個案總覽

Supplement to case E622A. The LiveRamp case follows the story of Anneka Gupta, Chief Product Officer of LiveRamp, from her early days with the company as a spinoff from Rapleaf, to the present day, where she manages a large product management team responsible for developing cutting edge data onboarding products.

In 2015, Snapdeal, an e-commerce company in India, faced a supply chain situation in reverse logistics. In conforming to the industry trends, the company had a policy on assured product returns, which led to most customers returning to an online merchant for future purchases. However, by the end of 2015, the estimated worth of products returned under the Indian e-commerce platform was $800 million to $1 billion. The rate of returns of online products could add substantial logistics costs to each product return, hampering the industry's growth. Snapdeal had some serious questions to address. Should it reverse its policy and not give customers a chance to return products? Should the company connect organizations and retailers with customers and derive valuable feedback from them? Should Snapdeal alter its product return policy in favour of a "free returns" or "no questions asked" return policy? Would corrective action be required for the e-commerce industry so companies like Snapdeal could create a return policy for customers who had legitimate reasons to return products?

Contracts, transactions, and records of them provide critical structure in our economic system, but they haven't kept up with the world's digital transformation. They're like rush-hour gridlock trapping a Formula 1 race car. Blockchain promises to solve this problem. The technology behind bitcoin, blockchain is an open, distributed ledger that records transactions safely, permanently, and very efficiently. For instance, while the transfer of a share of stock can now take up to a week, with blockchain it could happen in seconds. Blockchain could slash the cost of transactions and eliminate intermediaries like lawyers and bankers, and that could transform the economy. But, like the adoption of more internet technologies, blockchain's adoption will require broad coordination and will take years. In this article the authors describe the path that blockchain is likely to follow and explain how firms should think about investments in it.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review Article. Blockchain technology has the potential to transform how businesses are organized and managed. It allows companies to eliminate transaction costs and use outside resources as easily as internal resources. The implications for areas such as accounting, contract negotiation and enforcement, sales and marketing, and capital investment are myriad. Companies should start exploring how this technology could impact their industry and processes.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review Article. More than 2 billion people worldwide are users of social media, making it a logical platform for companies seeking to attract potential employees and engage consumers with their brands. In addition to sharing information on brand activities through official social media pages or accounts, employees share brand-related information, make comments endorsing the organization's brand, and display behaviors that are consistent (or at odds) with the brand values and promise. For companies, the social media behavior of employees represents both an opportunity and a risk. Some companies encourage employees to become brand ambassadors to consumers and job candidates on social networks such as LinkedIn and share the company culture on Facebook and Twitter. However, the authors found that in the companies they studied, employees on the whole displayed very low brand engagement on social media. Management was surprised to learn that their employees were not following the company on Facebook or other popular social media sites. When employees are not fans or supporters of the company's products, the authors noted, this can send an ambiguous message to employees' contacts and deprive the company of potential supporters. So what can companies do? From their research, the authors developed a set of recommendations for encouraging effective employee branding on social media. The first recommendation is to empower a stable of employee advocates. The authors say employees born in the era of the internet (so-called "digital natives") tend to be more active on social media and are more likely to become brand ambassadors for the company.

Pirates on the virtual sea are supplying their illicit digital content and goods through cyberlockers and darknet markets. The deep web hosts darknet marketplaces selling a variety of wares, such as narcotics and weapons, and is testimony to the growth of illicit trade on the internet. The challenge of web sites that host digital content piracy is exacerbated through linkages to a variety of malware schemes that have created a lucrative crimeware economy. Digital thieves target unsuspecting consumers as digital bait to derive profits from a variety of malware schemes such as ransomware and malvertising. The hijacking of access to computers and their digital content in order to ransom them back to consumers or organizations is considered to be one of the leading threats of internet crime. Malvertising schemes are plaguing the internet advertising business-criminals are reaping profits by posting legitimate advertisements at content theft sites or using an army of botnets to fake advertising traffic. A variety of stratagems are evolving to curb this illicit trade, including fostering multi-lateral enforcement tactics, updating legislation to circumvent this type of crime on the internet, training digital savvy citizens, and creating private-sector remedies.

In 2014, three former Code for America fellows embarked on a one-year skunk works journey to use technology to improve the enrollment process for California's SNAP (food stamp) program, CalFresh, to increase the number of residents receiving benefits in San Francisco. The case describes a user-centered approach to identifying bottlenecks within the CalFresh enrollment process and the low cost, fast solution proposed-and built-by the group. The case asks students to consider the opportunities, challenges and risks created by information technology in the public sector and whether taking a user-centered approach to policy implementation can improve social service delivery.

