The team from the Department of Information Systems that created decision-support software to help distribute crucial H1N1 vaccine knew that for this project, speed trumped all other protocols. They found that when faced with such severe time pressures, other design guidelines emerge, and textbook tactics go by the wayside.
Chaos in clinics" was what one TV news broadcast called 2009’s shortage of H1N1 vaccine. Once vaccine did start trickling into the supply chain, it was up to county officials to decide which healthcare providers would get the few doses available, and those decisions had to be made on the fly. In Arizona’s Maricopa County, public-health officials turned to Information Systems researchers from the W. P. Carey School of Business for a decision-making tool — a software program — that would help them distribute vaccines in an equitable and rational way.
There’s little margin for error when you’re in the business of selling electrons. After all, if an electron traveled around the world instead of bouncing around the nucleus of an atom, it would circle the earth some 8.3 times in one second. Since there’s no time to react, electricity providers must do all they can to prevent system failures. In such efforts, Arizona Public Service (APS) has developed award-winning innovations. During 2008, the utility earned the Edison Electric Institute’s Edison Award — the highest industry recognition an electric utility can earn — for one such breakthrough; contributing to that development were top-tier process-improvement methods and a dedicated team that teaches other utility departments how to get business-process management (BPM) rolling.
In the Web’s early days, self-styled seers proclaimed that the ironclad law of online commerce would be survival of the cheapest. Consumers could compare products with a few clicks of a mouse, these folks said, and thus they’d all soon migrate to the places where they paid the least. It hasn’t worked out that way. Plenty of sites have made good businesses out of offering great deals, but lots of higher-priced sellers remain. What has happened, says Rob Kauffman, a professor of information systems at the W. P. Carey School of Business, is that pricing transparency has become just one part, though a critical one, of companies’ online strategies.
How does your organization make decisions? Thomas Davenport, a professor of Information Technology and Management at Babson College and author of "Competing on Analytics: The Science of Winning," has taken a systematic look at the way decisions are made. He suggests that companies would benefit by examining the kinds of decisions they make, and the alternatives for approaching them. In this two-part conversation with knowIT, Davenport discusses analytics, the changing role of the executive and the future of decision making.
Privacy once meant drawing the drapes. Now that we depend on technology to do the world’s business, privacy means securing data, protecting personal information and keeping hackers at bay. Drawing the drapes in an electronic sense will call for a complex system of safeguards and require policymakers to create guidelines. On January 28, Data Privacy Day was observed across the U.S., Canada and 27 European nations. The W. P. Carey School of Business celebrated the day with a symposium for privacy leaders in the public, private and academic arenas. The event was hosted by the Center for Advancing Business Through Information Technology (CABIT) and Intel.
