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In a search for an optimized global business service operation, firms set up and relocate shared service centres around the globe. This teaching case examines the migration process of IBM procurement shared service centre from Budapest to Sofia. The teaching case describes the challenges that the teams in Budapest and Sofia faced and the migration methodology applied and later on adapted in order to meet the transition objectives. The teaching case concludes by challenging IBM's migration approach.

In February 2011, Nintendo released the next evolution of the DS line of handheld gaming devices in Japan: the Nintendo 3DS. Despite initial rave reviews of the new device, sales figures were much lower than expected. In July 2011, Nintendo announced that it would reduce the price of 3DS by 30% to boost sales. At the same time, Nintendo president Satoru Iwata declared salary reductions for all of Nintendo's directors, starting with a 50% cut of his own salary. In October 2011, Nintendo predicted that the net loss for the year ending in March 2012 would be US$264 million, a first in the company's 30-year history. Back in 2006, the Nintendo Wii disrupted the video game industry, and in the following years, Nintendo was disrupted by Microsoft with Kinect and by Sony with PlayStation Move as well as by Apple and Google with their game-changing products targeting the mobile industry. It remained unclear how Nintendo could turn around and reclaim the few glorious years after the release of the Nintendo Wii game console and the Nintendo DS handheld game device.

The purpose of this paper is to present a case about SYSCO's 'Best Business Practices' (BBPs). The analysis focuses on both the system and the impact of the system, particularly the measurable effects and the overall organizational impact. Perhaps, the most interesting issue is how a system for BBPs is used to manage a highly decentralized firm, and push the individual corporate entities to better performance, without requiring specific processes or best practices. Use of the system is illustrated through an example.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Many people in the information technology world believe that "big data"will give companies new capabilities and value. But companies have been dealing with an exponentially increasing amount of data, and much of it in forms that are impossible to manage by traditional analytics. "Big data"includes information such as call center voice data, social media content and video entertainment, as well as clickstream data from the web. The authors posit that organizations that are learning to take advantage of big data are beginning to understand their business environments at a more granular level, are creating new products and services, and are responding more quickly to change as it occurs. These companies stand apart from those with traditional data analysis environments in three critical ways. First, rather than looking at data to assess what happened in the past, these organizations consider data in terms of flows and processes, and make decisions and take actions quickly. In addition, organizations already involved with big data are taking a lead on hiring -and training -data scientists and product and process developers as opposed to data analysts. And finally, advanced organizations are moving analytics from IT into their core business and operational functions. As big data evolves, a new information ecosystem is also evolving, a network that is continuously sharing information, optimizing decisions, communicating results and generating new insights for businesses.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. In this article, the authors show that although the use of social media can be an extremely valuable way to enrich a company's culture and enhance its productivity, it isn't a sure thing. Based on a survey of 1,060 executives about their experience with social media and a number of indepth qualitative case studies, the authors argue that the main reason some social media initiatives fail to bring benefits to companies is because the initiatives don't create emotional capital, which they define as a strong emotional connection between stakeholders and the company. In the end, social media is still media -that is, mediums of communication -and those new mediums can be used as badly and counterproductively as any traditional mode. To show how companies can create a winning strategy, the authors contrast the experiences of two companies -an unnamed technology company and Tupperware Nordic, the Scandinavian branch of the kitchenware company. The technology company focused on software to facilitate social networking, not on using those new tools to build communities. It also tended to communicate in ways employees found insincere. Between insincere messages from the executive team and easier communication with other disgruntled employees, the initiative had no real positive effects for the company. Tupperware, by contrast, used the technology to help the company convey community spirit to its sales associates and took advantage of social media's unique ability to foster better vertical and horizontal communication.The authors conclude that although social media can help create closer and more dynamic stakeholder relationships, success with an online community requires a leader who can build emotional capital and who values community building as a means of creating economic value.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. In a recent data and analytics survey conducted by MIT Sloan Management Review in partnership with SAS Institute Inc., the authors found a strong correlation between the value companies say they generate using analytics and the amount of data they use. Combining the responses to several survey questions, they identified five levels of analytics sophistication, with those at Level 5 being most sophisticated and innovative. These analytical innovators in Level 5 had several defining characteristics. First, they tended to use more data than other groups. In fact, they were three times more likely than the 8% of those respondents who fell into the Level 1 category to say they used a great deal or all of their data. Second, there was a strong correlation between driving competitive advantage and innovation with analytics and how effective a company is at managing what the authors term "the information transformation cycle."This cycle refers to the process of capturing data, analyzing information, aggregating and integrating data, using insights to guide future strategy and disseminating information and insights. Respondents who fell into the Level 5 category also had a stronger need for speed than other survey respondents. Eighty-seven percent reported that the ability to process and analyze data more quickly was very important. Utilizing speed fell into three separate areas: customer experience, pricing strategy and innovation. Another intriguing finding from the survey involved the cultural impact on organizations. Some respondents reported that the use of analytics is shifting the power structure within their organizations. Analytical innovators, as a group, tended to be more likely than other groups to say that analytics has started to shift the power structure in their organizations.

