Exploring the Renewal of IT-enabled Resources from a Structural Perspective

Organizations are exposed to ever-increasing dynamic environments, making sustaining the derivation of IT benefits critical. However, researchers have observed that IT benefits are short-lived and have called for studies on how organizations can sustain the derivation of IT benefits, especially in dynamic environments. Research shows that the integration of IT assets and other organizational resources needed to form IT-enabled resources from which organizations derive IT benefits can also constrain the renewal of IT-enabled resources to sustain the derivation of IT benefits. In this study, we draw on relevant theories, published empirical cases, and a primary case study to explore, from a structural perspective, the renewal of IT-enabled resources to sustain the derivation of IT benefits. We find that certain structural properties (i.e., component flexibility, component centrality, and component coupling) emerge during the formation and modification of IT-enabled resources and influence the renewal of IT-enabled resources. We extend Nevo and Wade’s model on the formation of IT-enabled resources with the structural properties and offer eight propositions on how the structural properties and organizational capabilities influence the renewal of IT-enabled resources. We discuss the theoretical and managerial implications and identify areas for future research

Supplier relationship management best practices applied to the manufacture of a helicopter airframe in China

Thesis (M.B.A.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management; and, (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Mechanical Engineering; in conjunction with the Leaders for Manufacturing Program at MIT, 2009.Page 67 blank.Includes bibliographical references (p. 65-66).Sikorsky's recently begun program to manufacture the S-76 helicopter airframe at a supplier in China is examined as a case study of supplier relationship management. Best practices and key principles from the literature and other industry case studies are identified. Key concepts covered include: importance of product architecture and supplier strategic role on the appropriate type of supplier relationship to develop; the different stages of relationship management; the concept of making investments in a supplier relationship as a way of achieving desired relationship closeness; the importance of geography and culture on foreign supplier relationships. The best practices and principles are then used to analyze Sikorsky's performance in the China S- 76 airframe program to date. It is found that while Sikorsky is engaged in several key supplier relationship management activities, significant improvement could be made by more carefully considering how to overcome geographic and cultural distance and by making decisions about relationship investments in a more analytical way, with a focus on bottom-line financial impact. Finally, a generalized process for managing supplier relationships is developed. The six steps are: * Determine the appropriate relationship to develop with the supplier * Determine current supply chain proximity with the supplier * Determine stage of supplier relationship management and appropriate type of investments * Develop menu of relationship investment options * Determine the attractiveness of investment options * Select, prioritize and make investments.R. Jon King.S.M.M.B.A

An analysis about the relationship between the cloud computing model and ITIL v3 2011

Cloud Computing is widely recognized as a recent computing paradigm of digital transformation in which scalable and elastic computational resources are delivered as a service through Internet technologies. Its characteristics made this business model increasingly adopted by organizations reaching business goals. Besides its benefits, some risks may impact organizations internally and, in the way they deliver their services to their clients. Therefore, it became important to understand the impacts of the Cloud model on the way companies organize their processes. The goal of this work is to investigate which are the main impacts arising from the Cloud Computing model currently impacting Information Technology Infrastructure Library framework processes. The methodology selected will be through semi-structured interviews with knowledgeable professionals to effectively collect practical information that, according to the Systematic Literature Review performed, could not be collected by the traditional literature. By analyzing the Systematic Literature Review results, several processes of this framework were affected, which may lead to a need for reframing it. Although the organization’s approach to this model must be enhanced and adapted to a new reality, the empirical insights collected from semi-structured interviews, suggest that the framework does not need to be reframed, and ITIL v3 2011 most impacted processes by the introduction of the Cloud-based model, are Change Management and Incident Management.A computação em nuvem é amplamente reconhecida como um paradigma de computação recente da transformação digital, no qual recursos computacionais escaláveis e elásticos são fornecidos como um serviço através de tecnologias na Internet. As suas características fizeram com que esse modelo de negócio fosse cada vez mais adotado por organizações que na prossecução dos seus objetivos de negócio. Além dos benefícios, também existem os riscos podem impactar as organizações internamente e na forma como entregam os seus serviços aos clientes. Portanto, tornou-se importante entender os impactos do modelo de Cloud na forma como as empresas organizam seus próprios processos e práticas. O objetivo deste trabalho é investigar quais são os principais impactos decorrentes do modelo de Cloud que impactam atualmente os processos da Information Technology Infrastructure Library. A metodologia selecionada será por meio de entrevistas semiestruturadas a profissionais capacitados para recolher informações decorrentes de experiências na prática que, de acordo com a Revisão Sistemática da Literatura realizada, não poderiam ser obtidas pela literatura tradicional. Ao analisar os resultados da Revisão Sistemática da Literatura, diversos processos desta framework foram afetados, o que pode levar à necessidade de reformulá-la. As considerações empíricas recolhidas nas entrevistas semiestruturadas, sugerem que a framework não necessita de ser reformulada e que os processos do ITIL v3 2011 mais impactados no modelo Cloud são o de Gestão de Incidentes e de Gestão da Mudança

