In mid-October of 2020, Rico Ruiz, Director of Organizational Development at Tampa General Hospital (TGH), had to decide on a Digital Badging Platform (DBP) to support a professional development program hosted by University of South Florida (USF) for delivery to TGH's health care workers in the proposed People Development Institute (PDI). Ruiz was approached by TGH's CEO, John Couris, about a challenge with organizing and tracking the engagement of professional development of employees across its various departments. TGH was a highly respected hospital with nationally ranked clinical programs. Couris insisted that the development of the professional skills of 8,100 members in their interactions with other employees and patients needed to be better organized and tracked. Couris was prepared to invest $10M over a 10-year period into a healthcare professional development center, PDI, in partnership with the USF Muma College of Business. Dr. Matthew Mullarkey, a professor and co-director of USF's Doctor of Business Administration program, where Couris was in his second year of study, thought a system of micro-credentials based on academic digital badges could provide an innovative way to credential TGH's employees as they completed developmental programs through USF. The digital badges allowed for better tracking of TGH employee development and they could be stacked into more meaningful credentials such as college credits and certificates. Additionally, employees could share their earned digital badges on social media which would be free marketing for TGH. Although he had 19+ years of experience in education and organizational development, Ruiz knew nothing about digital badges or DBPs when first approached by Couris. After meeting with a DBP consultant who specialized in the digital badging space, Ruiz was able to narrow his choice to 3 DBPs: Accredible, Badgr, and Credly. Couris needed a proposal by Mid-November, giving Ruiz ten days to select a DBP and author a

Staff.AI is a start-up technology company featuring a new resource-sharing application for hospitals and health care professionals. Developed by neurosurgeon Dr. Carl Einarsson, the application addresses the substantial cost of staffing personnel for temporary requirements of acute care hospitals. Utilizing familiar mobile technology of Airbnb, TaskRabbit, Uber, and other resource-sharing companies, Staff.AI matches hospital staffing needs with available professionals, streamlining the recruiting process, reducing staffing agency costs, and correlating data of medical teams and clinical efficacy. Having conducted a successful beta-test with a major academic medical center and recruited capital, Dr. Einarsson must determine a reasonable pricing model to bring the company's namesake product to market.

The CIO of Fintech, Inc. -a billing-and-payment processing service for the alcoholic beverages industry must choose a cloud services provider for a new application for Fintech's clients. The CIO sees this initiative as a useful first step to take before moving other resources and services into the cloud. His staff briefs him on three providers: Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. Each provider offers services which fit Fintech's requirements, yet with important differences. The Fintech case addresses the perspective of a company purchasing cloud computing services, as opposed to a vendor selling cloud computing services. It offers the added benefit of describing an important specialist intermediary in the highly regulated and complex US alcoholic beverages industry. The case has been tested in MIS and IT Management classes in undergraduate, MBA, MS-IT and DBA programs. It introduces cloud concepts (SaaS, IaaS, PaaS), and provides an opportunity for students to consider technical, economic, operational and strategic factors when making mission-critical IT decisions such as moving an important application to the cloud. Students can also consider how to mitigate risks associated with particular providers. The instructor can use it to introduce students to pilot testing and issues in vendor selection and ongoing management. After considering strengths and weaknesses of each provider and the provider selection process, the instructor can ask students to recommend a provider and/or other steps Kwo should take before making a final decision.