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This article examines the characteristics and applications of 3-D printing and compares it with mass customization and other manufacturing processes. 3-D printing enables small quantities of customized goods to be produced at relatively low costs. While currently used primarily to manufacture prototypes and mockups, a number of promising applications exist in the production of replacement parts, dental crowns, and artificial limbs, as well as in bridge manufacturing. 3-D printing has been compared to such disruptive technologies as digital books and music downloads that enable consumers to order their selections online, allow firms to profitably serve small market segments, and enable companies to operate with little or no unsold finished goods inventory. Some experts have also argued that 3-D printing will significantly reduce the advantages of producing small lot sizes in low-wage countries via reduced need for factory workers.

A strategy called software product line engineering, or SPLE, is taking hold in industries in which software is an integral part of product offerings. Where it has found a foothold, SPLE has brought about remarkable results such as unprecedented product variation, substantial production cost savings, slashing of time to market, and massive productivity gains. SPLE is the software version of an old manufacturing concept: building a suite of products from common parts assembled under a common design in a common production facility. The special properties of software make SPLE a particularly high-payoff proposition. SPLE exploits the commonalities among products to achieve economies of scale, by creating core assets-assets that will be applied to multiple products in the product line. SPLE accommodates the differences among products by explicitly identifying and planning for those variations in product behavior and qualities. This management of variation allows the organization to achieve economies of scope and provides the capability of mass customization where every market is treated as a niche. Management ensures that core asset developers create effective core assets and product builders efficiently build products by using them. This requires oversight, coordination, and melding of purpose of groups that have slightly different inherent goals.

Innovative IT applications such as patient-present telemedicine consultation services can save lives and reduce costs. Yet, despite extensive pilot-testing, few such services have achieved long-term viability. Partners HealthCare's TeleStroke service, in full operation and managed by the Massachusetts General Hospital Neurology department, is financially self-sustaining and serves a vital need. Clinicians at some participating hospitals are interested in using telemedicine for other medical applications outside of stroke care. Should Partners expand its service? What organizational, clinical, and technical issues would arise if Partners expand its telemedicine offerings? How can these issues best be managed? The case is intended for an MBA or advanced undergraduate course in IT Management. We use this case in the first module of a Strategic IT Management course. Module I, Use IT for Business Value, introduces students to the resource based view of management and the mechanisms through which IT (hardware, software, network, and data resources) can add business value-such as by being embedded in a product or service (Netflix case), by generating valuable data that enables management to make better decisions or improve operations (Harrah's Entertainment and Catching Tax Cheats cases), and by serving as a platform for collaboration (this Telemedicine case).

Pearson Plc is an education company that operates worldwide and is headquartered in London, the United Kingdom. Its six primary business units are North American Education, International Education, Professional, the Financial Times, Interactive Data, and Penguin Publishing. The vice-president of product management within the Digital Learning division of the North American Education unit based in Chandler, Arizona begins to transform the product development processes to better meet the needs of his customers in the education market, specifically in transitioning from using an off-shored waterfall software development model to an on-shore Agile model. When the vice-president first joined Pearson a year earlier, the Digital Learning unit had spent significant resources developing a major upgrade to one of its educational software products. The first version of this new product was challenged by the disconnect between what the software development group was delivering and what the vice-president's customers desired. He is faced with a decision to continue focusing on the specific methodology they had implemented (Scrum) or move to a new one (Kanban). Additionally, he has to consider expanding his focus to help drive Agile methodologies both with other groups in his business unit and outside his business unit. These decisions must be made at a potentially critical time for his products as his organization deals with the growing pains associated with the shift to Agile.

The Web 2.0 era is nourished by the emergence of collaboration-conducive web applications, such as blogs, social networks, and wikis. Among these, Wiki has particularly revolutionized the way information is created and shared within a wide variety of organizations, such as educational institutions, research centers, and business enterprises. The technically undemanding nature of Wiki alleviates the burden of mastering cumbersome or complicated technologies, thereby encouraging personnel to share and archive valuable tacit knowledge with other members of the organization. As a result, Wiki helps mitigate the reluctance of members to share knowledge, resolving one of the most pronounced challenges in managerial efforts to capture, transfer, and store knowledge for the firm. This case study presents the inception of a wiki by the NBC Universal Software Engineering and Delivery Team and the expansion of the wiki to other departments in the firm, in particular to Peacock Productions, which specializes in programming of documentary TV programs. The Peacock Productions case demonstrates that Wiki can be a powerful tool for managing knowledge in business corporations, which must adapt quickly to changing market demands.