Online marketplaces such as eBay, Uber, and Airbnb have the potential to reduce racial, gender, and other forms of bias that affect the off-line world. And in the early days of internet commerce, the relative anonymity of transactions did make it harder for participants to discriminate. But as listings began to include photos, names, and other means of identification, bias emerged in areas ranging from labor markets to credit applications to housing--sometimes made worse by a lack of regulation, the absence of in-person interactions, and the use of automation and big data. How can companies reverse the tide? The key lies in more-intentional platform design, say the authors, who offer a framework for creating a thriving marketplace while minimizing the risk of discrimination. For starters, they say, companies must track and report on potential problems and carefully test choices that may influence the extent of discrimination. And they should thoroughly examine four design decisions, asking themselves: (1) Are we providing too much information? In many cases, the simplest, most effective change a platform can make is to withhold information such as race and gender until after a transaction has been agreed to. (2) Could we further automate the process? Features such as "instant book," allowing a buyer to sign up for a rental, say, without the seller's prior approval, can reduce discrimination while increasing convenience. (3) Can we make discrimination policies more top-of-mind? Presenting them during the actual transaction process, rather than burying them in fine print, makes them less likely to be broken. (4) Should we make our algorithms discrimination-aware? To ensure fairness, designers need to track how race or gender affects the user experience and set explicit objectives.

While extant research has studied the motivations of individualistic security compliance, this study explains what motivates employees to share security advice and troubleshoot with others. We argue that such findings are crucial for the development of people-centric security workplaces, where desirable security behaviors are disseminated amongst the employees. In this research, we applied network analysis techniques to perform two tasks. First, we explored the structural patterns of employees' sharing of security advice and troubleshooting. Second, we evaluated the effects of security climate perceptions, perceived accountability, and personal attributes on those sharing activities. While the sharing network was found to be thin and sparse, perceptions of direct a supervisor's security practices and accountability for security tasks can increase sharing. Age, seniority, and tenure-as well as having the same gender and department membership-can also motivate sharing. In contrast, security climate perceptions of coworkers and top management's security practices were found to discourage sharing. Our practical recommendations focus on the strategies to maximize security engagement in the workplace. Potential ideas for future research are also discussed in detail. Most importantly, we hope to offer this research as the foundation for future network studies in the behavioral security field.

Against a background of board-level concern for cybersecurity, organizations are seeking to ensure the protection of their information assets and minimize the risk of a cybersecurity attack. These objectives place two particular demands on organizations: to appoint a suitable official to head up their information security operations, a CISO; and to ensure that the executive and board are appropriately informed of the organization's security status. In exploring the challenges that confront organizations in selecting a CISO, we drew on data from the U.S., Canada, and New Zealand. Two main issues were addressed. First, the organization has to be very clear on what it wants in terms of the job the CISO is expected to perform and the corresponding attributes that such an incumbent would need to possess. The CISO is a senior-level executive and rather than being a specialized technical expert, the CISO should be an excellent communicator. This will help address the second issue, which is how effectively the CISO can communicate with the board. Some suggestions are provided that serve to aid both effectiveness and efficiency. However, organizations need to embrace their concern about cybersecurity and build it into their selection criteria for board members.

Worldwide usage of mobile smart devices has increased dramatically over the past two decades. The popularity of these devices has grown as a result of their increased processing power, storage capacity, and memory; they can now hold enormous amounts of both personal and private business data. In addition to the consideration of mobile devices, the scope of any forensic investigation has also grown to include cloud environments. Previously, we proposed a working model that can improve the effectiveness and efficiency of an investigation in a multidisciplinary environment. The study presented herein, however, evaluates a straw man model derived from current practice models to identify the required improvements. The study also proposes a new improved process model known as a multidisciplinary digital forensic investigation process model.

Business use of cloud computing services is motivated by ease of use and potential financial cost reductions. Service failure may occur when the service provider does not protect information or when the use of the services becomes overly complex and difficult. The benefits of cloud computing also bring optimization challenges for the information owners who must assess service security risks and the degree to which new human behaviors are required. In this research, we look at the risk of identity theft when ease of service access is provided through a single sign-on (SSO) authorization, asking: What are the optimal behavioral expectations for a cloud service information owner? Federated identity management provides well-developed design literature on strategies for optimizing human behaviors in relation to the new technologies. We briefly review the literature and then propose a working solution that optimizes the trade-off between disclosure risk, human user risk, and service security.

