Research Center Models for Attracting Corporate Funding

Approaches to generating external funding for research and to support other initiatives and university programs are presented. Emphasis is placed on value added research that stimulates intellectual activity and provides revenue that offsets the increasing limitations of university funding. The approaches presented proved successful for both urban and non-urban university environments

Corporate Sponsorship of Academic Research: The Trend, Its Drivers, and Its Implications

Budgets are shrinking in higher education, and greater financial accountability is simultaneously being demanded of universities. One of the consequences is that internal funding for research is more difficult to access than in years past. In such an environment, corporate sponsorship is an alternative that must be considered. In this article, we describe the forces compelling business schools to seek corporate sponsorship for research. Then, we discuss why some business faculty may perceive undesirable constraints in corporate-sponsored research. We also describe the challenges that researchers often need to address in order to secure corporate sponsorship and take full advantage of it. We conclude by describing some of the implications of this paradigm shift in research funding. When corporate funding is accessed and the relationship with the sponsoring organization is managed well, incentives are aligned among researchers, universities, and corporations. Benefits also include the development of new knowledge, solutions to real-world business problems, funding for researchers and universities, enhanced teaching, and a clear demonstration of the value of academic research

IS Students in Demand: Products of the Reengineered IS Classroom

Research suggests that IS people have lower social needsthan people in other occupations. Indeed, personal research on what motivates IS professionals reveals that interacting with other people and establishing relationships are some of the lower-rated motivational factors. Perhaps then, it should not be too surprising to learn that one of the most often heard complaints of IS majors relates to the inadequacy of their communication skills. Corroborating evidence is abundant. For example, IS departments, consulting companies, and computer vendors often recruit people who do not major in IS. These firms instead overlook the best and brightest IS students to recruit non-IS students that have developed interpersonal skills through other means --experience with student organizations, fraternities or sororities, or membership in student chapters of professional business societies on campus. When asked why this is the case, recruiters indicate that the ability to communicate effectively is a critical skill in their organizations, and that the interpersonal skills possessed by their candidates were fundamentally more important than the technical skills possessed by IS graduates. Recruiters feel that technical deficiencies possessed by their newly-hired employees can be overcome in training programs, whereas deficienciesin the ability to communicate effectively present a much larger training challenge. This is consistent with recent literature which reports that of all skills, the following are the most sought after by employers [1]: •listening and oral communication •group effectiveness: interpersonal skills, negotiation, and teamwork •adaptability: creative thinking and problem solving •personal management of career development Consequently, we as IS educators owe it to our students to begin to consider developing these skills within the IS curriculu

Cycle Time Reduction: Concepts and Case Studies

Increasingly organizations compete based on time. As a result, cycle-time reduction is a key agenda for organizations interested in achieving increased customer service and reduced cost. With improved cycle time, organizations can often eliminate or reduce inventory while expanding customer service offerings. The purpose of this tutorial is to present the fundamental concepts of cycle time reduction and to show how IS can be used to reduce cycle time, increase customer service, and reduce costs significantly. The tutorial examines several organizations that used IS as a way to leverage cycle time for competitive advantage

The Commoditization of IT: Evidence from a Longitudinal Text Mining Study

While Information Technology (IT) has been identified by researchers as a source of strategic advantage for businesses, commentators have argued that this reality may not endure. These commentators argue that the growing ubiquity of IT makes it a commodity input rather than a scarce and valuable resource. We examine CEOs’ Letters to Shareholders, one of the primary statements of corporate strategy, using both content analysis and latent semantic analysis, a text mining technique. Examining these letters allows us to investigate whether IT may be declining in strategic importance over time. We examine 160 annual reports from firms in the healthcare industry, covering a ten-year span of time, from 1997 through 2006. Our results indicate that the strategic emphasis placed on IT may be increasing, but its association with firm performance is declining. Our findings imply that as markets become more competitive, IT management capabilities and the strategic use of IT take on increasing importance. Our findings also imply that CEOs’ perception of the importance of IT is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for improved firm performance. This article makes two primary contributions. First, we present an empirical examination of the issue of IT commoditization as a complement to existing anecdotal discussions. Second, we demonstrate the use of latent semantic analysis (LSA), a relatively new methodology for analyzing textual data, one that is evolving into an alternative to the well-known content analysis technique

Systems analysis and design : best practices

xvii, 421, I-15 p. : ill. ; 26 cm