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Provides a longitudinal view of business reengineering at CIGNA Corp., a leading provider of insurance and related financial services throughout the United States and the world. CIGNA has been practicing business reengineering since 1989, completing over 20 projects. The case illustrates a number of reengineering projects. Also highlights the different forms and waves of business reengineering that the company has experienced.

A compilation of press remarks that detail the changes in control and management initiated by the company.

Continues the story of Mrs. Fields Cookies. Explores the new challenges the company faced managing its geographic growth and its expansion of products and markets through combination stores. Details the decision of Debbi and Randy Fields to delegate management responsibility.

Describes the resignation of the CEO hired three years earlier to transform the company.

Over the course of two years a CEO executes a business transformation strategy and key decisions.

A turnaround CEO engineers a business transformation and formulates short-term and long-term strategy after assessing the business situation.

In a turnaround situation, a new CEO must take actions in the short term to gain control and exercise executive leadership and lay groundwork to formulate a long-term strategy to rebuild a viable business.

Describes the changes in structure, management systems, people, and processes instituted by the company. Provides students with an opportunity to explore the nature of "IT-enabled" organizational change and the process through which it is implemented. Also enables a more general discussion of the challenges that companies face in organizing and managing in the 1990s and the actions that they are taking to meet those challenges. Affords an opportunity to confront the rhetoric of the emergence of a "new organization paradigm" with the reality.

Describes the environmental, organizational, and information technology context in the late 1970s that led to the development of the initial vision for change and the actions taken to implement that vision. The case ends with the abrupt departure of the CEO as profits plunge. Students have an opportunity to explore what went wrong and to define an action plan that addresses both the short-term and long-term challenges faced by the incoming CEO.

Describes the actions taken by the new CEO to return the company to profitability, to clarify the vision, and then to build the infrastructure (human, capital, and information) needed to support the long-term change in strategy and organization. Ends with senior management poised to institute a second round of organizational change initiatives--this time more radical in nature. Provides a rich description of the evolutionary nature of the vision for change and the development of the organizational and information infrastructure needed to support it. Students have an opportunity to define a detailed change agenda (e.g., specific changes in organization structure, management systems, people, processes, and information) and the actions needed to implement it.

Describes a small company selling freshly baked goods through privately owned specialty stores (each store sells only Mrs. Fields products). The company has about 8,000 employees worldwide and less than 150 information systems people for a unique leverage of MIS resources. The company uses information systems extensively in its processing, communications, and other management functions, including operations of the stores and hiring sales employees. Teaching objectives include discussion of information technology architecture, organizations, management control, and strategy. A condensed version of Mrs. Fields Cookies.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Chief information officers have the difficult job of running a function that uses a lot of resources but offers little measurable evidence of its value. To make the information systems department an asset to their companies--and to keep their jobs--CIOs should think of their work as adding value in certain key areas. Accordingly, CEOs can take a number of steps to aid a CIO's efforts. Based on studies of information systems leaders in 60 organizations, this article presents a portrait of successful CIOs and the CEOs who support them.

IT specialists often promise that technology will serve as a catalyst for change. But, as the author points out, it is a promise that usually goes unfulfilled. IT managers put too much emphasis on hardware and not enough emphasis on the soft science of how people actually share information. Too many managers still believe that, once the right technology is in place, appropriate information sharing will follow. To achieve its promise IT needs to take a human-centered approach. Looking at companies that have successfully addressed this problem--like Symantec Corp., Chemical Bank, Hallmark Cards, and Rank Xerox, U.K.--the author directly addresses how to rebuild an organization's information culture and how to get beyond the technologies to changing people's behaviors.

Rather than follow the make-and-sell strategies of industrial-age giants, today's successful companies focus on sensing and responding to rapidly changing customer needs. In order to survive in this sense-and-respond world, big companies need to consider a strategy called "managing by wire." In aviation, flying by wire means using computer systems to augment a pilot's ability to assimilate and react to rapidly changing environmental information. In a similar way, managing by wire is the capacity to run a business by managing its informational representation. Coherent corporate behavior needs more than blockbuster applications and network connections; it must be governed by a coherent information model that codifies "how we do things around here," and "how we change how we do things around here." This article describes managing by wire at Mrs. Fields Cookies, Brooklyn Union Gas, and a financial services organization that the authors call Globe Insurance.

Updates the (A) case.

When BellSouth Enterprises decided to aggressively pursue the international cellular market, it needed new software in order to cope with the complexities of cellular billing and the country-specific variations in the international cellular market. BellSouth made the decision to enter into a strategic alliance with TeleSciences. This case explores why it made this decision and what the ramifications of this decision were for BellSouth and TeleSciences.

Connor Formed Metal Products was a small, privately owned manufacturer of custom metal springs and stampings. Since becoming president in 1984, Bob Sloss had implemented many changes to the company's organizational structure, management control systems, and information systems. In particular, he introduced a computer system in one plant to track product jobs through the manufacturing process. Employees at every function and level of the company could access information about a particular customer or job. In 1990, Sloss wondered whether to roll out this system in the company's four other plants.

Designed to generate discussion on the issues of outsourcing from the perspective of a firm thinking about turning over its IS activities to a third-party vendor.

Designed to look at outsourcing from the perspective of a major computer services company trying to get into the business.

Outlines the full architecture of an outsourcing agreement and allows the class to discuss what should and should not be in such agreements.