In February 2017 the Team Project Manager and Flow Project Coordinator for Dell Technologies-Limerick (Ireland), is preparing for a review with Dell's Systems and Processes Improvement board, early in a transition from the use of one agile software development method (Scrum) to another (Flow, which applies lean manufacturing techniques to software engineering). The new manager has been on board less than six months. With ten years' prior software development experience in Brazil, he moved to Ireland when hired by Dell. Dell is midway through its attempts to transform from a manufacturing-heavy strategy to an IT-supported service-heavy strategy; its recent acquisition of EMC is an important step in that direction, and executives expect Flow will help globally-distributed software developers produce higher quality code, faster, in follow-the-sun mode. The Flow coordinator/champion recognizes Flow is a complex innovation; it will take time and focus for busy software developers (who only recently mastered Scrum techniques) to master new Flow techniques. The champion is also concerned that needed digital Kanban functionality (essential for supporting globally distributed teams using Flow) has not yet been approved or provided by the Dell IT organization in Texas; this and other obstacles are impeding the developers' transition to Flow. Keen to demonstrate his commitment to help Dell achieve these aims, he worries that some executives expect performance improvements sooner than teams can realistically deliver. He seeks to persuade executives to be both patient and helpful. As he plans his 20 minute presentation for the next day's meeting, he is told to keep his remarks to executives simple: highlight no more than three messages.

In May 2019 Memphis-based pharmacist and social entrepreneur Phil Baker hopes coding will start soon on blockchain software and related applications that will enable efficient and secure collection of usable drugs from individual donors and redistribution to needy authorized patients. To reach this point, he founded the subscription-based Good Shepherd charitable pharmacy, which bypasses pharmacy industry middlemen to sell medications at low prices, and distribute free donated drugs. Next, he successfully lobbied for passage of a Tennessee law that allows medications to be donated by individuals from anywhere in the US, to be redispensed to Tennessee patients, prioritized by need. After forming RemediChain LLC, recruiting a software development team, conducting some pilot tests to verify how to attract willing donors and needy patients, and launching the design phase for the blockchain system architecture, he formed a small consortium of pharmacy schools and other health-care organizations, in anticipation of further pilot-testing. Now, he wants to identify and plan how to mitigate foreseeable blockchain system project challenges before the system architecture and key elements are designed and software development begins. Since his two organizations (RemediChain LLC and Good Shepherd Pharmacy) are under financial pressure, and he wants to move forward quickly on building a scalable solution.

"Arizona Medical Doctors" (disguised) seeks a cost-effective solution to improve its medical claims coding quality. The new Vice President of Revenue Cycle Management learns that a contract was signed with a software firm to develop and implement, for the first time, an artificial intelligence (AI) solution that will combine natural language interpretation and machine learning for Evaluation & Management (E&M) medical coding. If it works, the new system will improve E&M coding quality at a very low cost compared with the company's current human quality control process. The VP needs to decide whether to go forward and if so, how to mitigate the significant project and business risks. The case introduces students to two branches of artificial intelligence: natural language interpretation (newer, riskier technology than speech recognition) and machine learning. Students are challenged to recognize the relationship between IT project risks and business risks, spot high-level IT project risks and consider how to mitigate them, and to consider implications for managing rapidly-evolving emerging technologies in health care and other contexts.

In fall 2018, the 64-year-old owner of a small 5th-generation family business in rural Iowa has not begun succession or retirement planning. His older daughter asks to talk with him about possibly taking over the store someday; Skip defers this talk until after the busy harvest season. A few days later "Big Ag Feeds" (disguised) offers to buy his business; they want an answer by year-end. Skip discusses the offer with his wife. If he accepts it, ownership would transfer to Big Ag in four years, ending the family business legacy. Skip always assumed he would keep the business in the family, yet now he considers this option and three others: 1) Counter-propose to transfer ownership to Big Ag in one year ("clean break" to retirement). 2) Groom his daughter to succeed him as owner/manager; 3) Hire an outside manager to run the store (retain ownership). Seeing that times are changing (huge agribusinesses are replacing small farms, with repercussions for his business; emerging technologies and new government regulations bring other opportunities and threats) Skip believes the next owner/manager will face a tougher road than the rough road he traveled in his career journey.

Case describes the career journey of the owner of two small family businesses, and illustrates the intertwining of crisis planning, retirement planning, and succession planning. The owner loses more than $500,000 in some problematic ventures, but gradually achieves steady profitability. At age 62 he has a heart attack, requiring emergency triple-bypass surgery. His wife, shaken by this close call, asks her husband to retire or at least sell one of their two businesses. However, this owner-manager is in no hurry to relinquish control. Next, a fire destroys his fast-casual restaurant, and the insurance settlement will not fully cover the cost of renovations to restore it to full operation. He considers several options: 1) walk away from it (minimal renovation, covered by insurance) and focus on his granite restoration business; 2) restore and return the restaurant to full operation (drawing on his personal savings) and continue as before. Discussing this case helps students appreciate why family business owners should plan for predictable surprises and how and why to develop a solid management succession plan.

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.

