Category: Managing IT

Social media: The wild, wild West of new technology

Leigh Dow, director of the Toolbox for IT at Toolbox.com, addressed the new developments in social media at a recent Showcase Series event sponsored by the Center for Advancing Business Through Information Technology (CABIT) at the W. P. Carey School’s Department of Information Systems. Dow started her career in politics, then went to work at Intel where she became excited about innovation environments and technology. From there she went back to school for an MBA in technology management. After graduating she joined Honeywell Aerospace in various marketing positions, eventually bridging into e-commerce and customer relations management. After the speech, CABIT Director and Professor Julie Smith David talked to Dow about what’s happening in the fast-expanding world of social media. We asked if Dow is seeing an uptick in awareness of social media within the Toolbox for IT community, and if those community members are actively looking for ways to use these tools for business value.

Podcast: Privacy by design

  Associate Professor Marilyn Prosch heads up the "Privacy by Design Research Initiative" at the W. P. Carey School’s Department of Information Systems. Prosch served on a task force of the American Institute of CPAs and the Canadian Institute of Chartered Accountants, which developed a set of metrics  called the Generally Accepted Privacy Principles, or GAPP.  Here at the W. P. Carey School of Business, Prosch and her colleagues are looking at privacy from a different perspective from other institutions.

Star power: How IT professionals and companies get it

If you use a cell phone or buy household electronics, there’s a good chance you own a device with one or more components distributed by Avnet. This global technology distributor’s 404,000-square-foot warehouse in Chandler, Arizona ships more than 10,000 line items each day and is the flagship in a global logistics network of value-add distribution centers worldwide that ship more than 38 billion devices each year to more than 100,000 customers. Given the importance of computer systems to its business, Avnet is certainly intent on developing IT stars and polishing their skills for on-going excellence. We interviewed Schultz and other Avnet executives to see what traits and skills they consider must-haves for top-tier systems professionals.

Predictive modeling: New techniques will make it faster and DEEPER

Before a bank offers you a mortgage re-fi, or a credit card company dangles a low interest rate before your eyes, some information-systems worker has probably pegged you as a promising prospect. He most likely used predictive modeling to do it, and it wasn’t a quick, easy task. But predictive modeling, the computer-supported process of forecasting things like customer behavior or creditworthiness, soon will be more efficient, because modeling software tools are beginning to be linked with the company databases where customer information resides. This development, along a new methodology developed by two Department of Information Systems professors, will allow companies to make marketing and other business processes even more effective.

Electronic medical records: A surprising short-term prognosis for cost savings

It is a widely accepted assumption in the healthcare and information technology industries that electronic medical records in hospitals help reduce costs and enhance the quality of patient care. But new research on the subject by information systems professors Michael Furukawa, Raghu Santanam and Benjamin Shao contradicts that conventional IT wisdom, and that has surprised and disappointed many in the healthcare and IT fields. But the researchers stress that the problems they discovered are short-term.

The whole truth and nothing but the truth: Managing information asymmetry in IS consulting

A cynic might say that information systems consultants shortchange their clients. They can, for example, promise more than they deliver. Or they can tarry and delay. Or they might ask, on the back end, to bill for "unanticipated" work. In a recent paper, Greg Dawson, an assistant professor in the Department of Information Systems, says that the cynics are half right. Yes, he says, some IS consultants misbehave, but so do clients. Both sides have information that the other one needs, and both sides sometimes hide or even distort that information to take advantage of the other. Why? Consultants and clients are pushing for the best deal for themselves, and people sometimes venture into unethical territory when they do that.