A Week about Porter

Technology Management Seminar in Problem Solving – Week 6 Weekly Summary

The class wrapped up in week 6 with some meaty content.  Porter’s 5 forces played a big role this week both in discussion questions and in the homework.  Those five forces being (1) threat of substitute products or services, (2) supplier power, (3) buyer power, (4) threat of new entrants, (5) rivalry among existing competitors.

Porter’s three generic strategies also made an appearance in the homework this week, those being (1) broad cost leadership, (2) broad differentiation, or (3) a focused strategy.  In examining these for application to the scenario, I emphasized the difference between a broad appeal strategy (strategies 1 and 2) and a focused strategy (strategy 3), ultimately advocating for a focused strategy.

Porter stayed in the center of the discussion with an additional discussion question about Porter’s value chain, a concept that makes the suggestion that businesses examine their processes in terms of a series of linked steps, each adding some value to the overall process.  By analyzing the steps in each process, companies may be able to reveal steps that would benefit from either process reengineering or automation, perhaps increasing the value that step adds to the process (for example, by lowering processing costs).

The paper this week also involved some discussion of first mover advantage.  First mover advantage can be described as occurring when a business is first to market with some sort of innovation resulting in a significant improvement in competitive advantage.  The example given in the text was FedEx’s development of customer self-service software, an innovation that has since been adopted by almost every major shipper in the industry.

Another course done.  One left.  Six weeks to finishing.  Then Adam’s IPod will have to find someplace else to go.  I’ve been thinking about that a lot, but trying not to get too far down the path- the last six weeks still need my attention and I’m finding it easier and easier to push the current task aside and think about what is further down the road.

The CIA – Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability

Technology Management Seminar in Problem Solving – Week 5 Weekly Summary

This week pulled together some information from previous weeks to build up to a discussion of enterprise systems, security vulnerabilities, risk mitigation techniques, and the business value of employing such protections.  When discussing threats to systems and mitigating techniques, many students offered practical insight from their work experience.  My own approach was to group the threats and protections into three categories; confidentiality, integrity, and availability.  Confidentiality issues centered on appropriate access controls.  Integrity focused more on addressing inadvertent disclosure.  Availability issues covered the gambit from denial of service to system recovery from a disaster or intentional sabotage.

The conversation then turned to various approaches and factors considered when assessing the business value of applying security and control technologies.  Again the students came through with a good mix of approaches they’ve seen, both ones they likes and didn’t like.  Some discussion addressed the concept of an enterprise-wide risk assessment driving security control choices, but the majority of people seemed to have seen real world scenarios where security choices were evolutionary.  People seemed to observe businesses making incremental improvements to security to address specific risks about as often (if not more so) than businesses doing a holistic risk assessment and deriving security choices from that assessment.  Regardless of the approach, it was clear that threats to systems continue to change (and perhaps at an increasingly rapid pace) making it necessary for companies to be proactive and timely in updating their countermeasures.

The homework this week was a team assignment centered on the process for recommending an enterprise system for the virtual organization we’ve been using throughout the course.  This assignment built on the work in previous weeks and was designed to address the points of justifying a system, assessing the business value of an integrated information technology environment, evaluating integration risks, and addressing the implementation of a management framework for security and control.

This was also a crazy busy week with robotics, so I peeled a lot of time away from school to wrap up the robotics build season.  The team paper this week was not huge, so if the other team members do their part we’ll all come out of this in good shape.  On the last team paper I over contributed, if my teammates don’t step up this time we’ll take a hit in the grade.  I have some ‘buffer points’ so I’m not too worried about it.
 

Information Technology – The Unplugged Week

Technology Management Seminar in Problem Solving – Week 4 Weekly Summary

This week started with a discussion question focused on wireless technology and how that technology can contribute to the business bottom line.  An additional question mixed in with that addresses the impact of a wireless culture on the future of business.  This kicked off a lot of discussion, with everyone sharing their experiences with all forms of wireless; text, voice and video.

The second discussion question focused on the impact IT can have on business communication; both in a good way and in a bad way.  This question really broke down into two parts.  The first part being what the relevance is of effective communication within an organization (and by association, what can be inferred about an organization that has good or bad internal communication).  The second part of this question related to the dual role IT plays in facilitating corporate communication, the first role being as communication system provider and enabler, and the second role as participant in the communication process.  More than one student pointed out the complexity that is introduced in IT related dialogs due to the specialized nature of the language IT uses.  This was cited as a common point of communication difficulty, but does seem to be an area that is improving.

The homework this week emphasized the process of evaluating a technology and applying it to a business scenario, with consideration given to the return on investment expected from the technology.  Wireless technology was the centerpiece of the homework, fitting in with the theme of the week.

Arguing quality will get you nowhere

Technology Management Seminar in Problem Solving – Week 3 Weekly Summary

The focus of this week (in the classroom anyway) was information management and decision support systems.  This branched off into two broad categories; evaluating technologies and the process of assessing decision support systems.  On the evaluating technologies branch a lot of ground was covered ranging from data mining and artificial intelligence to statistical analysis. On the assessment branch there was an extended discussion of assessing high quality information, an important baseline for starting an evaluation of any DSS.   The discussion questions continued with a very spirited discussion of possible roles for artificial intelligence technology in business (such as expert systems, neural networks, and a concept referred to as intelligent agents).  Several students either didn’t grasp the difference between artificial intelligence and automation or didn’t care.  Maybe a little of both considering the participation point scoring in this class puts a higher emphasis on volume than on quality.  I raised this when the instructor had deducted points (actually, I guess you could say he chose not to award the points) from my grade for a previous week.  After what a protracted discussion he acknowledged that he chooses to hold back points to reward high-volume students.  Since quality is very subjective I don’t really have a case to continue arguing the point; he could simply say all of my contributions are of a lower quality, regardless of the volume I contribute.  So I wrapped up the discussion with a comment that I would try to increase both and hopefully earn the maximum points.   

Apparently I didn’t completely piss the instructor off, or perhaps something in my argument hit a nerve because my grades in the second week took a jump up.  Some of those points were due to the instructor tacking on points from the previous week, but also an up tick beyond that- enough to boost my grade back into the 94%+ range.

To add to my cheer this week the homework was also the first major team assignment for the class.  Each team member advocated for a technology to be used by the company in the scenario, and collectively we were to assess a decision support system deployment in terms of a cost benefit analysis (including consideration of net present value).  It is always interesting during team assignments to see the students that start out with a cheerleader attitude, suggesting everyone finish early (days ahead of the due date).  These cheerleader types rarely keep their pom-poms waiving all week and this was no exception; the lead cheerleader advocated for a Saturday delivery of everyone’s content, and then vanished into the woodwork only to resurface on Sunday to say all his free time this week just disappeared.  Last time I checked in the class he still hadn’t wrapped up his piece.  Go Team!  I over contributed to the paper just as a safety net then stepped away from the keyboard to let the rest of the team take a swing at it.