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems introduce changes on a larger scale than most other systems. They link various components of the organization and modify its structure by deploying standardized processes and data models, which can lead to higher efficiency and significant cost savings. This case shows the adjustment dynamic between an ERP system and the other components of the organization. The project is a very large one, involving an investment of several hundred million dollars. The results are impressive. Bombardier implemented new processes through the use of the system, changed the roles of its employees, created a different way of looking at the organization and its activities and established new value indicators that helped crystallize the new behaviours.

The onset of the cloud computing industry reshaped IBM's strategy. Previously, it had excelled at vertically integrating all in-house activities to drive the value of their mainframe computers. The rise of personal computing was met with corporate denial at IBM. And, by the time it tried to enter the PC market, major players, like Apple, had a five-year lead. IBM then outsourced its operating system and microprocessors and sold its stake in Intel. The series of missteps after the era of mainframe computing brought IBM to its lowest point. After missing out on the PC boom, Cloud computing presented IBM with a new opportunity for it to become the dominant player in computing again. The question had become "How far should IBM venture into the cloud computing industry? And, which market segment would prove the most profitable for IBM?" This case shows the dynamism of the IT industry by the fact that even though IBM missed a cycle of innovation with the PC industry, it had the chance to catch the next wave with the advent of cloud computing.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. The relentless advance of information technology today means that a key task of the business manager now is to cope with one wave of IT innovations after another. At any given time, an executive is likely to feel more or less inundated by a current wave, unsure of what all the commotion is about, unable to avoid the topic in conversation and yet suspicious that the latest "killer app"may be mostly hype. Is there a better way?<BR> <BR>Drawing on years of his own research as well as the research of others, the author argues that the IT adoption cycle is a kind of wave machine that carries an innovation through five stages: (1) breaking the surface, (2) sending out ripples, (3) causing a squawk, (4) building the swell and (5) riding the crest. An important characteristic of IT innovations, the author notes, is that implementation is frequently costly, time-consuming and highly problematic. One consequence is that the number of adoptions of an IT innovation -which are essentially commitments that organizations make to implement the new technology -may outstrip successful implementations, resulting in a worrisome "implementation gap"that calls for explanation and can serve to dampen enthusiasm for the innovation. The author also points out that the rate at which value is achieved by an IT innovation is likely to peak long after the community's attention to the original organizing vision has dissipated.<BR> <BR>Thus, managers need to distinguish carefully between the attention an IT innovation receives and actual adoption, implementation and value gained from its use. Understanding these dynamics more clearly can lead executives to make better decisions about which "waves"to catch and which to let roll by.<BR>

This case study on India's wireless giant Bharti Airtel (Airtel) is the second of two cases on the company that show how the firm exemplifies many of the tenets set forth in the book The New Age of Innovation by CK Prahalad and MS Krishnan. Case B presents the students with the varied strategies that Airtel has pursued to become one of the most profitable wireless telecommunications companies in the world, despite the fact that it operates in one of the poorest countries on Earth. Airtel changed the industry by moving away from such standard metrics as Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) and has employed alternative measurements for success. It has also relied heavily on outsourcing non-core functions and designed unique Value-Added Services (VAS) for its varied customer base. The case asks students how Airtel can maintain its culture of innovation while growing quickly. How will it be able to remain agile, entrepreneurial, and flexible in the face of the necessary standardization that accompanies global expansion?

This case concerns a one billion (US) dollar 10-year global outsourcing project signed in 2007 to outsource major parts of the human resource (HR) function of a major multinational company. The client and supplier embarked on a large-scale implementation plan and ran into difficulties on meeting deadlines and delivering the systems required. The case focuses on the step-by-step phased roll-out in the client's Europe, Middle East and Africa region covering 44 countries. The case follows the many attempts to stabilise and deliver the project. In June 2010, the supplier sold its HR line of business to another supplier, which became responsible for the project. The case documents the strategy, governance, project management and escalation issues to March 2011, and asks questions about the practices exhibited so far, and future decisions on strategic sourcing, project management, de-escalating the problems and the retained capabilities needed by the client.

After widely-publicized complaints of destructive guests and unreliable hosts, online apartment rental site Airbnb explores mechanisms to facilitate trust between guests and hosts. Flexible online reputation systems can collect and share information with ease, but Airbnb must decide which information guests and hosts should have to provide and how much flexibility each should have in selecting whom to do business with. A full-featured system could provide all the information users have been requesting, but would it be too complicated for routine use?

Supplements the (A) case.

In the 1990's, 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 is most closely associated with Linux even though their stable of product offerings grew 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 came to be widely accepted as a enterprise software platform, the company transformed its thinking about and delivery of customer support. This case study explores the innovative ways that Red Hat went about this transformartion process.

