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Mustang Music (A) and (B) cases introduces students to data modeling, database implementation and database querying.

This supplement to Mustang Music (A), product #910E09, introduces students to data modeling, database implementation and database querying.

The president of Unimicron must evaluate the degree to which the company's information systems support its business strategy. The case provides an extensive review of the company's history, its strategy and its key competitive and organizational moves. The case reviews the way in which information systems are used in the company, and challenges students to assess the degree of fit between strategy, organization and technology.

The chief executive officer (CEO) of Taiwan Taxi must assess the adoption of iCall by the firm's taxi drivers. When originally conceived, iCall was supposed to be the basis for substantial growth in the number of taxi drivers signing up with Taiwan Taxi. But even after many years, adoption still lags behind the plan. The CEO must assess the reasons for the slower adoption of iCall and make recommendations on whether to revise the goal or improve adoption in order to meet it. The case demonstrates the many complexities involved in realizing business value from the adoption of information technology.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Google. Wikipedia. Threadless. All are platinum exemplars of collective intelligence in action. Two of them are famous. The third is getting there. Each of the three helps demonstrate how large, loosely organized groups of people can work together electronically in surprisingly effective ways -- sometimes even without knowing that they are working together, as in the case of Google. In the authors' work at MIT's Center for Collective Intelligence, they have gathered nearly 250 examples of web-enabled collective intelligence. After examining these examples in depth, they identified a relatively small set of building blocks that are combined and recombined in various ways in different collective intelligence systems. This article offers a new framework for understanding those systems -- and more important, for understanding how to build them. It identifies the underlying building blocks -- the "genes" -- that are at the heart of collective intelligence systems. It explores the conditions under which each gene is useful. And it begins to suggest the possibilities for combining and recombining these genes to not only harness crowds in general, but to harness them in just the way that your organization needs.

A senior manager at IBM Canada Ltd. is trying to determine how best to implement strategy developed at the global level. The Business Transformation Executive, Sales & Distribution, IBM Canada Ltd., is responsible for introducing, maintaining and retiring software programs to support IBM Canada's business needs. In October 2009, the senior manager is trying to assess if the customer relationship management (CRM) developed locally should continue to be supported or if the planned switchover to a global standard CRM should continue as scheduled. The case is intended for students to discuss the challenges of implementing global IT strategy at the local or country unit level.

Praxis Language is a small company in China started by three non-Chinese entrepreneurs. Originally focused on teaching Chinese to native English speakers using podcasting and other online tools, Praxis has also developed content to teach English to native Chinese speakers, which the company perceives as a much bigger market. The case describes the challenges facing the co-founder of Praxis as he navigates emerging mobile technology (hardware and software), the complexities of doing business in China, and the consequences of explosive growth.

A superior new technology emerges on the horizon, threatening your existing business. Do you strive to make a seamless transition to it or, perhaps, try to fight and defeat it? Both of those responses can be losing strategies. A third, frequently superior, option is one of "bold retreat," whereby your company cedes most of the established market to the new, dominant technology and instead pursues less vulnerable positions - not as a "turn tail and run" reaction but as a proactive, strategic alternative to head-on competition. There are two types of bold retreats: (1) retrenchment to a niche of the traditional market, where the old technology has an advantage over the new one in addressing customer needs; and (2) relocation to a new market, where the old technology is the inherently superior offering. You can even incorporate both moves into an effective strategy. Like a transition to a new technology, a bold retreat requires significant organizational change. That includes revamping your cost structure and talent base, not to mention selling the very idea of "retreat" to your internal stakeholders. Despite such challenges, a bold retreat that is carried out with foresight can be both a survival strategy and a success story.

This case considers the process of organizational transformation undertaken by Partners Healthcare System (PHS) since the 1990s as their hospital and affiliated ambulatory medical practices have adopted both EMR and CPOE systems. Encompassing a strategic investment in information technologies, wide-spread process change, and the pervasive use of institutional clinical decision support and knowledge management systems, this story has been 15 years in the making, culminating in 2009 with the network-wide use of EMR and CPOE by all PHS doctors. These developments in turn opened the door to the redefinition of services delivery and to the replacement of established therapies through the leveraging of the knowledge residing in 4.6 million now-digitized PHS patient records. As such, the PHS experience serves as a window into how one organization strove to address the daunting challenges of 21st century health care services information management, as a template for success in the implementation of large-scale information systems among research-based hospitals across the United States, and more broadly as a learning platform for industry executives in their efforts to transform health care delivery through data and knowledge management.

In 2001 Accenture took the bold step of separating from its parent, Arthur Andersen. The new firm that emerged had a bright future ahead, but it also faced the challenge of building a new IT infrastructure that could support a global organization that consults on leading-edge technology. Accenture's CIO at the time, Ed Schreck, knew that becoming a master of your own trade was not an easy task. Frank Modruson, Schreck's successor and the person responsible for carrying forward the IT transformation challenge from 2002 on, had ambitious plans for the new technology infrastructure that was to replace Arthur Andersen's legacy systems. Difficult decisions had to be made. Should the firm continue with a decentralized approach to managing technology platforms, in which each country chooses its own IT platforms and has autonomy to run them? Or should the firm take a mixed approach, in which the same standard applications would run throughout the enterprise but would be managed independently by individual offices? Or should Accenture espouse a "one-firm" approach and boldly shoot for a centralized implementation of its most critical systems, with all its offices interconnected on the same "instance" of a software platform? Furthermore, should the firm retain its traditional conception of IT as cost center, or should it migrate to a scheme that recognizes IT as a service provision center that generates measurable value for the organization? These questions and many others drove Accenture's CIO team to undertake one of the most remarkable IT transformations in a global organization in recent years.