Skilling up for CRM: qualifications for CRM professionals in the Fourth Industrial Revolution

The 4th industrial revolution (4IR) describes a series of innovations in artificial intelligence, ubiquitous internet connectivity, and robotics, along with the subsequent disruption to the means of production. The impact of 4IR on industry reveals a construct called Industry 4.0. Higher education, too, is called to transform to respond to the disruption of 4IR, to meet the needs of industry, and to maximize human flourishing. Education 4.0 describes 4IR’s impact or predicted impact or intended impact on higher education, including prescriptions for HE’s transformation to realize these challenges. Industry 4.0 requires a highly skilled workforce, and a 4IR world raises questions about skills portability, durability, and lifespan. Every vertical within industry will be impacted by 4IR and such impact will manifest in needs for diverse employees possessing distinct competencies. Customer relationship management (CRM) describes the use of information systems to implement a customer-centric strategy and to practice relationship marketing (RM). Salesforce, a market leading CRM vendor, proposes its products alone will generate 9 million new jobs and $1.6 trillion in new revenues for Salesforce customers by 2024. Despite the strong market for CRM skills, a recent paper in a prominent IS journal claims higher education is not preparing students for CRM careers. In order to supply the CRM domain with skilled workers, it is imperative that higher education develop curricula oriented toward the CRM professional. Assessing skills needed for specific industry roles has long been an important task in IS pedagogy, but we did not find a paper in our literature review that explored the Salesforce administrator role. In this paper, we report the background, methodology, and results of a content analysis of Salesforce Administrator job postings retrieved from popular job sites. We further report the results of semi-structured interviews with industry experts, which served to validate, revise, and extend the content analysis framework. Our resulting skills framework serves as a foundation for CRM curriculum development and our resulting analysis incorporates elements of Education 4.0 to provide a roadmap for educating students to be successful with CRM in a 4IR world

Framework of Big Data Analytics in Real Time for Healthcare Enterprise Performance Measurements