Back in the 1990s, computer engineer and Wall Street "quant" were the hot occupations in business. Today data scientists are the hires firms are competing to make. As companies wrestle with unprecedented volumes and types of information, demand for these experts has raced well ahead of supply. Indeed, Greylock Partners, the VC firm that backed Facebook and LinkedIn, is so worried about the shortage of data scientists that it has a recruiting team dedicated to channeling them to the businesses in its portfolio. Data scientists are the key to realizing the opportunities presented by big data. They bring structure to it, find compelling patterns in it, and advise executives on the implications for products, processes, and decisions. They find the story buried in the data and communicate it. And they don't just deliver reports: They get at the questions at the heart of problems and devise creative approaches to them. One data scientist who was studying a fraud problem, for example, realized it was analogous to a type of DNA sequencing problem. Bringing those disparate worlds together, he crafted a solution that dramatically reduced fraud losses. In this article, Harvard Business School's Davenport and Greylock's Patil take a deep dive on what organizations need to know about data scientists: where to look for them, how to attract and develop them, and how to spot a great one.

Senior leaders who write off the move toward big data as a lot of big talk are making, well, a big mistake. So argue McKinsey's Barton and Court, who worked with dozens of companies to figure out how to translate advanced analytics into nuts-and-bolts practices that affect daily operations on the front lines. The authors offer a useful guide for leaders and managers who want to take a deliberative approach to big data--but who also want to get started now. First, companies must identify the right data for their business, seek to acquire the information creatively from diverse sources, and secure the necessary IT support. Second, they need to build analytics models that are tightly focused on improving performance, making the models only as complex as business goals demand. Third, and most important, companies must transform their capabilities and culture so that the analytical results can be implemented from the C-suite to the front lines. That means developing simple tools that everyone in the organization can understand and teaching people why the data really matter. Embracing big data is as much about changing mind-sets as it is about crunching numbers. Executed with the right care and flexibility, this cultural shift could have payoffs that are, well, bigger than you expect.

Many organizations underestimate the challenges associated with the use of a knowledge management system (KMS). To better understand the nature of these challenges, this case describes the knowledge management efforts of a state governmental agency in the United States: Technology Project Authority (TPA). The case focuses on the three main phases of the TPA's knowledge management strategy, between 2004 and 2008. Under pressure to improve its business processes to sustain its expertise in IT project management, TPA implemented two KMS during the period covered in the case. In the end, the second KMS was still not used as intended. Giving our teaching objectives, students are asked to determine the characteristics of an organizational environment conducive to knowledge management activities, to evaluate the strategic alignment of the KMS, and to suggest a tailored method of analysis and reengineering for an integrated system such as the KMS needed at TPA.

The microstock photography industry took shape in the early 2000s, when iStockphoto commercialized its online catalogue of images contributed by a community of amateur and semi-professional photographers. This case takes place about four years after iStockphoto's purchase by Getty Images, an event that signalled a shift of market dominance from traditional stock photo houses to their microstock competitors. The industry has changed dramatically. Three firms - iStockphoto, Shutterstock and Fotolia LLC - control the lion's share of a mature market, and each dominates a particular segment. The Fotolia management team must find ways to grow Fotolia N.A., even as competitors also seek to exploit the "long tail" in the market. The case asks students to develop strategies to generate new revenue in this rapidly changing environment.

Kyruus is used in a course at HBS on Entrepreneurship in Healthcare IT and Services (EHITS). It describes a young company that has built a very large database on physicians. The company has had some early successful pilots with prominent customers, but it is now faced with choices on which markets to pursue. These markets each offer opportunity, but the company must make some decisions. As is often the case in early stage companies, these choices will affect a number of things, including organizational needs and capital requirements.

A small US-based crowdsourcing platform illustrates the entrepreneurial challenges in a new 'industry' - the crowdsourcing industry. The firm's president founded and manages a virtual firm, which he launched even before the term crowdsourcing was coined. He has chosen to focus his firm, initially, on selling labor services to the American real estate market. Now that he has successfully built a network of reliable providers and repeat clients, his dilemma is how to grow his firm.

Healthware, a digital communication agency specializing in healthcare, is based in Salerno Italy. The firm has 72 employees in two countries as well as clients in 14 countries. The case illustrates the location trade-offs of operating - and growing - a global digital company far from the epicenter of Italian business. The theme is universal. Once the firm is far from a nation's epicenter, a dynamism may be absent but the advantages are quite tangible: lower costs and employee stability. This teaching case is based on actual companies, people, and events, though some details have been dramatized or disguised.

