Adam Moyer

Yeah, I agree, Chris. Any additional quantification will aid Siemens in determining whether the open innovation sessions are worthwhile. The employee surveys are a really good, outside-the-idea. We do external client surveys with my company to gauge satisfaction, but I hadn’t considered the internal facing ones.

Yeah, it seems like they lack focus in any one area, like Wyeth did, which then restructured with a focus on pharma only. GE has certainly made a similar corporate structure work, though, so it doesn’t seem like there is a single correct answer.

Nice post, Will. I agree with you that some authors, especially ones just starting in the business, will continue to need agents and publishers, since they won’t know how the business works all that well. It will be interesting to see how big name authors opting for self-publishing will affect the publishers’ revenue streams. Will they have to…[Read more]

Nice post, Rich. Couldn’t we also apply some of the lessons we’ve learned the last few weeks with Wyeth and Volkswagen? While I agree these open innovation strategies are one way to align corporate interests, couldn’t Siemens also take the tact of becoming less “multi-national” and more “global” in their corporate structure. The hybrid structure…[Read more]

Clearly, Siemens needs some way of measuring their investment in open innovation. The most obvious way to measure the success of the open innovation projects is through ROI or NPV analysis. By calculating the incremental cash flows created by the open innovation projects, Siemens can consider which projects have been successful and how to properly…[Read more]

The most obvious advantage of digital media over physical media is cost reduction in materials and distribution. Even though compact discs and cassette tapes were relatively low cost to produce, multiplied by several billion copies, it can still be a significant cost to the industry. Since there is no longer a need to distribute physical copies,…[Read more]

Abundance is more disruptive to society than scarcity in the way that Christensen defines it. We develop highly functional marketplaces to buy and trade scarce goods and services. Those marketplaces are supported by infrastructure and human capital. When a product becomes commoditized (i.e. becomes abundant), all of the investment in employees and…[Read more]

I am a member of the online weather community (which is probably as nerdy as it sounds). It started a few years ago, when I was first starting out as an operational forecaster for my current company. I recognized that I had lots of responsibilities that I wasn’t taught about in college or grad school, so I started looking for other areas to learn.…[Read more]

Totally agree, Rich. These initiatives need to start at the top in the C-suite, but having executive backing isn’t enough. These companies that are attempting to make major changes to their business model would be wise to follow Kotter’s steps in creating the environment necessary for change.

Hi Ryann – can you explain the part about “versus having IT move us to the correct size and upgrades when necessary?” I’ve always thought that one of the main benefits of moving to the cloud was only using the resources you need. In other words, you don’t have to buy hardware that is more powerful than you need now because you anticipate needing…[Read more]

That’s interesting, Ryann. How did your company decide to make a move to a centralized ERP system? Did they go through an NPV analysis or did it “just make sense?” I ask because a lot of the companies I work with are spending a lot of money installing SAP or JDA right now, which makes a lot of sense to me for the reasons you listed, but I find it…[Read more]

But isn’t Coke really using a multi-national or multi-domestic strategy except in their marketing department? Outside the US and Canada, they export responsibility for bottling and distribution to licensees (e.g. Coca Cola Enterprises in Western Europe or Coca Cola Hellenic in Eastern Europe – which are not owned by KO in Atlanta) and only ship…[Read more]

The role of IT in the globalization of Wyeth was to be the primary driver of the change. While senior management recognized the challenges in getting the data they needed to make effective decisions, IT was the primary driver in getting all of the different stakeholders on board with the plan and then following through. In fact, IT made some…[Read more]

The four major services described in the case are Simple Storage Service (S3), Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2), Simple DB, and Simple Queue Service (SQS).

S3 allows customers to store information in the cloud at very cheap rates – at the time of writing $0.12-$0.15/GB/mo for storage, $0.10 per GB uploaded and $0.10-$0.17 per GB downloaded. Those…[Read more]

If I were explaining the cloud to a co-worker, I’d tell them that much of the IT infrastructure is similar to current terrestrial based solutions, but based on large server farms that are accessed through the internet. Our company is going through a migration to the cloud right now. Essentially, we’re trying to replicate our current systems, which…[Read more]

Hi Chris – I agree that consumer goods companies have a greater strategic need to pursue a global strategy, but I wonder how many of them actually are able to pull it off. For example, Procter and Gamble has struggled for years in adapting a global strategy because too much power and control are tied up with the heads of their individual country…[Read more]

Information technology has clearly enabled the emergence of global brands. Without a strong IT infrastructure, the cross-function and cross-country communicated needed would not be possible. For example, Dell Computers could not support plants and offices in Texas, Florida, Poland, Ireland, Malaysia, China, and India without the IT infrastructure…[Read more]

Interesting, Ryann. Does your company have a PMO with oversight responsibility for the big IT project? How does the project manager keep all of the different teams engaged on the project? It’s good to hear that HR is involved – as we learned in HRM, it’s important for HR to be strategically aligned with the executive team. Does HR do that through…[Read more]

Hi Brandon – interesting comments. Do you think VWoA needed to adjust its goals based on the parent’s goals? Or should corporate dictate their goals back to VWoA? It can work either way, but I think a lot of the consternation between the business units stemmed from unclear objectives. The other issue the case brought up was that some business…[Read more]

Nice post, Ryann. So thinking back to the Southwest case study, how did systems thinking help Southwest succeed where the other major carriers failed? I can think of a couple places. They thought holistically about the entire airline transport problem. Rather than focusing on maximizing individual routes (as you would using a hub-and-spoke model),…[Read more]