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Fifty years after the expression "garbage in, garbage out" was coined, we still struggle with data quality. Studies show that knowledge workers waste a significant amount of time looking for data, identifying and correcting errors, and seeking confirmatory sources for data they do not trust. When data are unreliable, managers quickly lose faith in them and fall back on their intuition to make decisions, steer their companies, and implement strategy. They're also much more apt to reject important, counterintuitive implications that emerge from big data analyses. The good news is that improving data quality is often not as hard as you might think, the author asserts. The solution is not better technology: It's better communication between the creators of data and the data users; a focus on getting the process right going forward rather than on cleaning up existing bad data; and, above all, the shifting of responsibility for data quality away from IT folks, who don't own the business processes that create the data, and into the hands of managers, who are highly invested in getting the data right.

Why do companies have so little to show for their investments in big data? The biggest reason is that they aren't doing a good job using the data they already have. They don't know how to manage the information embedded in their operating systems, analyze it in ways that enhance their understanding, and then make changes in response to new evidence and insights. The few companies that have adopted evidence-based decision making ensure that all decision makers have performance data at their fingertips every day. They also follow four practices: (1) Agree on a single source of truth. Using performance data from just one source yields a more accurate view of costs and profitability. (2) Use scorecards. Perhaps the best way to teach people how to use data to create business benefits is to provide them with data about their own performance. (3) Explicitly manage business rules. Little data can have a big effect on performance when managers use the data to assess and improve the business rules that govern their operations. (4) Use coaching to improve performance. Adopting evidence-based decision making is a big cultural shift. Employees need help learning how to base their decisions on data instead of on instinct. Fortunately, companies that make the shift don't usually go back, and they improve their operations in ways that rivals can't easily replicate.

The 5-year transformation at Guardian Life Insurance provides significant insights for organizations aspiring to enhance their IT-business alignment. Alignment is more than just organizational structure, there is no silver bullet; it requires effective governance, partnership, communications, value analytics, technical services, and people. Like most companies around the globe, Guardian recognized the importance of moving to a collaborative IT-business alignment relationship; IT-business alignment was a persistent pervasive problem that needed to be improved. In 2005, Guardian viewed IT as an ineffective expensive cost of supporting the business. Was improving the IT-business relationship as difficult as drawing 'a line' in the sand? Today, IT is enabling and driving demonstrable strategic business value. The approach that transpired this turnaround at Guardian will provide students and organizations with a clear understanding and set of lessons learned that can be applied to enhance IT-business harmony. More importantly, it will help organizations recognize the important role that IT and business leadership must play as they collaborate to address the important considerations necessary to attain a mature relationship. To demonstrate this transformation, the past and the current IT-business alignment maturity of Guardian has been benchmarked and analyzed to reveal the steps taken to enhance the impact that IT is having on the company. Were these initiatives all that are necessary to enhance the IT-business relationship? What are the important next steps to improve the relationship?

The case shows how a technology services company shaped and reshaped - and reshaped again - its IT governance structure to better integrate the IT function with business clients. The company is a large Italian telematics provider - Octo Telematics - which is specialized in the provision of telematic services and systems for the insurance and automotive markets. During the period described in this case, the company was growing and globalizing rapidly. The desired alignment between IT and the business units is needed to promote behaviors consistent with the organization's mission and strategy. As Octo experimented with new processes, committees and reorganizations the company 'traveled' through several governance archetypes.

A common and critical dilemma confronting enterprises today is how to ensure that they realize value from their large-scale investments in information technology (IT) and IT-enabled change. IT-enabled investments can bring huge rewards, but only with the right governance and management processes and full engagement from all management levels. This teaching case is about the tough but rewarding journey of the Dutch airline company KLM in improving the governance of IT, moving from managing the cost of IT towards managing the business value of IT. Although KLM still has challenges ahead, the changes in structures, processes and relational mechanisms have helped to restore trust between the business and the IT organization, and lowered business operating costs through a more rigorous selection and portfolio management process. The changes have also increased the resources allocated to IT innovation. Although KLM faced some unique challenges as it began the journey to transform its enterprise governance of IT, the realization of greater business value from today's significant and increasingly complex investments in IT is a concern for all businesses. We therefore believe that the practices and lessons learned at KLM can be applied by other organizations as they seek to more fully engage their own business unit managers in IT investment decision making and in accountability for realizing business value.

