IT Lecture 1

• Globalization
• Rise of the Information Economy
• Emergence of the Digital Firm
• Transformation of the Business Enterprise

Knowledge

• Wealth Flows from innovation, not optimization
• The ideal environment for cultivating the unknown is to nurture the supreme agility and nimbleness of networks
• The domestication of the unknown inevitably means abandoning the highly successful known - undoing the perfected
• The cycle of "find, nurture, destroy" happens faster and more intensely than ever before

• Innovation
• Critical Thinking

Technology

Organization where nearly all significant business processes and relationships with customers, suppliers, and employees are digitally enabled, and key corporate assets are managed through digital means

The unique ways in which organizations coordinate and organize work activities, information, and knowledge to produce a product or service

• Flattening
• Decentralization
• Flexibility

• Strategic
• Tactical
• Operational

Interrelated components working together to collect, process, store, and disseminate information to support decision making, coordination, control, analysis, and visualization in an organization

• 1. Knowledge - how to use information
• 2. Information - shaped data
• 3. Data

Input to Process to Output to Feedback, which goes back to Input

• Input: The collection of raw data from within the organization or from its external environment for processing in an information system
• Processing: The conversion, manipulation, and analysis of raw input into a form that is more meaningful to humans
• Output: The distribution of processed information to the people who will use it or to the activities for which it will be used
• Feedback: Output that is returned to the appropriate members of the organization to help them evaluate or correct input

Strategic partner

• A new way of doing things that initially does not meet the needs of customers
• Ex. The internet

Produces an improved product customers are eager to buy

• Situation in which the relative bargaining power of two parties in a transaction is determined by one party possessing more information essential to the transaction than the other party
• Rise of the e-world

• No need to trade of richness of information for reach of information
• Made possible by the internet
• Ex. Amazon can suggest books individually to millions of customers

• Virtual Storefront: Sells physical products directly to consumers or businesses
• Information broker: Provides product pricing and availability information; generates revenue from advertising or directing buyers to sellers
• Transaction Broker: Processes online sales transactions for a fee

• Online Marketplace: Provides digital environment where buyers and sellers meet
• Content Provider: Provides digital content, such as news; revenues from fees or advertising
• Online Service Provider: Provides connectivity; Ex. Clickstream

• Virtual Community: Provides online meeting place for people of similar interests
• Portal: Provides initial point of entry to the web, along with specialized content and services; Ex. Yahoo
• Syndicator: Aggregates content or applications to resell as package to third-party Web sites

• Threat of new market entrants
• Threats from substitute products
• Suppliers
• Customers
• Other competitors

All elements of the firm (organizational structure, tasks, people, and technology) must develop simultaneously and with the same goal