Keys to Successful Global Sourcing

Interesting article about how to make sure companies are successful as they use global sourcing to gain a competitive advantage in the market place.

http://www.accenture.com/Global/Research_and_Insights/Outlook/By_Issue/Y2007/BoldNewGlobalSourcing.htm

More "Ignite" Presentations

All - We did a little work with Ignite presentations in Toby's corporate ventures class - here is another resources you can use: http://pecha-kucha.org/

Business Schools Respond to Demand for Use of Social Media

Business schools are taking note of the importance of social media, pretty interesting:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/31/education/31iht-riedmba.html

Privacy and Tracking

As my team started working on data collection for the social media modelling project, I thought... hmmm... seems like there is a A LOT of data out there that people might not want to share. Apparently people have thought about that.

http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/03/31/ars.cloud.law/index.html

This article in AdWeek talks about a new metric for measuring the return of online advertising. Sounds complicated...http://www.brandchannel.com/home/post/2010/03/30/Gawkers-New-Online-Ad-Metric-Branded-Traffic.aspx

UGC Article

Here is a short but worthwhile article on UHG and some things to keep in mind when deciding how much credibility to give its predictive powers - or even when you decide how seriously to take it. We take what we want from it most of the time - call it self-serving bias if you want (thanks Prof Leroy) but remember to be conscious of the voice of the contributor.

http://mobilemarketingnews.com/?p=12

Influencers/UGC/Social Media

Interesting and quick article with some good stats on social media. Enjoy.

http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1007600

Submit questions for global sourcing guest speaker

I've created and seeded Wikis on both the sections' Moodle -- April 6, 2010 section. Please use this space to suggest questions for our guest speaker Akhilesh Tripathi, Country-head TCS Canada.

ERP Implementation at Cargill - MISRC presents John Geisler

MISRC PRESENTS:

Management Information Systems Research Center (MISRC) Seminar Series located in the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota Presents:
Title:The Tartan Transformation at Cargill
Speaker: John Geisler, Corporate Vice President, Cargill, Incorporated

Date: Friday, April 30, 2010

Time: Check-In 8:00 AM, Seminar 8:30 AM - 11:15 AM

Location: Carlson School of Management 2-206, 2nd floor Directions from the 19th Ave. Parking ramp-Proceed through the skyway from the ramp (3rd floor of the ramp) and continue into the Carlson School around the corner towards the right (entrance from the skyway-3rd floor is the entrance to the 2nd floor of the Carlson School) and a short way down the hallway 2-206 is the 1st door on the right.

Registration: http://www.misrc.umn.edu/registration/

Seminar page: http://www.misrc.umn.edu/seminars/2010-04-30/

Calendar page: http://www.misrc.umn.edu/calendar/

Parking page: http://www.misrc.umn.edu/parking/

Abstract

Cargill, an international provider of food, agricultural and risk management products and services, is ready for big change. Already a market leader with 159,000 employees and $116 billion in revenue, Cargill is taking a bold, well-planned step to achieve its strategic objectives and growth aspirations. Through Tartan, Cargill will connect 80 business units in 68 countries under a common business process and governance model enabled by SAP and other technologies.
This keynote address features John Geisler, corporate vice president and Tartan Leader, to highlight lessons learned after the first two years of this decade-long journey and how Cargill will sustain this change.

Presenter

John Geisler serves as corporate vice president with responsibilities for Cargills Global Food Ingredient businesses. His role as a Cargill corporate vice president is to focus on leveraging knowledge, perspectives and experience to make connections across the Cargill portfolio of businesses and its people.

Geisler joined Cargill in 1978 and held a number of positions in Cargills wheat milling business until he was named country manager of Cargills operations in Thailand in 1993. In 1996 he returned to Minneapolis and soon was named President of Cargills worldwide dry milling division and executive supervisor of its worldwide malting business.

He is currently deeply involved in the Tartan project, which is a major corporate undertaking to improve and redesign the key business processes we use to run and manage our businesses and to make them common across Cargill. It is also to improve how we capture and maintain our critical business information, the standardization of key Cargill data as well as to simplify and consolidate our portfolio of software applications, and upgrade the technology that supports them so we have the right infrastructure to support our business for 2015 and beyond.

In addition to his Cargill responsibilities, Geisler serves on the boards of Holy Family Catholic High School in Victoria, MN and the Malt-O-Meal Company.Geisler graduated from the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, in June 1978 with a bachelor's degree in business administration.

Webcast Details
If you wish to ask the presenter questions you can submit your questions by e-mailing misrc@umn.edu or by using the built-in Ask feature of Mediasite.

Detailed webcast information will be sent to all webcast registrants prior to the event.

Additional information regarding MISRC seminars and events, including directions and parking, presenter's slides (if available), and the event calendar, can be found at: http://www.misrc.umn.edu/
Questions or comments?

Management Information Systems Research Center
Phone: 612-625-0862
Fax: 612-626-1600
misrc@umn.edu
http://www.misrc.umn.edu/

Here is another article surrounding how to measure the "ROI" of social media. Again, this is a huge issue on everybody's mind.

http://smartblogs.com/socialmedia/2010/03/26/how-del-monte-foods-finds-social-media-success/

Understanding and managing social media is a big deal for managers right now. Here is a relevant article that may be good for any group that is looking at social media for the mini-wiki project.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304434404575149883850508158.html?mod=dist_smartbrief

Pricing Digital Media

Turns out that pricing in the digital domain still has some kinks to work out. Check out this short article on the results of Apple's decision to allow music studios to set their own price (instead of "everything is 99 cents").

