Between 2001 and 2011, iSoftStone Holdings Ltd. grew from a small information technology services firm operating out of Beijing with 40 employees into a global IT consulting and services company with 11,000 employees, effectively competing with established Indian outsourcing IT providers such as Tata and InfoSys. The case discusses the particular go-to-market and growth strategies of iSoftStone and its evolution as a global player. The focus of the case is on addressing how iSoftStone approached the management of its human capital and intellectual property as both the vehicle for its rapid and successful expansion and as a differentiating factor between the enterprise and its competitors. The iSoftStone story also demonstrates the importance of enterprise-wide measurement of performance and the use of lessons learned in refining internal business processes and in developing project and service delivery teams.
This case identifies the approach taken by Partners HealthCare to better manage the commercialization of its intellectual property (IP). Existing processes did not leverage the shared resources, such as business development efforts and the research centres created as a consequence of the formation of Partners HealthCare in 1995. Partners was the largest hospital organization and second-largest non-university recipient of research funding from the National Institute of Health (NIH). As such, it generated a vast and varied body of IP constituting an asset of considerable value to Partners and those it served. The leadership of Partners viewed it as their mission to the organization and to the greater health care community to vigorously pursue commercializing innovation generated through research efforts. <br><br>The case considers the organizational structure and how this structure enabled a cohesive commercialization effort. It includes three vignettes that involve research projects that precede the creation of the Research, Ventures and Licensing (RVL) unit in 2005. RVL served as the centralized office for overseeing the processes of IP protection, licensing, translational research project funding, new venture creation, and industry partnerships to bring forward the inventions that emerged from the research of Partners affiliates and their primary investigators. The case demonstrates how a large health care organization can bring innovative products and services to market through appropriate organizational transformation.
In the 1990s, Red Hat established itself as a leading proponent of the open source software movement and sought to carve out for itself a significant role in the open source marketplace. As of 2011, the company reported $177 million in non-GAAP operating income in FY2010, based on revenues of $748 million. Red Hat’s market capitalization was set at $8 billion as of January 25, 2011. It operated 65 offices worldwide, including 12 Global Support Service Centers, and employed 3,580 people. The Red Hat brand was most closely associated with Linux even though its stable of product offerings had grown to include a number of other noteworthy system software and middleware products, such as JBoss and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization. As Red Hat’s Linux product line had come to be widely accepted as an enterprise software platform, the company had transformed its thinking about and delivery of customer support. This case study explores the innovative ways that Red Hat went about this transformation process.
This case considers the process of organizational transformation undertaken by Partners Healthcare System (PHS) since the 1990s as their hospital and affiliated ambulatory medical practices have adopted both EMR and CPOE systems. Encompassing a strategic investment in information technologies, wide-spread process change, and the pervasive use of institutional clinical decision support and knowledge management systems, this story has been 15 years in the making, culminating in 2009 with the network-wide use of EMR and CPOE by all PHS doctors. These developments in turn opened the door to the redefinition of services delivery and to the replacement of established therapies through the leveraging of the knowledge residing in 4.6 million now-digitized PHS patient records. As such, the PHS experience serves as a window into how one organization strove to address the daunting challenges of 21st century health care services information management, as a template for success in the implementation of large-scale information systems among research-based hospitals across the United States, and more broadly as a learning platform for industry executives in their efforts to transform health care delivery through data and knowledge management.
The KL Worldwide Enterprises Inc. case provides a rich context within which to explore the information technology (IT) issues that confront a global enterprise engaged in the manufacture, sales, and distribution of durable goods. The primary purpose is to give students a real-world, hands-on simulation of an IT systems development process that spans the entire lifecycle of an IT project from initial project scoping and justification through acceptance testing and deployment. The KL case emphasizes the design and delivery of enterprise resource planning, supply-chain management, decision support system, and e-commerce solutions for both for-profit and not-for-profit organizations. The case leads the reader into a consideration of the many opportunities to improve KL's performance through the better design and integration of IT-enabled processes and services, including designing a new e-commerce or DSS capability and reengineering KL's supply-chain and product design practices.