To customers, there’s not much to loyalty programs; on the surface they’re usually just a piece of plastic and a "Here’s how much you saved" line at the bottom of a receipt. But experts at the W. P. Carey School of Business say that for companies, the programs can be phenomenally more complex and important than taking a trifling percentage off a customer’s bill.
When a big software company releases a new product it often comes with the now ubiquitous "version" number: 1.0, 2.0, etc. In the past few years, a second version of the Web has emerged with the moniker Web 2.0. Not a single technology or product, Web 2.0 is a term meant to encompass many technologies and signifies that the way we use the Internet is evolving. W. P. Carey School professor of supply chain management Kevin Dooley and colleague Raghu Santanam, a professor of information systems, say that the new-and-improved web has very real implications for how we interact with and profit from the web.
Enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems have a growing reputation for being big, slow, pricey and just about impossible to change once they’re installed. Those aren’t exactly promising survival traits in competitive environs that demand IT agility. In the conclusion of our two-part story, Julie Smith David, associate professor of information systems at the W. P. Carey School of Business, discusses REA (resources, events and agents) analysis, a method of system modeling that may meet the information and agility requirements of corporate computing today.
With any luck at all, there isn’t a giant asteroid headed our way soon, but in the world of information technology, an extinction event may be on the horizon. Enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems — those monolithic software packages that evolved to tame companywide data — may be heading the way of trilobites and dinosaurs. Once in place, ERP systems are rigid, says Julie Smith David, an associate professor of information systems at the W. P. Carey School of Business — not the adaptive trait that leads to success in a dynamic environment.
When employees make up their minds that a knowledge management (KM) system is more trouble than it’s worth, they simply stop using it. This decision affects the employer’s bottom line and is a crucial factor in whether the big aspirations for a KM system pan out. Indeed, such investments frequently under-perform, which leaves companies wondering how they can get more value out of their knowledgebases. Govind Iyer and Sury Ravindran, associate professors of information systems at the W. P. Carey School, decided to look at the problem from a new angle — and found some surprising results.
Few companies operate independently in the Electronic Age, which means that the security vulnerability of every business partner — outsourcer, client, whatever — whose computer system has access to yours is a potential portal to your most sensitive data. In a presentation during the "Cultivating and Securing the Information Supply Chain" symposium sponsored by the W. P. Carey School’s Center for Advancing Business through Information Technology, researchers described a Department of Defense-funded study on investing in IT security.