In June 2008, the Kimpton Hotels' area director of revenue management (director) for Washington, D.C. was trying to process the most recent customer information report from Priceline.com (Priceline). In an attempt to improve revenues during periods of low occupancy at the hotel, the director had recently been using Priceline's "name your own price" bidding format. While using this sales channel had limited success, the director was wondering the best way to maximize the revenue coming from Priceline without cannibalizing existing sales or tarnishing the Kimpton brand. His challenge was to create a pricing strategy that would determine the optimal posted price for rooms in the Washington, D. C. hotel as well as the number of rooms that should be provided to Priceline.

In June 2008, the Kimpton Hotels' area director of revenue management (director) for Washington, D.C. finished creating a pricing strategy that would determine the optimal posted price for rooms in the Washington, D. C. hotel as well as the number of rooms that should be provided to Priceline.com. He realized there was even more potential to gain revenue by posting more than one price; however, this would add further complexity into the strategy and he was unsure of the potential impact of having multiple posted prices.

The Kimpton Hotels' area director of revenue management (director) for Washington, D.C. was excited about using Priceline.com to help fill rooms on some of Kimpton's low-demand weekends. He estimated the coming weeks' demand across three rate classes and across three lengths of stay (LOS), and he wanted to make sure he did not use Priceline.com too aggressively by releasing too many rooms onto the site.

The director of Acute Care Information Management at University Health Network is thinking about how to form a steering committee and several working groups to manage the implementation and ongoing operation of the Medication Order Entry and Medication Administration Record module. This initiative would be the most challenging and complex the IT department had ever undertaken. She would need to address the concerns of administration, physicians and nurses.

One of the most basic revenue management problems is how to allocate a fixed capacity to various types of classes of customers so that the total profit is maximized. Using the example of a flight traveling from Toronto to Vancouver, the revenue management problem is to decide, in each period, how much of the realized demand to accept and how much to reserve for the latter classes in order maximize the revenue. The crux of the problem revolves around the trade-off between spoilage and dilution. The author uses various mathematical formulae (including the static model, Littlewood's Two-Class model and n-Class model of expected marginal seat revenue) to model optimal seat-allocation outcomes.

In recent years, many countries with publicly funded healthcare have started using cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA) along with review of clinical data as a tool to assess the overall benefit of a new drug to the society and set priorities with regards to health care budget. Cost effectiveness was formally incorporated into the Ontario drug review system in 1993 and the Canadian drug-review system in 2003. The issue of using cost effectiveness has become increasingly contentious in recent years: some newly approved cancer drugs cost $3,000 to $6,000 or more for one treatment cycle, but their high prices means that they were often classified as being not cost effective. This note reviews many of the competing interests in debates over drug funding and dilemmas about healthcare financing decisions in the presence of limited budgets.

A freelance geologist was asked for advice regarding two mining claims to property on Sturgeon Lake, near Thunder Bay, Ontario. Specifically, he was asked if there was enough gold on the property to pursue an economically feasible mining opportunity. The geologist determined that an analytical approach would best aid the analysis of the multiple factors he would need to consider in arriving at a decision about whether or not to proceed with the mining operation. The first stage in ore extraction involved building an access road, and the second stage was to implement a drilling program. There was considerable uncertainty surrounding the costs and actual feasibility of completion of these stages; yet only when these stages were completed could actual mining of the property begin. If mining proceeded, it was assumed it would take 10 years to extract all the gold from the site, and the total amount of gold in the mine would be extracted at an even rate over the 10-year period. Mining costs were assumed to be $30 an ounce, and the geologist used a discount rate of 20 per cent before taxes when evaluating projects.

The head of the Green IT team at Wipro Ltd, a leading IT services company headquartered in Bangalore, India, is facing dilemmas with regard to the company's goal of becoming carbon neutral by 2014. The green computing program has been in operation for over a year at Wipro, but the strategy remains inadequate. On the positive side, a strategy is in place, an organizational structure has been put together and virtual staff members have been enlisted. However, the company has not yet developed a core set of skills in green computing. A shared belief is not resonating across the organization, there are no systems with which to measure and monitor the progress of green computing, and execution is falling short. This case provides background for understanding the inception and implementation of Wipro's green strategy and enables students to analyze the situation from the perspective of a team leader who is expected to deliver results.

The head of Patient Escort Services for Vancouver General Hospital (VGH) had to determine the best approach to improve efficiency of the hospital's porter system. Porters represented a vital part of various hospital processes, facilitating timely flow of patients, equipment and materials throughout the hospital. Recently, VGH had experienced incidents in which the capacity of the porters was insufficient to meet the demands of the hospital and, despite best-efforts at scheduling, these problems remained. The head of Patient Escort Services spent several weeks collecting data to determine where the problems existed, and wondered if his data could provide answers to some critical questions: How well did the current porter schedule meet daily demand? What is the optimum number of porters? The head of Patient Escort Services had one week to submit his report to VGH's board of directors.

The Laws of Disruption, written by Larry Downes, a partner with the Bell-Mason Group, is a 12-chapter book published by Basic Books/Perseus Books Group. Compossed of four sections, the book explores a simple but unavoidable principle of modern life: though technology changes exponentially, social, economic, and legal systems change incrementally. This disparity in change, Downes argues, will inevitably instigate conflicts between social, economic, political, and legal systems rooted in the past and the current and future generations who are dramatically rewriting the rules of both business and social interaction. Downes suggests nine emerging principles that are shaping a new legal code - the laws of disruption - that will close the gap between institutions of the past and those of the future. Chapter 1 introduces the Law of Disruption and its key drivers, Moore's Law and Metcalfe's Law. Downes argues that these laws help to reveal the foundation for a new human existence - the digital life. The escalating conflict between business leaders, governments, and consumers over intellectual property and information is also discussed.