The case takes us back to 2009, a year of great turmoil and the start of a transformation journey for BARCO, a global visualisation solutions company. Stefaan Kindekens, newly appointed corporate CIO, is preparing the new IT strategy per request of the board of directors. At the heart of the proposal are the introduction of a new IT operating model and the replacement of the legacy systems landscape. The case allows for discussions about business and IT alignment, IT strategy, and IT governance.

This case study invites students to discuss strategic value creation through the use of information technology (IT). It raises issues of business model innovation, IT strategy, digital platforms, ecosystems, business-IT alignment, and leadership. The key character in the case is the Chief Information Officer, Paul Danneels, who is ready to drive the strategic transformation of the VDAB, the Flemish Employment Agency, from a service provider to a labor market conductor. Starting from a firm understanding of the VDAB's strategic choices, students should be able to discuss the positioning and role of the IT department as well as its views on value delivery.

This case describes the effective information technology (IT) business alignment considerations that led to the successful implementation of a telecommunication platform designed to efficiently route cell phone calls in a financial institution in Chile. The company had several branches throughout the country, including its headquarters in Santiago. This initiative was part of a Technology Cost Savings strategy generated in response to the 2008 crisis. The idea behind it was to align internal business leaders with the IT team in order to optimize these costs, realizing a more efficient telecommunication platform, and to work together, as several cost-reducing initiatives were being executed at the same time. Achievements were thoroughly reviewed by the board of directors, and thus pressure to clean up the house was high. At that time, when users called a cellular phone from a landline, the call was charged using a fee much higher than a mobile company rate. The goal of the project was naturally to optimize these charges. An automatic call routing was designed, discussed and executed with the participation of the business leaders, based on each branch's demand and projected growth. The case relates the project lifecycle: the mistakes made at the beginning, the initial platform tests and bottlenecks, the rejection and frustration of the business, and a posterior crisis control and recovery phase. IT alignment and sponsorship from the directors were crucial, as there was no way back. All these factors, plus the additional IT activities competing for business attention, made this project both a challenging and learning experience.

Mergers, acquisitions and divestments, including the carve-outs of business units or parts of them, are standard strategies used by multi-divisional organizations to adjust their business portfolios. Carve-out projects are critically dependent on their management of IT. Systems, which have been integrated in order to deliver seamless and efficient IT operations, must now be pulled apart under demanding time and compliance constraints. In 2007, Delta IT Consulting (DIC), one of France's biggest IT-service provider, sold one of its three service provider divisions, IT Product Services. This division employed about 3500 employees in 20 countries and previously generated 0.7 billion of DIC's euro3.8 billion revenues. DIC itself is a division of Delta Corporation - a French high-tech company and leading player in a wide array of businesses, industries and countries around the world. This teaching case challenges the reader to analyze and manage the IT carve-out as a critical component within the divestment project. The case includes insights into strategic and organizational challenges of planning and managing an IT carve-out project.

An update of Google's Android operating system since 2009. The case discusses the incredible success and market growth of Android and its impact on the global mobile market. Google adeptly added features and functions to make the OS competitive with Apple, as well as fleshing out its relationships with OEMs. Additionally, the company successfully brought partners and content into the Android ecosystem to make a richer experience for customers.

As IT innovations in the last years emerged on the consumer market, employees are more experienced in the private than in the corporate use of innovative IT devices and applications. These employees, familiar with the benefits consumer products offer, expect those to be provided by their corporate IT. This trend, referred to as 'consumerization of IT', leads to more and more consumer innovations infiltrating companies. In particular, mobile consumer devices are currently spreading into companies, strongly pushed by top management, and create several challenges to Chief Information Officers (CIOs) around the globe: 'What IT costs are associated with the use of mobile consumer devices?', 'How will corporate use of mobile consumer devices affect IT management?', and 'How to introduce an IT service for corporate as well as personal mobile consumer devices?'. OMEGA Group, a multi-national company with 50,000 employees, wants to leverage the potential of mobile consumer devices for corporate purposes. Therefore, these questions have to be addressed and answered by its CIO. The teaching case is designed to introduce the characteristics of consumerization and associated challenges for IT management. The case uses selected information systems methodologies and frameworks.

Big data has unleashed a torrent of infographics--most of them awful.

This case follows IBM's use of iterative software development to manage projects. The head of IBM's Rational Product Development is asked by the head of IBM's WebSphere Product Development to deliver an additional feature in the Rational product that would enable WebSphere to accomplish some new tasks. The feature requested is a critical requirement that has been requested very late in the product development cycle. Can the Rational Product Development team meet the WebSphere request? Should it undertake the changes to accommodate the new requirements? If so, can the team deliver the functionality without delaying the product release? This case also provides an opportunity to evaluate an iterative approach to project management.

