MIT Sloan Books

During my time I Sloan I have had the opportunity to work with some great professors and researchers. I just wanted to highlight some of the books they have written.

My CISR Research Advisor, George Westerman, recently released a new book called IT Risk. One reviewer put it nicely when he said it is the first IT risk book that didn't put him to sleep. George and his CISR colleagues do great work. Please check out his new book.

I am also working as a teaching assistant for Professor Tom Malone. His book, The Future of Work, has some great insights on the organizational changes that are happening due to the reduction in communication costs.

Outsourcing and Innovation

The CISR research project I have been working on for the last year, "Building an Environment for Innovation," is in the process of finishing up. My last case study for the project is focused on vendor innovation. Our research has found the vendor innovation and outsourcing should not be lumped together. Managed right vendor driven innovation can be an important piece of an innovation portfolio. This research will be available to CISR sponsors this spring. Until then the quotes from a recent CIO Magazine article do a good job of summing things up:

Indeed, most outsourcing SLAs and pricing models deter innovation. Take data center management. It’s the outsourcer’s responsibility to ensure 99.99 percent uptime or provide backup services. “The value add would be when the service provider looks at the environment and says, Now I understand how you support your business and I see that by leveraging this new technology or different hardware, we can improve the quality of the service or your costs,” says Taylor of Fluor, which is on its fourth major outsourcing contract since the mid-1990s. “But you’re paying the vendor X dollars per server so there’s no motivation for them to reduce that number.”

Fluor signed a new contract with IBM last year. “The lesson we learned was that we needed to put a more generic umbrella agreement in place for future innovation,” says Taylor. “There are specific towers of service in the scope of work that are commoditized. But there is also a separate agreement that will enable IBM to provide innovation in all kinds of areas, like virtualization.” The contract includes prenegotiated terms for future innovation around issues of indemnity, risk and intellectual property protection. “If we want to have IBM explore virtual desktops, there’s already a fabric in place. We don’t have to call the lawyers and go through a full negotiation each time,” explains Taylor. “And it’s separate from the rest of the outsourcing, so IBM doesn’t need to get reimbursed through the fees we pay for the commodity activity.” Now Fluor can increase and decrease services from IBM without penalty. “It’s important not to lock yourself in because you don’t get the benefit of innovations that present themselves every day,” Taylor says.

Grand Central Problems

I've been using Google's voicemail service Grand Central since September. The service lets you aggregate all your phone numbers (home, work, cell, etc) under one master number. When somebody calls you the service routes the call (or screens it) based on your preferences. It is a great concept that has a few bugs.

First, in an age where everyone has caller ID on their cell phones or at work, people get very confused when you call them back on a different number. Then the next time they call you they call back the other number and not your Grand Central number. For whatever reason, people just can't deal with the concept of a number with no home (i.e. the Grand Central number).

Second, all of the call routing preferences are based on your phonebook. However, Grand Central's importing tool is very clumsy and does not de dupe.

Finally, as of late Grand Central is unreliable. Now I know this is only a beta product but you just can't mess with people's messages. On Feb 4th Grand Central lost stored contacts and voicemails. Today is Feb 14th and the voicemails still haven't been restored. Unfortunately for me, I'm in the middle of search for a job and I can't listen to any of the messages that were left for me in the last 10 days. Needless to say I'm not very happy about this.

Grand Central has had a few other high profile problems. Check out this post from Tech Crunch.

Innovation and Productivity

In my work on innovation one topic that frequently arises is the definition of innovation. Innovation is not the same as invention. In contrast, innovation includes both value creation and value capture. This means that innovation is just as likely to be a service as a product or technology. In addition, innovation has a direct link on the economy in a way that invention does not necessarily have. The Economist's recent article & interview with Vijay Vaitheeswaran does a good job of covering these concepts.

John Patrick at MIT

Last week internet pioneer John Patrick came to speak to my Technology Driven Business Change class. John worked at IBM for over 30 years and helped guide IBM through the internet revolution. In addition, the class is taught by Irving Wladawsky-Berger who headed IBM's internet division. Together John & Irving have some great experiences and stories about the challenges IBM faced. Rather than relay them all I'll just say that you should check out Lou Gerstner's book "Who Says Elephants Can't Dance?" Also, John's slides are posted on his blog.

Check out John's blog and post about his experience at MIT and Irving's technology leadership blog.

Grand Central

I just got my invite to beta test Grand Central. I stumbled upon this company when I was doing research this summer and about a week later they were purchased by Google. The technology aggregates up to six phone numbers. When a contact calls, Grand Central can be set to ring to specific numbers. Additionally, each contact can receive a custom greeting, voicemail can be checked online, and calls can be blocked. This service is great for people who are constantly checking multiple voicemail boxes. If you have a desk phone, mobile phone, home phone, etc this is worth checking out. Now that they are owned by Google I'm sure we can expect some exciting new features. Also, check out the recent Wall Street Journal article for another review.

Back to School - Week 4

This semester has been unbelievably busy. I thought second year would be fairly relaxing but as it turns out I'm working just as hard as my first semester of business school. Although, this year most of my workload is self-induced.

One of my classes this semester is through the MediaLab at MIT. The class is called Digital Innovations and we are researching how cell phones can be used to spark economic development in Costa Rica. In the coming weeks you'll probably see lots of mobile tech postings from me. My group is especially interested in how cell phones can be used to enable carpooling. We believe that a good, cell phone enabled system could significantly increase productivity and quality of life by reducing daily travel times. The BTIS system in India has a great start on solving this problem as well as the related traffic issues. In addition, today's Wall Street Journal had an interesting article on phones in India.

Back to School

It is hard to believe that the summer is over and school is starting back up again. For my summer internship I was back at Harrah's Entertainment working on their IT Innovation team. Before I cronicle my summer or launch into new topics I want to cover a few things from the end of the school year.



I want to thank Michael (MJ) Sikorsky, CEO of Cambrian House for coming to speak to Tom Malone's class. MJ is one of the most well read people I met and he is full of passion for what he does. Cambrian House is working hard to build an engaged community. MJ and I had an interesting discussion on perdictive markets versus a head to head competion format.



I also want to congradulate Harpreet Marwaha, MIT Sloan class of 2007, on his new startup AudioDizer.

There are about a million other things I need to highlight but given my recent track record of posts I think I'll start with this.

PBwiki

As you probably know business school is all about group projects. Given that I've done a fair amount of research on Web 2.0 topics I figured I should put my money where my mouth is. I've been using PBwiki for many of my class projects. I haven't tried many of the competing products but PBwiki was easier to uses the the other ones I checked out. One of the features that I like is that you can set it up to email you when there are changes to the page. This means that you don't have to constantly check to see if your group members have made changes. In addition, they are offering ad-free wikis for educational purposes.

The company has been adding features since their recent round of fundraising.

I'd love to hear what other collaboration tools you have been using. The field of solutions seems to be growing more crowded everyday.