Healthcare organizations (HCOs) currently have many information records about their patients. Yet, they cannot make proper, faster, and more thoughtful conclusions in many cases with their information. Much of the information is structured data such as medical records, historical data, and non-clinical information. This data is stored in a central repository called the Data Warehouse (DW). DW provides querying and reporting to different groups within the healthcare organization to support their future strategic initiatives. The generated reports create metrics to measure the organization\u27s performance for post-action plans, not for real-time decisions. Additionally, healthcare organizations seek to benefit from the semi-structured and unstructured data by adopting emerging technology such as big data to aggregate all collected data from different sources obtained from Electronic Medical Record (EMR), scheduling, registration, billing systems, and wearable devices into one volume for better data analytic. For data completeness, big data is an essential element to improve healthcare systems. It is expected to revamp the outlook of the healthcare industry by reducing costs and improving quality. In this research, a framework is developed to utilize big data that interconnects all aspects of healthcare for real-time analytics and performance measurements. It is a comprehensive framework that integrates 41 integrated components in 6 layers: Organization, People, Process, Data, Technology, and Outcomes to ensure successful implementation. Each component in the framework and its linkage with other components are explained to show the coherency. Moreover, the research highlights how data completeness leads to better healthcare quality outcomes, and it is essential for healthcare organization survival. Additionally, the framework offers guidelines for selecting the appropriate technology with the flexibility of implementing the solution on a small or large scale, considering the benefits vs. investment. A case study has been used to validate the framework, and interviews with Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) have been conducted to provide another valuable perspective for a complete picture. The findings revealed that focusing only on big data technology could cause failing implementation without accomplishing the desired value of the data analytics outcomes. It is only applied for one-dimensional, not at the enterprise level. In addition, the framework proposes another 40 components that need to be considered for a successful implementation. Healthcare organizations can design the future of healthcare utilizing big data and analytics toward the fourth revolution in healthcare known as Healthcare 4.0 (H 4.0). This research is a contribution to this effort and a response to the needs

Designing supportability into software

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, System Design & Management Program, February 2004.Includes bibliographical references (p. 114-116).Background: Despite the identification of a "software crisis" in the 1960s, large software projects are full of defects even today [19]. These defects cause the software to behave unexpectedly. The cause generally is attributed to the inherent property of software to possess arbitrary complexity [20]. Additionally, computer software is becoming all pervading. There is literally an explosion of software automating things that were considered impossible to automate only a few years ago. Essentially, software is growing to encompass anything and everything with such speed that we don't have the time to reflect on 'what happens when the software does something that it was not intended to do?' In other words, the software encounters an anomaly or a defect something customers encounter everyday. In any case, whenever customers encounter problems caused by defects they need help to solve these problems. They generally seek such help at a software vendor's product support services. With software getting more and more complex it is getting extremely difficult to support customers in a timely and cost effective manner. There is a constant struggle to ensure high Quality of Service (QoS) with low Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), which in turn affects Return on Investment; in such a scenario considering nearly 80% of the costs associated with software occur after it is shipped to the customer. Currently, there are two solutions to such problems caused by defects: First, if the source of the problem itself is found to be a defect in the software then the software vendor generally fixes the problem by modifying their code. Such a problem is generally classified as a bug. By now it is known that software applications have such bugs or defects or anomalies. These bugs cause the software to behave unexpectedly. Depending on its severity this behavior can on one extreme go unnoticed or one the other end produce catastrophic results. It pervades all software whether it is the AT&T long distance switching node crash in 01/15/90, the well known Y2K bug in database related software, Microsoft Passport Security defect, Mars Polar Lander defect, or the Ariane 5 rocket defect. These are just a few examples of well known software bugs. For each well known bug there are untold numbers of bugs that may not see the limelight. These defects can arise due to many reasons during the design and development of the software however they primarily arise due the essence of software to possess inherent properties of complexity, conformity, changeability, and invisibility [20]. Hence, a question arises, "Do we still try to single-mindedly go for the elusory 0 bug product? OR Do we accept that there are going to be bugs and try incorporate / accommodate for this directly into the product or otherwise?" Second, if the source of the problem is such that the vendor cannot simply fix the product, then it is classified as a limitation of the software product itself. In such a case the support organization works with the customer to find a workaround. Additionally, if many customers encounter the same problem then the product needs to be modified based on the workarounds their support services have provided to customers. In other words the product evolves based on how its customers use it. Product support services also receive numerous problems that are non-defect related where the source could be customer error or ignorance, improper documentation etc and their solutions generally require end-user education and training, better documentation etc. However such nondefect related support incidences fall outside the scope of this thesis. In the defect related scenarios illustrated above most of the contemporary efforts to determine the root cause of a customer's problem, requires in-depth knowledge of the product, extensive debugging that is extremely tedious, painstaking, and manual. Resolution of a problem depends solely on the troubleshooting skills, experience and subjectivity of the Support Personal that the customer is able to get a hold of. Products have all along incorporated functionality such as better features, performance, scalability etc. into their designs however none explicitly addresses how to tackle a software application's problems. This is unfortunate since such problems deeply affect customers and software development organization alike. The former looses productivity, effectiveness, time and money while the latter expends dedicated monetary and human resources for troubleshooting software products for a number of years until the product is declared obsolete or the customer's license expires. Problems affect overall customer satisfaction with the software making them more skeptical of future releases. The bottom-line is that there is a strong need to innovate software design and development itself to address how to deal with software problems so that customers should not have to loose their time, money or their life because the software application they are using has problems.by Prashant A. Shirolkar.S.M