A midwest hospital purchases new CT Scanners which are much faster than the existing technology. Processes in the radiology department are optimized to the older, existing scanners, and technicians are unable to take full advantage of the new scanner speed. The hospital finds itself working to change the processes to suit the new scanners capabilities and take full advantage of their speed.

Cloud computing is a sea change in the way companies use technology; it's as inevitable and significant as the shift from steam power to electricity on the factory floor. Because criticisms of the cloud have gotten a lot of hype, however, many companies are hesitant to explore it. In this article, McAfee, a principal research scientist at MIT's Center for Digital Business, debunks commonly cited concerns about the cloud. When it comes to cost, reliability, and security, he says, the cloud promises to equal or better on-premise computing. Moreover, as the experiences of companies like 3M, the global contractor Balfour Beatty, and the consulting firm CSC show, cloud computing offers sizable benefits, such as improved productivity, easier collaboration, the ability to mine data for insights, and higher capacity without major capital investment. Here, McAfee walks readers through the three basic categories of cloud computing: "infrastructure-as-a-service" (the leasing of raw computing capacity), "platform-as-a-service" (the leasing of computers ready for software development), and "software-as-a-service" (the hosting of applications for users). Arguing that CEOs and senior managers need to take the lead on the shift to the cloud, he then outlines how companies can get started.

The first across-the-table negotiation between Google and China concluded successfully in 2006, when Google received a license to establish a local domain (google.cn) targeted at Chinese Internet users and not subject to the "Great Firewall". During these negotiations both Google and the Chinese government struggled to reach an outcome that would be acceptable to their constituents. Google was caught between pleasing its shareholders and preserving its reputation for free access to information, while China was balancing the desire for cutting-edge search technology and the concern that liberal access to information would undermine its political-economic model. In the end, the negotiation resulted in Google operating two domains in China: Google.com and Google.cn. In early 2010, Google announced that its corporate infrastructure had been the target of a series of China-based cyber attacks and accused the Chinese government of attempting to further limit free speech on the web. These incidents led to a public conflict and private negotiations between Google and the Chinese government, which culminated in July 2010 when the Chinese government renewed the google.cn license knowing that Google was redirecting all Chinese customers search to its google.hk.com site This case concerns the changes in Google and the Chinese government's environment that led to Google withdrawing services from google.cn and the Chinese government saving face by renewing the google.cn license. The case is based on the publicly reported events surrounding two series of negotiations between the U.S. technology giant Google and the Chinese Government regarding Google's license in China.

Process and information technology changes in organizations are not always voluntary and motivated by strategic goals. Instead, they may be imposed on organizations by regulatory bodies and certifying agencies. This teaching case focuses on one company's multi-year journey of making process and information technology changes so as to comply with a new set of regulations known as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX). Even though SOX compliance work focuses on designing, implementing, and testing internal controls, these controls are nothing but activities designed to ensure that processes implicated in the production of financial information are completed correctly and that the financial representations they generate are reliable. Thus, despite its emphasis on internal controls, accounting and auditing, this teaching case provides students with insights into compliance-related process improvement and system integration in general.

The Telemonitoring at Visiting Nurse Health System case presents one home healthcare organization's efforts to use telemonitoring to improve the quality of care provided to at-risk patients who were discharged from hospitals and needed home care. After two years of using the Health Buddy system for telemonitoring at-risk patients, Mark Oshnock, President of Visiting Nurse Health System (VNHS) must decide whether to invest in buying more Health Buddy units. While Oshnock believed that there were real benefits associated with telemonitoring, he was having difficulty quantifying those benefits and he was concerned about VNHS' ability to continue investing resources in telemonitoring given the realities of the health care reimbursement environment in which they operated. While several studies had demonstrated the benefits of telemonitoring, Oshnock felt that the long-term benefits accruing to the health system as a whole were not immediately quantifiable or visible to the hospitals and insurance companies. Without external support for the telemonitoring initiative from insurance companies, it would be difficult for VNHS to keep up the momentum and ramp up telemonitoring through additional purchases of Health Buddy units. From a purely financial standpoint, such an investment would be very difficult for VNHS to justify. The irony was that with the new regulatory pressures and increased focus on preventative healthcare, telemonitoring pointed to an effective tool in managing and reducing acute care hospitalizations. However, balancing these benefits against limited financial support from other key players in the health care system would be challenging.

New research shows that a surprisingly high number of technology projects go wildly over budget, sinking careers and companies. Managers contemplating technology initiatives need to take steps to avoid IT "black swans."