This case describes the development of the HealthCare.gov website front-end, systems and databases supporting the implementation of the Affordable Care Act. In late October 2013, US Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and US Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Marilyn Tavenner appear before a Congressional subcommittee to apologize about system glitches. The case gives students an opportunity to consider project risks that affected this huge systems development effort, and to consider how to ensure that millions of uninsured or underinsured Americans would be able to sign up for affordable health insurance

This case, based on data collected in a longitudinal field study, presents Dr. Nathalie MajorCook, a Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario (CHEO) pediatrician, who in January 2012 was considering what to do about a 2-year grant-funded pilot project, which had provided an innovative patient care coordination service to 23 families of children described as technology-dependent, medically complex and fragile. Convinced that the Complex Care Coordination service is worthwhile, Dr. Major-Cook wants to move it beyond the pilot test phase to a funded, ongoing service. The case situation is a 'cliff hanger,' in that in January 2012, Dr. Major-Cook has not yet learned whether a proposal to fund this as an ongoing service will be approved. If it does not receive approval, she will face the unpleasant task of explaining to parents that this valuable service will end in a few short months. If it does receive approval, several decisions need to be made and actions taken in order to scale the service up, so that it can support about 100 families of technology-dependent, medically complex and fragile children in the region. Dr. Major-Cook also wonders if there is anything else she can do to tip the scales in favor of this decision. The case context is unique and captivating; the young patients under Dr. Major-Cook's care suffer from multiple, and sometimes rare life-threatening diseases. The new Complex Care Coordination model, entailing several new roles and a new way to exchange important information among care providers, was designed to improve the quality of healthcare service delivery, increase parental satisfaction and reduce care costs.

The E. Phillip Saunders College of Business (COB) Dean at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) discovers that his RIT-issued laptop has been stolen from his home. He notifies Dave Ballard, a member of the College of Business IT staff. Ballard, still acutely aware of two recent incidents in which laptops containing thousands of Social Security numbers were stolen from the RIT campus, hopes the Dean's laptop does not contain personally identifiable information. If so, the incident would need to be reported to the New York Attorney General's Office, and RIT would be required to pay for a credit monitoring service for individuals whose identity may have been compromised. The case provides an opportunity for students to examine processes that should be triggered when an information security incident occurs. The case describes incident response processes that were triggered at RIT and technologies that were used or could have been used by COB IT staff to track the laptop and protect its contents. In discussing the case, students can consider how the theft of a computing device exposes an organization to risks of inadvertent disclosure of information in different categories (such as private, confidential, internal, or public), and students can derive useful guidelines for effective information security incident response.

At the University of Oslo (UiO), CERT manager Margrete Raaum learned of a network attack on Titan, a high-performance computing cluster that supported research conducted by scientists at CERT and other research institutions across Europe. The case describes the incident response, investigation, and clarification of the information security events that took place. As soon as Raaum learned of the attack, she ordered that the system be disconnected from the Internet to contain the damage. Next, she launched an investigation,which over a few days pieced together logs from previous weeks to identify suspicious activity and locate the attack vector. Raaum hopes to soon return Titan to its prior safe condition. In order to do so, she must decide what tasks still need to be completed to validate the systems and determine if it is safe to reconnect it to the Internet. She must also consider further steps to improve her team's ability to prevent, detect, and respond to similar incidents in the future. This case is designed for an undergraduate or graduate information security (infosec) class that includes students with varied technical and business backgrounds. The case supports discussion of technical and managerial infosec issues in interorganizational systems - a topic that is currently underrepresented in major case collections.

Innovative IT applications such as patient-present telemedicine consultation services can save lives and reduce costs. Yet, despite extensive pilot-testing, few such services have achieved long-term viability. Partners HealthCare's TeleStroke service, in full operation and managed by the Massachusetts General Hospital Neurology department, is financially self-sustaining and serves a vital need. Clinicians at some participating hospitals are interested in using telemedicine for other medical applications outside of stroke care. Should Partners expand its service? What organizational, clinical, and technical issues would arise if Partners expand its telemedicine offerings? How can these issues best be managed? The case is intended for an MBA or advanced undergraduate course in IT Management. We use this case in the first module of a Strategic IT Management course. Module I, Use IT for Business Value, introduces students to the resource based view of management and the mechanisms through which IT (hardware, software, network, and data resources) can add business value-such as by being embedded in a product or service (Netflix case), by generating valuable data that enables management to make better decisions or improve operations (Harrah's Entertainment and Catching Tax Cheats cases), and by serving as a platform for collaboration (this Telemedicine case).

This case examines medication administration processes and technologies on a neonatal intensive care unit (NICU). Taking the point of view of a hospital's VP of Administration, the case also gives students an opportunity to consider the perspectives of the CIO and Medical Director. It describes tragedies in which infants died after being inadvertently overdosed with blood thinners (poor information quality and poor process quality were implicated in these tragedies), and briefly introduces students to several U.S. national initiatives that aim to improve clinical processes and outcomes.

