Rich Menseck

Not sure where I will be in five years. But, I am writing a note to myself reminding me not to fire the IT guy when his budget is twice what my executive committee expected for our global IT initiative. As Michael noted earlier, technology is constantly changing and there is no true comfort zone in that arena. We need to continually adapt to…[Read more]

Dan,

I agree with your points about the real estate scenario. Another issue I’ve seen with the “for sale by owner” or Assist to Sell type scenarios is the more established real estate Buyer’s Agents won’t take their clients to those homes for sale simply because they’re not using the “typical channels”. With the increased availability of…[Read more]

Ali, Sorry it took me so long to get back to your comment. Can’t argue with your point about profits because of access to resources. I guess Amazon might be a good example of that with significant book sales in a dying print industry? It’s amazing how the abundance of information you noted can be so good and so bad at the same time. I love…[Read more]

Rosemarie, Nice post. Penn Relays are always a good time. It sounds like an interesting organization to work with. How many athletes are you helping each year? I would think you have a lot of people to place. My neighbors growing up were from Jamaica and they shared a lot of the same sentiments you noted in your post. In particular, I know…[Read more]

Adam,

That’s a good point. There are some similarities with the other two cases you mentioned. I definitely think becoming more global versus multi-national would be a move in the right direction for Siemens. Although, based on the reading, that sounds like it would be quite a task. Maybe they could coordinate that type of transition one…[Read more]

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That was an interesting interview. It covered a lot in the short period. I agree that abundance is more disruptive to society than scarcity. Companies are constantly searching for ways to create a niche market or provide a service in a way that differentiates them from the competition – ways to become “scarce” – because that’s where there is…[Read more]

I am a member of The Appraisal Institute (AI) which is a community of practice related to my field of work. I signed up for membership only within the past few years although I completed my training and coursework to become a Certified Residential Appraiser in Pennsylvania more than ten years ago. Until recently, having membership with the…[Read more]

I think one of the biggest positives for establishing open innovation in a company like Siemens is aligning the interests of the different departments towards common goals related to business and process improvement. It provides a more clear picture of what is needed and necessary to move the company into the future. As the article describes,…[Read more]

I think the obvious main benefit of the digital media is the ability to eliminate the costs associated with the physical production and distribution of CDs/albums and focus time and effort on the marketing and promotion side of the business. Per the case study, packaging, distribution and overhead (retail and record company) represented more…[Read more]

Adam/Chris – It’s funny how so many of these cases/articles keep bringing me back to the Leadership Challenge book. It seems like many, if not all, of these companies are struggling at one point or another because they haven’t established the “buy in” from the company as a whole for the IT initiatives. As Adam points out with P&G struggles, it…[Read more]

Ryann, How do you feel about the money Morgan is investing in the global initiatives? It seems as if the funding was also a major issue with Wyeth and we saw Volkswagen’ face similar hurdles with it’s IT department earlier. Does Morgan advertise the investment made for the initiatives you’re talking about? Since the Wyeth case is a little…[Read more]

Rachel, Thanks for the comments. I’m glad you didn’t lose your stats spreadsheets. I’ve seen your spreadsheets compared to the ones I built and I think you could make some pretty good money selling those to incoming OMBA classes! I’m beginning to use the Google Drive for my appointment calendar so my co-workers and wife can access and share…[Read more]

Information technology was the driving factor in Wyeth’s globalization. If the company could properly manage its information across all affiliates, it would present cost savings and provide more efficient ways to track and manage production across the organization. In the example from the Data Warehousing discussion, the coordination of IT c…[Read more]

The four major services offered by Amazon described in the case are: Simple Storage Service (S3) – a platform for storing data and retrieving data from anywhere on the web; Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) – a web service that enables developers to build computing capacity through Amazon’s cloud based environment; Simple DB – a database program that pr…[Read more]

It was relatively easy to explain “the cloud” to a co-worker since we had to rebuild our appraisal database from scratch after our main computer died last fall. Using Carbonite’s system, we lost about a half day worth of work but really didn’t miss a beat because we were able to access any files we needed from our personal computers until we got…[Read more]

Information technology is definitely one of the primary enablers for the emergence of global brands. But, I think advances in things like transportation, communications and production have also helped companies with the establishment of their global presence. Technology improvements in all these areas as well as information technology have made…[Read more]

Never mind on this issue. Think I have it covered. If anyone comes across the same problem, though, you need to go to your Google account and revoke your access rights to view files and then re-authorize permission to use the spreadsheets when you are importing the spreadsheets.