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April 1: Brian Butler to speak on Handling Flammable Materials: Wikipedia Biographies of Living Persons as Contentious Objects

March 30, 2011 By

Brian Butler

Associate Professor, Managenment Information Systems,

Katz School of Businss, University of Pittsburgh

April 1, 2011

Speakman Hall 200, 1000am – 1130am

Seminar Title :  Handling Flammable Materials: Wikipedia Biographies of Living Persons as Contentious Objects

Abstract

Common ground. Shared interests. Collective goals. Much has been said about the power of technology to bring people together around commonalities to form groups, teams, and communities. Yet, the same technologies can also be used to bring together individuals with fundamentally irreconcilable differences. In these cases, the question is not how to construct systems that build on commonality, but rather how to manage artifacts that by their very nature provide affordances for conflict. In this paper we examine how Biographies of Living Persons (BLP) in Wikipedia exemplify contentious objects, both in terms of their features and their consequences. We draw from discussions of risk management and resilience to outline four approaches that groups can use to manage contentious objects (risk avoidance, risk minimization, threat reduction, and conflict management). Description of the policies, structures, and systems surrounding Biographies of Living Persons in Wikipedia illustrate how application of these approaches enable the creation and existence of large collection of contentions objects, without undermining the viability of the larger socio-technical system.

For a copy of the paper, click here.

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March 16: Max Boisot to speak on Mapping Strategic Knowledge Assets: The Case of the ATLAS Experiment at the LHC

March 13, 2011 By

Max Boisot

Professor of Strategic Managenment,

Burmingham Business School,

March 16, 2011

Alter Hall 505, 200pm – 330pm

Seminar Title :  Mapping Strategic Knowledge Assets: The Case of the ATLAS Experiment at the LHC

Abstract

Can conventional strategy tools be applied in knowledge-based businesses? Using a framework, the Information-Space or I-Space, designed to analyse knowledge flows, we present research currently under way at CERN to map part of the knowledge assets used by the ATLAS Experiment, today the world’s largest single scientific experiment. Although this research is being carried out in a non-commercial context, we believe that it has implications for the development and conduct of knowledge-based strategy.

March 4: Bin Gu to speak on IT Infrastructure Governance and IT Investment Performance: An Empirical Analysis

March 2, 2011 By

Bin Gu

Assistant Professor of Information Management,
McCombs School of Business, 
University of Texas at Austin

March 4, 2011

Speakman Hall 200, 1000am – 1130am

Seminar Title : IT Infrastructure Governance and IT Investment Performance: An Empirical Analysis

Abstract

The value of information technology (IT) investment comes increasingly from its ability to complement and enable business strategies and organizational capabilities. As a general purpose technology, however, IT could either a complement or a constraint. Making the right IT investment, particularly the right IT infrastructure investment could thus have far-reaching impact on a firm‟s IT investment performance. A necessary condition to make the right IT infrastructure investment is to ensure that a firm‟s IT infrastructure governance (ITIG) configuration is aligned with the firm‟s organizational structure and business strategies. In this study, we use a two-step approach to provide an empirical assessment of the impact of the ITIG alignment on IT investment performance. We first recognize that a key challenge is that the appropriate IT governance mode varies across both firms and business units within. We address the challenge by extending the multiple contingency theory for IT governance from the firm level to the business unit level. We use the business unit level multiple contingency theory to develop an empirical model to predict the appropriate ITIG configuration for each business unit and use the difference between the predicted and observed ITIG configurations to derive a multiple contingency theory based measure of ITIG misalignment. We then assess the relationship between ITIG misalignment and IT investment performance across a Fortune 1000 firm samples. We find that firms with high ITIG misalignment receive limited benefits from IT investments; whereas firms with low ITIG misalignment obtain about twice the value from their IT investments compared to firms with average ITIG misalignment.

Click here for a copy of the paper.

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