In winter 2010 Bob Stetzel, the new Chief Information Officer (CIO) at Vermont Teddy Bear (VTB), hopes to replace or modernize many of the company's existing systems and invest in some new applications. This catalog marketer (via online and print catalogs) offers three separately managed brands: Vermont Teddy Bear (VTB), PajamaGrams, and Calyx Flowers. Sales are highly seasonal, with peak volumes at Christmas, Valentine's Day and Mother's Day. Stetzel has spent his first few months on the job cataloging systems and databases, learning about the 'spider web' of middleware connecting various applications and platforms, and locating employees with expertise to fix them. The company has survived an economic downturn and several costly strategic missteps. The CEO is seeking new sources of revenue and ways to leverage their well-known brand, while the CIO needs to set Information Technology (IT) priorities: should they invest in a full-featured Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) package or take other steps that would more quickly yield tangible results? Whatever choice he makes, Stetzel will have to convince the CEO and the Board of Directors to provide the necessary resources. This case provides students with an opportunity to place themselves in the shoes of a CIO wrestling with strategic IT alignment challenges at a time when resources are severely constrained and competitive rivalry is fierce.

Atul Mahajan nicknamed 'AM,' a wealthy Indian, sits on the board of Kisan Group, his family's chemical company (family and company names disguised). Charged with managing the Mahajan family wealth, he has formed a private equity group that helps build mid-market companies. He has also launched a few technology-enabled ventures of his own, including a company that failed in its attempts to sell a service that used encrypted and masked barcodes for document authentication and a successful company that provided administrative and data management support for pharmaceutical clinical trials. Now, apparently with sufficient resources to contemplate another entrepreneurial venture, AM wonders whether to revive the document authentication business, with a turnkey solution or one or more services that would use encrypted RFID tags instead of the older barcode technology. This teaching case was developed based on interviews with Mr. 'Mahajan' and two other employees. The case provides an opportunity for students to investigate technical, strategic and operational uncertainties and challenges associated with building a business around a new technology. For business schools that are attempting to 'globalize' their curriculum, the case offers the benefit of presenting the point of view of a well-connected Indian entrepreneur.

This case examines issues in the assessment and adoption of Internet technologies in a federal US government context, and describes in detail a pilot project to determine the feasibility of adopting an application service provider solution to support procurement by multiple federal agencies using a variety of different legacy transaction systems. The pilot test of the Internet Payment Platform (IPP) by the eMoney group of the United States Treasury's Financial Management Service involved three federal agencies and subsets of their suppliers. Participants saw many benefits from their use of the IPP, but agreed that for full-scale operation it needed to be modified to better fit the government procurement context. The project manager is weighing the pros and cons of conducting another pilot test using the same commercial software as before, or obtaining and customizing a new commercial package, or building a new system from scratch.

A start-up intellect exchange initially offered a public expertise exchange, connecting experts with clients. Now management wonders whether a new, more focused strategy will succeed.

Presents the story of Open Market, Inc., one of numerous companies formed in 1994 to engage in electronic commerce over the Internet. This case examines the company's development--its business strategy and organization evolution--as the company increased in size and gained a firm foothold in the uncertain electronic commerce.

Motorola became a recognized quality leader in large part by becoming a leader in employee education and by encouraging "participative management." Through the Motorola Training and Education Center, later Motorola University, the company invested substantial resources in improving workers' skills and establishing a common language of quality across the corporation to support its ambitious quality improvement goals. Through quality circles, its Total Customer Satisfaction quality competition, and its potentially more far-reaching empowerment initiative, Motorola encouraged its employees to apply their new knowledge and skills in innovative and proactive ways. The growing interest in empowerment raised a number of organizational issues that led many to wonder how best to achieve its stated goals.

Motorola's old automative electronics plant in Arcade, outside Buffalo, New York, faced the prospect of closure in the mid-1980s, but leading customers persuaded Motorola to give the plant a second chance. The new plant manager, Dennis Fiehn, recognized that existing practices had to change if the plant was to remain competitive. He pushed for fewer supervisory layers, flexible job boundaries, cross-training, team-based production, and more active problem solving. The move to a modern plant in nearby Elma (1989) coincided with a new corporate-wide push for higher quality and cycle-time goals and more participative management. Soon operators were performing functions previously restricted to supervisors, technicians, and skilled workers. Supervisors, now team leaders, delegated more responsibility and became more like coaches. The plant was now recognized as a strong performer and slated for expansion.

S.K. Ko managed Motorola's Penang, Malaysia factory, producing telecommunications components and equipment. As a female manager of a multi-ethnic and labor-intensive plant in Asia, Ko faced a number of challenges. She had already promoted quality circles and quality competitions to meet Motorola's raised standards. Extensive training gave workers the skills to solve problems and to troubleshoot equipment. But Ko was skeptical of empowerment efforts at other Motorola sites that aimed for much greater worker participation in decision making. She thought empowerment inappropriate to the Asian context. She also thought that many operators would have trouble upgrading their skills as the world became more information intensive. Other Southeast Asian nations with lower labor costs were a competitive threat to Penang's labor-intensive processes. She envisioned Penang transformed by the year 2000 into a fully automated manufacturing operation and a design center for all of Motorola's Asian operations.