In 2005, a successful Peruvian-based software company was seeking to grow by exporting its software products. The case illustrates the entrepreneurial challenges in selling software products from a developing nation that is not on the forefront of the technology world. LOLIMSA has successfully grown its market into several Latin countries outside of Peru. The firm is considering trying to enter the lucrative American market for the second time, but knows that the investment in market entry is substantial.

Increasingly, employees are innovating with their own consumer technologies (such as smartphones and tablets), rather than looking to their companies' IT departments to lead technical innovation. This can give rise to tension between employees and IT departments, and this tension is particularly pronounced in the US military, where long systems development times run headlong into young, technology-savvy soldiers arriving in camp with smartphones, sophisticated applications, and high expectations. In this case study, this phenomenon plays out in the person of a US Army Captain who, using resources obtained via the Internet and while on a tour of duty in Afghanistan, develops and sells an inexpensive iPhone application - Tactical NAV - that provides soldiers with a sophisticated navigation tool.

This case documents the challenges involved in the adoption of information and communication technology (ICT) by the government in a democratic system, especially in the context of a developing country. Nemmadi was an e-governance project initiated in 2004 by the government of the state of Karnataka located in the southern part of India. Since the beginning of the new millennium, the policy and the political environment in Karnataka had turned quite favourable for such ICT initiatives. Aimed at improving the transparency, accountability and efficiency of the government administration at the village level, Nemmadi was an ambitious project conceived to offer digital services to rural citizens across 800 hoblis (cluster of villages) in the state. The services included issue of certificates of several kinds, which entitled the citizens belonging to economically and socially backward sections of the society to avail of benefits and concessions under various government schemes conceived as part of affirmative action by the state. Project Nemmadi was conceived as a 'sequel' to a celebrated e-governance initiative called Bhoomi, which involved digitization of seven million agricultural land records, and was a landmark in e-governance in India. Bhoomi was championed and closely led by Shekhar Puri, the then Principal Secretary of e-governance who also led the Nemmadi project during its roll-out phase. The roll-out of Project Nemmadi faced many challenges. The village functionaries and their interface with Nemmadi impacted project implementation, and hence adoption. It had received its share of bouquets and brickbats and had won several awards. Naveen Iyer took charge as the Principal Secretary of this department. Naveen's recommendations to the political leadership and the decisions that follow could transform the project to a truly village-level Citizen Service Center.

This case concerns Microsoft's attempt to completely restructure its major global finance processes and operations through what the authors call a Vested Outsourcing agreement. In February 2007, Microsoft signed an outsourcing agreement with Accenture, with an original contract term of 7 years at a value of US$185 million. This was extended 2 years later, to 2018, with expanded scope, and a total contract value of $330 million. Called the OneFinance initiative, the effort outsourced nearly all back office finance transactions spread across 95 countries to service provider Accenture under a new kind of outsourcing model. Under the agreement the parties operate under incentives to improve performance and deliver increased value year-over-year, while sharing in the risks and rewards of doing so. The case focuses on the rationale for this distinctive approach to outsourcing and transformational change, and provides details of the definitions of work, measurements, pricing models and governance structures adopted. The fine-grained account of the OneFinance outsourcing arrangements provides an opportunity to identify the distinctive principles and practices adopted by the parties. Readers can compare and contrast the case with other outsourcing deals and assess the challenges in choosing the supplier and the approach. The case also invites an assessment of the risks being incurred, the inherent implementation and operational challenges and how they might be met. The case also raises questions about what levels of success might be achieved, and what conditions would need to be present for success. Finally, the case raises the issue of whether, and if so how, this distinctive 'vested' approach could be adopted elsewhere.

The Walsham hotel is an upscale hotel, located in a large southern city. Its clientele have high expectations and, given the Walsham's urban location, likely includes many senior executives. The case focuses on the hotel's Director of Rooms and, in particular, the hotel's profitable mini-bar department. A major face-lift for the property's rooms provides an opportunity to replace the refrigeration units in the mini-bar, units that have been in place for over 10 years. The Director is considering either a more energy-efficient version of the current unit or a much more expensive unit, the KN346. The latter has some interesting electronic features including sensing technology and peer-to-peer networking that, together, would permit remote real-time access to the mini-bar inventory. This unit could drive down labor costs, reduce disagreements at check-out, improve customer service, and allow personalized mini-bar stocking. The case is arranged in four parts. Only Part A should be distributed in advance. Part B should be distributed only after Part A is discussed. Parts C and D could be similarly distributed only after discussion of their preceding parts.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article.