The Magic Bazaar

Its that time of the year again for me. Every Fall I have the privilege to open my academic year by teaching the IT Management course to our Executive MBA students here at Carlson. We meet intensively during their residency week on campus and three recent encounters (two physical-world, with senior business leaders in the Twin Cities, and one virtual)  nicely link to my overall theme for this course:

1. A recent luncheon meeting with the CIO of one of our major (top 5) accounting and consulting firms led us to conclude that if firms today are not being enabled by the cloud, and don’t have mobile, analytics/BI and social layers in whatever they do (read processes, services and products), they are probably leaving money on the table
2. An evening with the Minneapolis head of a top global strategic consulting firm confirmed that most firms are not even using an iota of the data that they generate for gaining competitive advantage, and
3. My own social media space (Twitter and Facebook) was aflame a couple of weeks ago by Marc Andreessen’s (he wrote the original web-browser Mosaic, founded Netscape…) article titled Why Software is Eating the World, in which he elaborates how “software companies are poised to take over large swathes of the economy.” His main point is that six decades into the computer revolution we are now at the point of transforming entire industries. While publishing — think books, movies, music; entertainment — videogames; telecom and direct marketing may not be that surprising as we may have internalized the Amazon, iTunes, Netflix, Zynga, Skype and Googles of the world, the real change is happening in the physical world (cars, retail, oil and gas, agriculture, healthcare and education). Did we miss something? :-)

These highly interlinked sets of issues are the motivation for pursuing a yin-yang efficiency-innovation duality (Bapna and Sambamurthy 2010) based theme for our course. On one hand IT can be the great efficiency provider, the integrator and standardizer for companies with multiple business units, geographies and processes. Interestingly, technologies such as cloud and forces such as global sourcing are leading towards a shrinkage of the “empire” of the IS/IT organization within many firms, much to the chagrin of many CIOs. 

However, the cutting-edge companies (P&G for instance) are using IT for front-line business innovation through analytics, social media and superior knowledge sharing. Hence, we also focus on how IT can contribute towards business innovation (lower operating costs, not just IT costs which are anyway in single digit percentages of revenues; contribute to top-line growth through newer information based products, processes and services; and improve internal knowledge flows).  

This is the territory we cover in CEMBA 5712 and the following ‘Leveraging Social and Digital media for Business” course (Spring 2012).

What’s your view of IT within your firm and industry?