Am I alone in understanding that just because you CAN communicate something doesn't mean you SHOULD. The same technologies that will make us more productive can also have plenty of negative consequences.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704896104575140361533549880.html?mod=WSJ_hps_sections_lifestyle

In response to new rules, GoDaddy to stop registering domain names in China

Looks like other companies are following Google's lead in China.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/24/AR2010032401543.html

Want to learn more about the biggest global ERP roll-out happening currently? - April 30, 2010 - MISRC presents John Geisler of Cargill on Project Tartan http://ping.fm/9EAZW

Posterous -- Post content online using email

Came across Posterous.com. Seems like a super easy way to post all kinds of content online and synch up multiple social media platforms. Not sure whether the Facebook linkage is at the Fan Page level or at the user account level. Hopefully, the former...

Twitter site planning to capitalize on microblogging

Twitter is planning to develop a business model to start making money.

http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2010/03/25/coming-soon-twitters-business-model/?mod=rss_WSJBlog&mod=

Not as productive as we think?

Being connected is no longer good enough for creating value for US businesses...

http://www.nytimes.com/external/gigaom/2010/03/25/25gigaom-sweden-rocks-and-the-us-drops-in-tech-productivit-75780.html

An interesting article from this month's Fast Company regarding how technology is influencing educational reform. Anybody doing educational pioneers or planning to interview for a position with them might enjoy this read....

http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/144/a-is-for-app.html

The Value of Time

Pages 23-25 in "Wired for Innovation" mention using time as a way to measure activity not captured in traditional economic metrics; this brought to mind the work of feminist economists (e.g. Marilyn Waring: "Counting for Nothing"), who have called for decades for alternative ways of measuring activity. In many less-developed countries, the majority of women are not in the workforce but there is certainly value in the time they spend preparing food, cleaning and raising children, but this is not captured in measurements like GDP. The difficulties in measuring the value added by technological advancements was an unexpected parallel to some of my earlier studies.

Hmm, who reviews the reviewers? -- Yelp in trouble http://ping.fm/lVybS

At the request of some students, created an optional group Wiki for the major project..

Kurt Vonnegut -- Writing with Style

One of the many benefits of meeting and exchanging syllabii with interesting colleagues such as Prof. Mike Smith in places such as CMU. One gets exposed on how to communicate key ideas to students in simple terms.


Here are Vonnegut's seven deceptively simple principles:
- Find a subject you care about.
- Do not ramble, though.
- Keep it simple.
- Have the guts to cut.
- Sound like yourself.
- Say what you mean to say.
- Pity the readers.

Ref: Kurt Vonnegut on Writing With Style

Added article b) for the 3/23 class on Moodle

Invited section 2 to co-author the class blog http://ping.fm/YGAUG

Just invited section 1 students to co-author http://ping.fm/NwtjA Will invite sec 2 students in a couple of days

Influence or homophily?

It's hard to attend a serious academic conference these days and not find somebody attempting to understand better whether how (in a causal way) people participating in social networks influence others. For instance, if you post a positive Facebook update about a product or service, does that cause your friends to adopt it? The key challenge is always separating out the effects of influence versus that of homophily. In the latter people adopt similar things because they have similar preferences, and not necessarily because of the social network based influence.

Check out this interesting study that attempts to isolate these effects in a social contagion game.

Do you think this study suffers from a similar issue?

The Internet of Things

A nice precursor to the Winter BI conference in Utah, this new McKinsey Quarterly article talks about how the "Internet" is now being embedded into "things" such as micro-cameras that explore the digestive track or in Zipcars (a highly IT savvy car-sharing company). http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/The_Internet_of_Things_2538

Off to REI-SLC to replace a damaged ski pole!

MBA 6240 groups will be along the lines assigned by the MBA office. You do not have to worry about forming your own groups. I'll Moodle..

Pandora -- the music industry

Saw this piece http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/08/technology/08pandora.html?8dpc in the NYTimes today. We will be discussing the IT influenced disruption and the subsequent re-crafting of the music industry mid April.

Just a reminder to MBA 6240 students. Please buy the Brynjolfsson and Saunders book prior to the beginning of the class. The Amazon link is http://ping.fm/Bf3Gz

MBA 6240 Syllabus

The draft class syllabus is now available on Moodle. The course-pack should be available shortly, if it is not already in the bookstore.

Ping.fm test to post to the class blog, twitter and FB page in one click of the mouse

Blog Twitter Connection

This blog is now connected to the class Twitter page http://twitter.com/CsomITCore. Posts made here get updated every 30 minutes to Twitter.

Welcome to the Core IT MBA Course at Carlson

We will be using this blog:

1. Extend the class discussion beyond the walls of the class
2. Get inputs from and interact with experts outside the class, including case protagonists, industry folks and other faculty colleagues
3. See the value of increased information flows and IT innovation in action

You will also find us on Facebook and Twitter.