FALL 1994 VOL. 36 · NO. 1 Rounding out the Manager’s Job Tom Peters tells us that good managers are doers. (Wall Street says they “do deals.”) Michael Porter suggests that they are thinkers. Not so, argue Abraham Zaleznik and Warren Bennis: good managers are really leaders. Yet, for the better part of this century, […]
SUMMER 1994 VOL. 35 · NO. 4 If We Build It, They Will Come: Designing Information Systems That People Want to Use Building an information system that works is an activity that is far from certain. Even experts sometimes run afoul of the technical and project management challenges in system development — a fact underscored […]
SPRING 1994 VOL. 35 · NO. 3 Is Your CIO Adding Value? Chief information officers have the difficult job of running a function that uses a lot of resources but that offers little measurable evidence of its value. To make the information systems department an asset to their companies — and to keep their jobs […]
WINTER 1994 VOL. 35 · NO. 2 Case Management and the Integration of Labor Several years ago at IBM Credit Corporation, arriving at a quote for computer financing involved five business functions and, on average, took seven days — even though customers and sales representatives were anxiously awaiting the outcome. Now, coming up with a […]
FALL 1993 VOL. 35 · NO. 1 Exploiting Opportunities for Technological Improvement in Organizations We often hear that companies must learn to embrace change. This is particularly true of companies that are applying advanced technologies to improve their competitive position. The full advantages of such technologies cannot simply be purchased off the shelf; they are […]
SUMMER 1993 VOL. 34 · NO. 4 Database Marketing: New Rules for Policy and Practice Although a relatively recent development, database marketing (DBM) programs are already forcing important choices by companies, consumers, and legislators. These choices are changing society’s view of what constitutes good marketing practice in the United States and other countries where the […]
SPRING 1993 VOL. 34 · NO. 3 Making Global Strategies Work It is hardly a novel insight that global competitive forces compel multinationals to fully leverage the distinctive resources, knowledge, and expertise residing in their subsidiary operations. Questions of what are “winning” global strategic moves for the modern multinational have increasingly intoxicated international executives.1 Yet […]
WINTER 1993 VOL. 34 · NO. 2 Adoption of Software Engineering Process Innovations: The Case of Object Orientation Organizations increasingly rely on information technology (IT) both to perform their day-today operations and as a source of new products and services. The popular focus has been on hardware components, and that story has been overwhelmingly positive: […]
FALL 1992 VOL. 34 · NO. 1 Beyond Business Process Redesign: Redefining Baxter’s Business Network In the rush to dramatically compress product development cycle times, improve market responsiveness, and redefine customer-focused operations and service quality, many companies have turned increasingly to redesigning — “reengineering” — operational business processes. Yet the majority of these efforts focus […]
SUMMER 1992 VOL. 33 · NO. 4 Critical IT Issues: The Next Ten Years It’s a Monday morning in the year 2000. Executive Joanne Smith gets in her car and voice activates her remote telecommunications access workstation. She requests all voice and mail messages, open and pending, as well as her schedule for the day. […]
SPRING 1992 VOL. 33 · NO. 3 Who Owns the Twenty-First Century? In the United States, most of the last half century has been devoted to worrying about the Soviet Union. Democracy and capitalism faced off against dictatorship and communism. Suddenly, the threat disappeared. The Berlin Wall came down; East Germany and West Germany were […]
WINTER 1992 VOL. 33 · NO. 2 Managing Overconfidence Good decision making should include an understanding of the limits of our knowledge — or metaknowledge. Because overconfidence is deeply rooted in our culture, and because metaknowledge is not recognized, rewarded or formally taught, overconfidence remains a hidden flaw in managerial decision making. This article examines […]
FALL 1991 VOL. 33 · NO. 1 Interactive Marketing: Exploiting the Age of Addressability It’s a marketer’s dream — the ability to develop interactive relationships with individual customers. Technology, in the form of the database, is making this dream a reality. Now companies can keep track of customer preferences and tailor advertising and promotions to […]
SUMMER 1991 VOL. 32 · NO. 4 Bundling — New Products, New Markets, Low Risk INCREASING NUMBER of companies are realizing the value of combining separate elements of their product lines into bundles. Creating a bundle is like creating a new product. Thus bundles, like new products, can be instruments for implementing company strategy. Although […]
SPRING 1991 VOL. 32 · NO. 3 Beating Murphy’s Law IN THE PRESS, managers trumpet the success of new technologies. But all too often the private answer to “How is the new equipment working?” is “Badly.” Managers lament that their experience is living proof of Murphy’s famous Law: “Whatever can go wrong, will.” Yet the […]
WINTER 1991 VOL. 32 · NO. 2 The Effective Organization: Forces and Forms WHAT MAKES an organization effective? For a long time we thought we had the answer. Frederick Taylor told us about the “one best way” at the turn of the century, and organizations long pursued this holy grail. First it was Taylor’s time […]
FALL 1990 VOL. 32 · NO. 1 The Leader’s New Work: Building Learning Organizations This article, based on Senge’s book, “The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization,” begins to chart this new territory, describing new roles, skills and tools for leaders who wish to develop learning organizations.[gate_icon post_id=”2600″] By Peter M. […]
SUMMER 1990 VOL. 31 · NO. 4 The New Industrial Engineering: Information Technology and Business Process Redesign AT THE TURN of the century, Frederick Taylor revolutionized the workplace with his ideas on work organization, task decomposition, and job measurement. Taylor’s basic aim was to increase organizational productivity by applying to human labor the same engineering […]
SPRING 1990 VOL. 31 · NO. 3 Plugging into Strategic Partnerships: The Critical IS Connection IN TODAY’S COMPETITIVE WORLD, the effective use of information technology (IT) as an element of a competitive strategy is critical. In the literature there are numerous examples of how organizations have used information technology to build and sustain new relationships […]
WINTER 1990 VOL. 31 · NO. 2 Proactive Environmental Management: Avoiding the Toxic Trap A BANK. FORECLOSED on a loan and took control of a small piece of real estate. The .property was later found to be contaminated with hazardous wastes and, after a long-drawn-out court case, the bank was held liable for half a […]