Managing Technology

The rising data flood and emerging tools for analyzing it are changing the ways innovation gets done.

The irony: We know less about the sources of value in the economy than we did 25 years ago.

On the Web, innovative data reuse yields opportunities — and legal questions.

Many companies have established technology-based platforms or virtual customer environments to partner with their customers in innovation and value creation. In pursuing such initiatives, most companies seem to focus primarily on customers' innovative contributions, paying limited attention to customers' interaction experiences in the VCE. But the VCE experience has broader and more profound implications -- particularly for customer relationship management. In this article, the authors offer a framework to help companies understand and evaluate customers' VCE experience profile. The authors describe five customer roles in innovation and value cocreation: product conceptualizer, product designer, product tester, product support specialist and product marketer. Each role has something to offer. However, depending on the customer innovation role, the nature of the customer interactions and the technologies used in the VCE will vary. The VCE customer experience is made up of four components: the pragmatic experience (its ability to provide information), the sociability experience (how it promotes group discussion), the usability experience (defined by the quality of the human-computer interactions) and the hedonic experience (relating to mental stimulation and entertainment). Drawing on examples from companies including Microsoft, SAP, Samsung, BMW, Volvo and Ducati, the authors suggest strategies and practices to enhance customer experiences in VCEs and ensure favorable outcomes in terms of both innovation management and customer relationship management. Designing and implementing the right system can help companies improve innovation and customer relationship management. Therefore, managers should view their VCE initiatives as an integral part of their overall innovation and customer strategies. What's more, the costs of implementation can vary widely. Therefore, companies need to be careful about selecting and implementing a portfolio of strategies and practices that meets the needs of the types of customers they want to engage in value cocreation.

New technologies such as blogs, wikis, Second Life and Skype are popping up, sometimes unexpectedly, in many organizations. Assessing which technologies to implement is difficult enough. Figuring out how to assess a novel technology that is already being used by members of your organization is even more challenging. With so many new and different technologies emerging all the time, trying to choose the "right" one for every company and situation is the wrong approach. Managers instead need to evaluate how it will work in their specific organization. In that spirit, the authors introduce the six-dimensional Genre Model -- based on why, what, who, where, when and how -- for considering the central issues, risks and benefits of using a new medium in the context of existing technologies. The model helps assess how employees' use and adoption of the new technology will align with the organization's mission, culture and business practices and how it may change productivity and effectiveness. Several case studies are analyzed. Blog Central at IBM, introduced by management as a self-publishing platform for employees, soon became more social than informational as users applied blogging to extend their personal networks, "get the pulse" of their organization and establish a sense of community. After MNI Partners, a management consulting company, adopted the Skype system to cut costs on its weekly international conference calls, the nature of those meetings evolved as participants exploited the new medium's properties. And when managers from a large European petroleum company, which the authors call Epsilon, established an internal electronic bulletin board for the exchange of technical information, they learned that many longtime employees, aggrieved by recent corporate changes, had other uses in mind for that medium. The Genre Model is used to analyze these cases, as well as to help explain, retrospectively, why the business letter gave way to the memo, which then was largely subsumed by e-mail.

Technology use, diverse networks and access to new information all enhance productivity.

Two Unisys studies indicate there's a wiser use of your IT resources.

For many years now, companies seeking to deliver higher business performance by harnessing IT have focused on alignment -- the degree to which the IT group understands the priorities of the business and expends its resources, pursues projects and provides information consistent with them. In practical terms, that means there must be shared ownership and shared governance of IT projects. However, the authors contend that their research -- a survey of more than 500 senior business and technology executives worldwide, followed up with in-depth interviews of 30 CIOs -- reveals a troubling pattern: Even at companies that were focused on alignment, business performance dependent on IT sometimes went sideways, or even declined. That's because underperforming capabilities are often rooted not just in misalignment but in the complexity of systems, applications and other infrastructure. The complexity doesn't magically disappear just because an IT organization learns to focus on aligned projects rather than less aligned ones. On the contrary, the authors say, in some situations it can actually get worse. Costs rise, delays mount and the fragmentation makes it difficult for managers to coordinate across business units. The survey also showed that almost three-quarters of respondents are mired in the "maintenance zone." IT at these companies is generally underperforming, undervalued and kept largely separate from a company's core business functions. Corporate management budgets the amounts necessary to keep the systems running, but IT doesn't offer enough added value to the business and often isn't expected to. Drawing on the experiences of Charles Schwab & Co., Selective Insurance Group, De Beers, First Data Corp. and National City, among others, the authors identify a group of best practices that constitute "IT-enabled growth." The companies that achieve the highest growth at a low cost manage complexity down, source IT staffing and software wherever it makes the most sense and create start-to-finish accountability connected to business results. Then, and only then, the best performers tightly align their entire IT organization to the strategic objectives of the overall business, using governance principles that cross organizational lines and making business executives responsible for key IT initiatives.

A new planning process, tested at established companies, puts e-business into perspective and helps make it manageable.

Has enterprise software become too complex to be effective?