Business-Driven IT Transformation at Royal Philips: Shedding Light on (Un)Rewarded Complexity

In 2013, Royal Philips was two years into a daunting transformation. Following declining financial performance, CEO Frans van Houten aimed to turn the Dutch icon into a “high-performing company” by 2017. This case study examines the challenges of the business-driven IT transformation at Royal Philips, a diversified technology company. The case discusses three crucial issues. First, the case reflects on Philips’ aim at creating value from combining locally relevant products and services while also leveraging its global scale and scope. Rewarded and unrewarded business complexity is analyzed. Second, the case identifies the need to design and align multiple elements of an enterprise (organizational, cultural, technical) to balance local responsiveness with global scale. Third, the case explains the role of IT (as an asset instead of a liability) in Philips’ transformation and discusses the new IT landscape with its digital platforms, and the new practices to create effective business-IT partnerships

Producer-side Use Cases of Digitized Products: What’s Best for Your Company?

Digital technologies are moving into physical products. Smart cars, connected lightbulbs and data-generating tennis rackets are examples of previously “pure” physical products that turned into “digitized products”. Digitizing products offers many use cases for consumers that will hopefully persuade them to buy these products. Yet, as revenues from selling digitized products will remain small in the near future, digitized product manufacturers have to look for other sources of benefits. Producer-side use cases describe how manufacturers can benefit internally from the digitized products they produce. Our article identifies three categories of such use cases: product-, service-, and process-related ones. We suggest digitized product manufacturers to (1) also consider internal value creation opportunities when developing digitized products, (2) take stock and identify blind spots, and (3) prioritize use cases. Our research can help product manufacturers when building a business case for digitizing their products

Strategic Flexibility and IT Infastructure Investments - Empirical Evidence in Two Case Studies

This paper presents an empirical study to explore how firms invest in their IT infrastructure to support strategic flexibility. It investigates how IT infrastructure capabilities relate to strategic flexibility, how firms build flexibility into their IT investment decisions, and how the firms use IT to support strategic flexibility. Our cases indicate that different types of needed flexibility at the organizational level, ask for different types of IT infrastructure capabilities. In both cases, flexibility is supported by centrally organized management-oriented IT infrastructure capabilities. In the IT investment process, flexibility in the investment decision-making process is implicitly taken into account, whereas IT infrastructure flexibility is explicitly valued for. In both cases, management expects more explorative use of applications supported by IT infrastructure investments to better enhance strategic flexibility than exploitative use does. The implications for further research are discussed

Spectroscopy of Orbitally Excited Bs Mesons with the CDF II Detector

Die Arbeit beschreibt die weltbeste Messung der Masse der orbital angeregten Bs Mesonen, die in einer D Welle in ein Kaon und ein Bu Meson zerfallen. Massenresultate der Arbeit sind in das PDG Buch eingegangen. Darueberhinaus wurde ein maximales Limit auf die Breite gesetzt, und die Produktions- und Zerfallsverzweigungen der untersuchten Zustaende betrachtet

Recent results on B spectroscopy at the Tevatron

The Tevatron collider at Fermilab provides a rich environment for B spectroscopy. Recently the first direct observation of the B{sub c} meson has reduced its mass uncertainty by two orders of magnitude. A search for {eta}{sub b} mesons provides the best limit on its production in p{bar p} colliders. In studies on orbitally excited B{sub d} mesons for the first time the narrow states could be separated from each other. The orbitally excited B{sub s} mesons have been observed for the first time. With the charged {Sigma}{sub b}{sup (*)} a second B baryon could be established beside the {Lambda}{sub b}

A neural network z-vertex trigger for Belle II

We present the concept of a track trigger for the Belle II experiment, based on a neural network approach, that is able to reconstruct the z (longitudinal) position of the event vertex within the latency of the first level trigger. The trigger will thus be able to suppress a large fraction of the dominating background from events outside of the interaction region. The trigger uses the drift time information of the hits from the Central Drift Chamber (CDC) of Belle II within narrow cones in polar and azimuthal angle as well as in transverse momentum (sectors), and estimates the z-vertex without explicit track reconstruction. The preprocessing for the track trigger is based on the track information provided by the standard CDC trigger. It takes input from the 2D ($r - \varphi$) track finder, adds information from the stereo wires of the CDC, and finds the appropriate sectors in the CDC for each track in a given event. Within each sector, the z-vertex of the associated track is estimated by a specialized neural network, with a continuous output corresponding to the scaled z-vertex. The input values for the neural network are calculated from the wire hits of the CDC.Comment: Proceedings of the 16th International workshop on Advanced Computing and Analysis Techniques in physics research (ACAT), Preprint, reviewed version (only minor corrections

Origin and age of submarine ferromanganese hardgrounds from the Marion Plateau, offshore northeast Australia

Be and Nd isotope compositions and metal concentrations (Mn, Fe, Co, Ni, and Cu) of surface and subsurface ferromanganese hardground crusts from Ocean Drilling Program Leg 194 Marion Plateau Sites 1194 and 1196 provide new insights into the crusts' genesis, growth rates, and ages. Metal compositions indicate that the hardgrounds, which have grown on erosional surfaces in water depths of <400 m because of strong bottom currents, are not pure hydrogenetic precipitates. Nevertheless, the ratios between cosmogenic 10Be and stable 9Be in hardgrounds from the present-day seafloor at Site 1196 between 1 x 10–7 and 1.5 x 10–7 are within the range of values expected for Pacific seawater, which shows that the hardgrounds recorded the isotope composition of ambient seawater. This is also confirmed by their Nd isotope composition (Nd between –3 and 0). The 10Be/9Be ratios in the up to 30-mm-thick and partly laminated hardgrounds do not show a decrease with depth, which suggests high growth rates on the present-day seafloor. The subsurface crust at Site 1194 (117 m below the seafloor) grew during a sedimentation hiatus, when bottom currents in the late Miocene prevented sediment accumulation on the carbonate platform during a sea level lowstand. The age of 8.65 ± 0.50 Ma for this crust obtained from 10Be-based dating agrees well with the combined seismostratigraphic and biostratigraphic evidence, which suggests an age for the hiatus between 7.7 and 11.8 Ma