This case takes students through the evolution of LEGO's business model from a traditional product-centric "make and sell" model to a more customer-centric "anticipate and lead" model in which products are co-created with customers, and customers are leveraged as a key factor in the company's innovation strategy. It begins with LEGO's struggles in the late 1990s to early 2000s, as competitors and imitators posed threats to LEGO as did the increasing alternative modes of electronic and Internet-based play. LEGO posted losses for a handful of years, and the company's culture waned. The case then takes students from the early 2000s into 2013, a period through which LEGO underwent significant transformation, which began with a new CEO, Jørgen Vig Knudstorp. The case highlights the company's evolution through three lenses - its organizational evolution, community evolution, and technological evolution.

In February 2005, Jesús Cepeda, Director of Grupo Santander's Management Control Area, reviews a Chilean pilot test of a new management information system, MIS America. Grupo Santander, a global financial institution, had grown rapidly through acquisitions in recent years, giving rise to a great need for reliable, timely information to help Santander managers compare performance across globally distributed units and make better strategic and operational decisions. Top executives had an urgent need for both consolidated and precisely disaggregated information.The pilot test in Chile had suffered numerous delays. Cepeda had to decide what to do next regarding MIS America. The original plan had specified that following the Chile pilot, the new system would be rolled out throughout Latin America, but Cepeda was not sure if he was ready to authorize the rollout. This case study highlights the information systems challenges associated with rapid growth via acquisition. The case also examines questions of centralized versus decentralized control in a corporate MIS that addresses different needs in different Latin American countries, while responding to Grupo Santander's own needs at the corporate level. The challenges presented by this large and complex project are applicable to many IT projects in other industries and geographic settings.

This module note introduces James March's concept of exploration and exploitation, and the management challenge of balancing the allocation of resources to the two activities in the firm. The note also touches on the O'Reilly and Tushman paper on the ambidextrous organization, and mentions some of the other literature.

The takeover of Bombay Suburban Electric Supply Ltd (BSES) in 2003 (eventually renamed Reliance Energy) marked the foray of Reliance Industries Ltd into the power transmission and distribution business. The power sector, plagued by bureaucratic controls and constraints on supply and demand, offered little managerial discretion to alter the traditional drivers of growth and profitability. The case illustrates how Reliance Energy leveraged technology to transform its strategy and operations in order to establish international standards of operational excellence and customer service in the Indian power sector. Students learn about the significant risks in technology-driven transformations and their critical success factors, such as complementary changes in firm structures and business processes. The case is set in 2008, when the Chief Information Officer (CIO) of Reliance Energy is found dwelling over the digital transformation of the company that has led to the decision to spin off the information technology (IT) department into a third-party technology solutions provider for the infrastructure sector. Was the digital transformation of the company a success? What were the lessons learnt from this transformation?

In 2012, the Chief Information Officer (CIO) of Worthington Health-Care System (WHCS), a St. Louis company with 27 health-care facilities, is considering how to improve IT project governance. Over the previous 7 years, three approaches to developing project oversight had been attempted, including a Project Management Office, a project Portfolio Management application (PlanView), and more recently, an incremental approach to process improvement, which was meeting with increasing resistance. The CIO's challenge is to find an effective solution to IT project work and oversight at WHCS. This teaching case was prepared to support a Business Process Consulting course, but it may also be suitable in an IT Management, IS Project Management, Business Process Improvement and IT-Enabled Change, and Accounting Information Systems class.

E-mail management company Mimecast shares the results of a 2012 survey of 2,600 workers in the U.S., UK, and South Africa who use e-mail every day.

This case describes the strategy adopted by Cisco India to develop the Advanced Services Router 901 ('ASR 901'). It is part of a larger strategy by Cisco headquarters to understand what could be built in the developing markets for the developing markets, as opposed to products conceived with only developed markets as the focus. Within a time frame of a few months, a team forms to develop the ASR 901 completely from scratch - from conception to launch - in Bangalore, India. It then goes on to win several awards, and interestingly, orders begin streaming in from not just the developing economies, as had been expected, but also from top tier customers in the developed markets. ASR 901 is undoubtedly a milestone in Cisco India's indigenous innovation initiatives. Can the lessons learnt while progressing through the several stages of product development be applied to similar new initiatives?