility and social networking are the keys to the future

What stood out for you?  What are your take-aways?

Changing knowledge sharing in knowledge-based firms

This week in class, we began a discussion about encouraging knowledge sharing in knowledge-based firms.  Both CareGroup and Siemens were wrestling with how to encourage their employees to share knowledge with one another.  In the case of ShareNet, Siemens created a structured knowledge base where they struggled to get employee buy-in.  CareGroup created a knowledge sharing app that automatically searched through all of the tacit knowledge to discover patterns to make explicit (albeit with a disastrous outcome!).


Despite their differences, this raises several issues for discussion...


Issue #1: Knowledge sharing


Some questions for you to consider:

• Is the concept of knowledge management inherently flawed?  Is it a noble effort that rests upon flawed assumptions?
• How do firms encourage knowledge sharing?  We know that knowledge is the chief asset for firms today, so how do we encourage employees to share it?
• Are there models of knowledge management and knowledge sharing that might work?

Issue #2: The knowledge of the group

We also raised the issue of the knowledge of the group versus than the knowledge of the individual.  As part of this discussion, we talked about about crowdsourcing - what are your thoughts on this approach?  Just six hours after our class, a column came out discussing crowdsourcing and the use of twitter to discover truthiness (thanks Stephen Colbert!).


Issue #3: The future of knowledge management

I also presented an argument that the future of knowledge management rests in social networking.  Do you agree/disagree and, to return to a topic presented earlier in class, how should firms approach social networking for internal purposes?  JetBlue is currently using Facebook to go downstream and create a better relationship with their customers, but in light of our discussions on ShareNet and CareGroup, are there similarities and approaches that we can glean for internal firm communications?


Issue #4: Knowledge sharing and innovation

Last, as I was reflecting upon what you were sharing in class, I started to wonder about the relationship between the reliance of knowledge gathered from knowledge management systems and innovation.  Does knowledge sharing stifle innovation - if you rely upon the knowledge of others, does it make you less likely to innovatively approach the problem?  Does it create constraints upon you and not allow you to "think outside the box"?

I look forward to your thoughts!

Change in Change-Resistant Firms

The theme of this week is change...


Today in class we talked about Providian Trust and Spartan Stores - two firms that are trying to change their firm with IT.   Providian struggled to overcome cultural resistance to IT and Spartan grappled with the structure of their organization.  These point to the struggles of dealing with rejectors of technology.  


In your research participation, you are trying to discover what makes people reject technology.


In the lectures, we are talking about business process improvement and the need to improve our process to impact our business effectiveness.


These three elements converge this week on the blog - how do you think that we overcome resistence to change?  Are the tactics and methods different depending upon the type of resistence? How do you incentivize individuals and/or organizations to adopt technology?  Have you seen resistence in your own job experiences? Share your stories and your thoughts!

Investing in IT

In class today, we talked about Charles Schwab and Zara and we had a very interesting post-case discussion.  This leads us to ask some questions:

• What are the criteria for deciding whether or not to invest in IT?  
• When there is competitive pressure upon you, how do you respond -  do you move closer to the competitor that is trying to change competition or do you try to make the new competition move closer to you? 
• What about the hidden, lost sales for Zara or Schwab - do you know what you are missing if you fail to invest in IT?

I look forward to hearing your thoughts on these questions and continuing our in-class discussions!

Control, Centralization, and Organizational Change

We launched our case study presentations with discussions of Mrs. Fields Cookies and Otisline. I wanted to extend our in-class discussions over the next week. As you reflect upon the case studies, let me present some questions for you to debate and blog about...

1. What is the right balance between control and freedom, from an IT perspective?  As an executive, is it possible to balance the two or is strategic control the best approach?  What can we learn from MFC and Otis?
2. How should firms balance the centralization/decentralization of decision making?  How should IT facilitate decision making?
3. When we consider STS, how can we achieve harmony?  Which element should move first?  Or is there no "right" answer?

I look forward to seeing your thoughts!

Social Networking, the Cloud, and the Enterprise

On the blogosphere this week in BADM 7050, we have seen a great debate about our private and public lives as well as the role of social networking. There were a lot of great blogs about the impact of technology on culture and how it truly has changed everything. Several of you raised the issue of mobile technology, Google, and the Apple TV. So, by now, all of us have a broader understanding and appreciation of the role of IT within our economy and society. Now let us focus on the enterprise, as we shift our focus to how IT facilitates decision making and operational excellence. Let us pick up on some of these technologies and see how you think that firms could use them for decision making.

The first is social networking. Is this simply a consumer phenomenon? Or can firms use social networking to make it easier for knowledge management? How do you think firms can use them? There certainly are various opinions about how it can be used [MSNBC], so what do you think?

The next technology is mobile. A new study says that the Mobile Web will rule by 2015 [MS report]. How will these changes alter how business is conducted? How does it need to change?

The lecture this week will raise two other emerging technology trends - mashups and cloud computing. A mashup is putting together services from multiple websites to create a composite application. Check out some of the examples on the Programmable Web website [here]. What will happen in firms when users can create their own apps? In your job experience, how much control did you have over IT solutions? How will this change everything?

The next is cloud computing. Cloud Computing is sourcing services over the web. There was a great blog in Computerweek that summarizes some of the great enterprise questions that a Cloud environment raises [Ryan Nichols]. After reading the article, what do you think?

While not directly related to the technologies we have talked about in class, CIO had an interesting discussion about some future technologies [CIO]. As a future manager, which technologies do you think your firm should implement? What do you think would make firms more effective?

As future managers, I want you to start to view these technologies through the prism of the golden rule - there is no such thing as a technology project, just business projects about technologies. While these technologies are really cool, how will they change decision making? Knowledge Management? Operational Excellence? I look forward to hearing what you think!

Technology is changing everything

Welcome to the first class blog.  In this space, we will bring forward the IT issues of the day to relate our classroom discussions to emerging real-world topics.

Our focus during the first week of class has been the profound changes that IT can enable.  Over the past few days, we have seen a series of reports about how firms are embracing these changes to go downstream and get closer to the customer.  These changes range from the marketing of products [WSJ article] to location-based services [CNN article].  What do you think - how has the emphasis on moving downstream and closer to the customer changed how you shape and work?  What else can firms do to move more downstream?

Meanwhile, the mobile market is heating up.  Microsoft is betting $1 billion on their new mobile O/S in an attempt to fight against the Droid and the iPhone [MSNBC], while Blackberry rules the corporate market, maintaining an impressive 70% market share [CIO].  Our class has been talking about the importance of location shifting and moving power to the handheld device - these stories point out how we are just getting started in the mobility phase.  What do you think of the mobile market - how should we think about "work" differently now?

The last series of stories over the past few days deals with Google's jump into the talk market.  The new app appeared with gmail earlier this week and is now live, with over 1,000,000 calls placed in the first 24 hours [Tweet from Google].  Yet, analysts argue that Google will not compete with Skype [Business Week].  What do you think - how will these evolving firms alter the competitive landscape of the telecom market?  How will this change how we collaborate in the future?