Blue Titanium is a strategy boutique that provides consulting to senior management and specializes in competitive intelligence. The founder of the company is fine-tuning his strategic plan and has to decide whether the selection of the company's Web server software and hardware should be decided as part of the company's strategy or to leave the selection to the chief technology officer.
eLance.com had just opened its online services to the public. The site was designed as a platform allowing buyers to post projects that freelancers (sellers) could bid on. After three days of operation, three requests for temporary positions appeared. Recruitment was not the intended purpose of the site and the co-founders disagreed on whether these requests should be allowed to stay on the site. Both founders knew that the choices they made now would directly affect future Web site development as features to support a projects-only site would be somewhat different from a combined projects and personnel site. They had to look ahead and consider the strategic and IT implications, and determine the objectives of the site and what products they would launch.
Lucent Technologies is a worldwide company that delivers systems and software for next-generation communication networks. The company is restructuring to try to improve its stock value after significant losses. A key component of the company's restructuring is the retention of their information technology employees. There is an industry wide shortage of IT workers, causing a large number of these workers to job-hop for better pay. The chief executive officer needs to decide what employee compensation programs should be in place, determine if workplace conditions and rules need to be changed and if the company's recruiting program is attracting the best talent.
WaveRider Communications, Inc. was a Toronto-based company with a mission to become the leader in global wireless technology by developing, selling and supporting products that enabled wireless Internet service providers. It recently launched market its Last Mile Solution, offering Internet service providers the opportunity to provide wireless Internet access at broadband speeds in the unlicensed 2.4 gigahertz spectrum. The wireless Internet access industry was relatively untapped and WaveRider's vice-president of marketing wondered whether the company, as it started its growth phase, should seek an alliance with a competing technology company. To determine the feasibility of this idea, he needed to classify the competition, review the customer barriers and evaluate which technology was the best fit.
Waterloo Regional Police Service, along with seven other police services, collaborated and invested resources in a computer system project that would streamline functions such as computer aided dispatching, records management, mobile workstation environments and most importantly, information sharing between these police services. The project has been in progress for several years, and a number of major issues with the computer system vendor were still unresolved. The chief of the Waterloo Regional Police Service must decide whether to continue with the installation of the computer system or move on to other options.
eLance.com allowed buyers to find sellers for time-sensitive project work without limiting bids to sellers within the vicinity of the buyer's physical office. It was just finishing the beta test of its site which had facilitated over 30,000 transactions in the past year. eLance was in the midst of closing its second round of venture financing which would allow it to execute its plan to become the premier online global services marketplace. To do this, it needed to prevent disintermediation - instances when eLance buyers and sellers, after being introduced on the eLance site, decide to conduct future project-related transactions offline. This would prevent eLance from mediating these transactions and gaining revenue from them. eLance had already implemented several customer-focused onsite and offline features to deter disintermediation. The co-founder and vice-president of business development had to determine what incentives were needed to keep customers dealing with each other through the site rather than offline.
The Richard Ivey School of Business had recently introduced a wireless network and required all students to purchase laptops and network cards. After a year of use, the faculty decided to restrict laptop usage in class by disallowing the use of network cards. They felt the students were using the network cards for unrelated activities in class and that this was compromising the learning process. Reaction from the students was mixed, with some students quite vocal about the (un)fairness of this new policy. The section head for one of the MBA sections knew that finding a long-term solution would be a difficult process. There were valid points in the arguments to both restrict and not restrict the use of the cards. She had to evaluate the advantages and disadvantages in order to make a recommendation to the faculty at a section meeting the following day.
In 1998, Metropolitan Life's first vice president of Interactive Commerce faced a plethora of opportunities, challenges, and decisions in charting MetLife's strategy for e-commerce. He wanted to move quickly into transacting Web-based commerce, but he had to consider executive support, infrastructure requirements, possibly disenfranchising the sales force, fast-moving competitors, and the frenzied rate of technology change. The case covers almost all e-commerce start-up issues, but from the perspective of a large, established bricks and mortar business. (A 19-minute video is available for purchase with this case.)
A proposal to give all pharmacists computer database access to the prescription histories of all British Columbians was meeting stiff media criticism over privacy issues. While the Ministry of Health foresaw many benefits of the proposed Pharmanet to consumers, pharmacists, and government regulators, many others felt access to so much information would lead to misuse or abuse. With province-wide implementation only two months away, the Pharmanet project director had to decide what, if any, additional changes to the database system had to be made to ensure public support.
As part of General Motors' overall strategy to standardize systems across GM's global operations, GM planned to implement a new timekeeping information system throughout GM plants in Canada. A common timekeeping system could increase plant efficiency, standardize reporting for headquarters, and facilitate productivity benchmarking across North America. Existing GM Canada timekeeping practices differed considerably within Canada and with U.S. operations, however, and Canadian resistance was threatening system implementation.