Architecting the future telebehavioral health system of care in the Army

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Engineering Systems Division, 2012.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 151-159).Charged by the Chairman of the Joints Chief of Staff, the authors were members of a study to develop innovative recommendations for transforming the military enterprise to better manage post-traumatic stress and related conditions in support of service members and their families. The authors first began their study by performing a stakeholder analysis to understand the unmet needs of stakeholders across the enterprise. By assessing stakeholder values across the life cycle, we found that there was a strong need to improve the continuity of care and accessibility of services for service members and their families, in particular for the Reserve Component and National Guard population. Therefore, the authors investigated the role of technology to serve as a force extender to improve access and timeliness of care to psychological health care services. Specifically, they utilized a systems approach to evaluate the current state of telehealth within the Military Health System. By utilizing the enterprise lenses of strategy, policy, organization, services, processes, infrastructure, and knowledge to analyze the current state of telebehavioral health, they proposed a future state architecture for telehealth delivery. They highlight seven enterprise requirements for developing this future state architecture: 1. MEDCOM shall establish a core funding stream as a line item to support TH service line. 2. MEDCOM Telehealth Service line shall develop standard TBH metrics for deployment across the enterprise 3. MEDCOM Telehealth Service line shall identify eligible populations across the enterprise that could benefit from the expanded access that TBH services provide. 4. MEDCOM Telehealth Service line shall develop an enterprise solution that supports seamless flow of operational information and the electronic health record. 5. MEDCOM Telehealth Service line shall revisit specific policies that are presenting barriers to telehealth growth and sustainability. 6. MEDCOM Telehealth Service line shall encourage learning and best practice sharing across the Army TH enterprise. 7. MEDCOM Telehealth Service line shall collaborate with other Army governance organizations to develop a mobile health strategy and pilot projects for the Army enterprise.by Andrea K. Ippolito.S.M

How to Improve the Security Skills of Mobile App Developers:An Analysis of Expert Knowledge

Much of the world relies heavily on apps. Increasingly those apps handle sensitive information: controlling our financial transactions, enabling our personal communication and holding intimate details of our lives. So the security of those apps is becoming increasingly vital. Yet research shows that those apps contain frequent security and privacy problems; and that almost all of these issues could have been avoided had the developers had sufficient motivation, support and knowledge. This lack of developer knowledge and support is widely perceived as a major threat. We therefore investigated the skills, approach and motivation required for developers. We conducted a Constructivist Grounded Theory study, involving face-to-face interviews with a dozen experts whose cumulative experience totalled over 100 years of secure app development, to develop theory on secure development techniques. The study identified that the subdiscipline of app development security is still at an early stage, and found surprising discrepancies between current industry understanding and the experts’ recommendations. In particular it found that a secure development process tends not to appeal to app developers; and that the approach of identifying common types of security problems is too limited to give an effective security solution. Instead we identified a set of successful techniques we call ‘Dialectical Security’, where ‘dialectic’ means learning by questioning. These techniques use dialogue with a range of counterparties to achieve app security in an effective and economical way. The security increase comes from continued dialog, not passive learning. The novel contribution of our work is to provide: A grounded theory of secure app development that challenges conventional processes and checklists, and A shift in perspective from process to dialectic. Only by working to develop the Dialectical Security skills of app developers shall we begin to see the kinds of secure apps we need to combat crime and privacy invasions