Wearable computing devices promise to deliver countless benefits to users. Moreover, they are among the most personal and unique computing devices of all, more so than laptops and tablets and even more so than smartphones. However, this uniqueness also brings with it a risk of security issues not encountered previously in information systems: the potential to not only compromise data, but also to physically harm the wearer. This article considers wearable device security from three perspectives: whether the threat is to the device and/or the individual, the role that the wearable device plays, and how holistic wearable device security strategies can be developed and monitored.

The recent FBI v. Apple case has the potential to turn a 227-year-old statute law in into a tool for government agencies to gain access to personal and corporate information. Recent events such as 'Petraeus-gate,' hacked nude celebrity photos in the cloud, and the use of a search and seizure warrant in the United States seeking customer email contents on an extraterritorial server raise important issues for the supposedly safe storage of data on the World Wide Web. Not only may there be nowhere to hide in cyberspace but nothing in cyberspace may be private. This article explores the legal and technical issues raised by these matters, with emphasis on the court decision In the Matter of a Warrant to Search a Certain E-Mail Account Controlled and Maintained by Microsoft Corporation and the subsequent upholding of that decision.

The use of managerial control ratios for benchmarking IT costs is widely accepted. This installment of Accounting Matters informs CIOs about IT managerial control ratios and the assumptions underlying the use of these ratios in IT cost benchmarking. Incorrect use of these ratios and violation of the assumptions can lead to faulty inferences and costly mistakes. This article proposes a technique for benchmarking IT costs to draw the right conclusions from the data.

With the explosion of the digital universe, it is becoming increasingly important to understand how organizational decision making (i.e., the business-oriented perspective) is intertwined with an understanding of enterprise data assets (i.e., the data-oriented perspective). This article first compares the business- and data-oriented perspectives to describe how the two views mesh with each other. It then presents three elements in the data-oriented perspective that are collectively referred to as the data triad: (1) use, (2) design and storage, and (3) processes and people. In describing the data triad, this article highlights practices, architectural techniques, and example tools that are used to manage, access, analyze, and deliver data. By presenting different elements of the data-oriented perspective, this article broadly and concretely describes the data triad and how it can play a role in the redefined scope of work for data-driven business managers.

In fewer than ten days during the summer of 2016, millions of smartphone users around the world went crazy over Pokémon Go, an augmented reality videogame app. If only all new high-technology products-and their investors-could enjoy such runaway success! Alas, the road to new technologies can be bumpy, and marketers of new high-tech products face numerous obstacles. Six perils await these marketers: significant market uncertainty, significant technological uncertainty, issues of compatibility within a product's complex multi-component system, struggles to orchestrate self-reinforcing network effects, challenges of navigating ecosystem complexities and competition, and inherent risks of making hard choices among multiple product-market options with significant path dependency. This article discusses these dangers and concludes with advice regarding steps marketers can and should take to make the journey to market less perilous.

In 2015, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) ran the largest healthcare system in the United States, with over 1,700 sites of care that served nearly 9 million veterans. One year earlier, a scandal had erupted over a cover-up of the excessive wait times veterans faced to get medical appointments in some VA facilities. The fallout led to the resignation of the Secretary of Veterans Affairs, a criminal investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the eventual replacement of 14 of VA's top 17 leaders. This case documents the efforts of the new leadership team to improve access, regain trust, and transform the organization to address the broadening medical needs of the nation's growing veteran population.

SmoothPay, a 14-people start-up in Canada that offered mobile payment and loyalty solutions, enjoyed initial achievements after its launch in 2014. In less than two years, through industry partnerships and community engagement, SmoothPay grew to have over 100 merchants in its system, with over 5,000 users. However, the future was full of risks and uncertainty: businesses and consumers in Canada were both slow in adopting mobile payments, and, as a small firm, SmoothPay had not yet established brand awareness. SmoothPay's management needed to address several key challenges. How could SmoothPay differentiate itself from its many competitors? What strategic direction should the company take? What market should SmoothPay target to enable sustainable growth?

AllDrinksSoft (ADS), a US-based manufacturer and distributor of non-alcoholic beverages, began its journey into Business Analytics (BA) by developing two performance dashboards: one for its branches and one for its sales staff. By recounting the development and implementation of these two applications, and considering how improvements to them might be prioritized, this case explores ADS's journey into BA. In so doing, it highlights questions about the meaning of BA, the various ways in which analytics solutions can be designed and implemented, what the stages of BA maturity look like and how organizations might progress along this maturity trajectory.