Articles

Companies are increasingly outsourcing information technology for a variety of reasons, such as concern for cost and quality, lagging IT performance, supplier pressure, and other financial factors. The outsourcing solution is acceptable to large and small firms alike because strategic alliances are now more common and the IT environment is changing rapidly. The authors offer their suggestions for determining when to outsource and how to structure and manage the resulting alliance. Most important, they suggest, is to view the outsourcing agreement as a strategic alliance and manage it as such.

Errors in data can cost a company millions of dollars, alienate customers, and make implementing new strategies difficult or impossible. The author describes a process AT&;T uses to recognize poor data and improve their quality. He proposes a three-step method for identifying data-quality problems, treating data as an asset, and applying quality systems to the processes that create data.

Japan's distribution systems, long the target of criticism, are changing. Deregulation, new manufacturing imperatives, consumer behavior, and the economy have interacted to reshape Japanese distribution. The trends have important implications for global business, since the system now offers areas of opportunity for Western manufacturers and retailers.

How can companies combat the overconfidence and tunnel vision common to so much decision making?

A new kind of information system is emerging that will reduce the time to market, help tailor products and services to customers' needs, and make processes more responsive to unexpected events. Expressive systems allow users to adapt quickly and easily to exceptions from standard operating procedure. The authors describe how expressive systems work and suggest ways of modifying the roles and structure of IS departments to implement the new technology.

How can you tell if your company is, indeed, a learning organization? What is a learning organization anyway? And how can you improve the learning systems in your company? The authors provide a framework for examining a company, based on its "learning orientations," a set of critical dimensions to organizational learning, and "facilitating factors," the processes that affect how easy or hard it is for learning to occur. They illustrate their model with examples from four firms they studied -- Motorola, Mutual Investment Corporation, Electricite de France, and Fiat -- and conclude that all organizations have systems that support learning.

An organization's ability to develop and change its information systems quickly and often is increasingly important. The two primary approaches to systems development have been build or buy. The authors' research suggests that a third alternative can enable organizations to both develop and change systems faster -- a "template" approach. Templates are existing systems, built with the aid of computer-aided software engineering (CASE) tools, that are changed at the design level and thereby customized for a new organization's use. The authors discuss the use of the template approach at three companies, as well as the rapidly growing template marketplace. All three organizations cited significant reductions in the time and cost of delivering their systems, as well as improvements in IS-business relationships and the ability to learn new business methods and technologies.

When two or more branded products are integrated, like IBM and Intel or Bacardi Rum and Coca-Cola, they are perceived as linked, or jointly branded. The authors present a rationale for why such alliances may sometimes be an appropriate strategy. They develop a managerial decision template to analyze the costs and benefits of joint branding, and discuss the implications of such decisions for different types of allies. They conclude by calling for multidisciplinary empirical examinations of brand alliances.

A hybrid of Japanese and American parents, NUMMI provides a case study of the successful introduction of a new production system. By working on the assembly line in the NUMMI plant and interviewing hundreds of people, the authors observed the transformation of an out-of-date General Motors auto plant into the world-class assembly operation it is today. Their study has implications for other organizations that are trying to learn from each other, particularly across national borders. Their findings also show how organizational culture plays a central role in companies that are adapting to a constantly changing environment.

How much does your organization know? The vital impact of organizational knowledge on performance is now widely recognized, but the study of how to manage such knowledge is still in its infancy. The author defines technical knowledge and gives a framework for mapping and evaluating levels of knowledge. He shows how to apply the framework to measure how much your organization knows and doesn't know about its production processes, to learn where knowledge resides in your company, and to make better use of what you know. He shows why automation without adequate knowledge leads to disaster and how to manage knowledge in a world of continual organization learning.