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The new system in a day-care center is producing biased results--setting off an alarm when some dark-skinned parents enter the lobby. The director of the center must decide whether improving security is worth the possible legal ramifications. This fictional case study by Mary C. Gentile, David Danks, and Maralee Harrell features expert commentary by Joseph Steinberg, Cedric L. Alexander.

The shift away from a sole focus on financial returns to multistakeholder capitalism has involved a welcome rediscovery of the idea that businesses are social entities. Embracing this strategy requires a combinatorial accounting, taking into consideration the health of five types of stakeholders: employees, partners, and communities, along with investors and customers. This is not easy to achieve, even for companies that say they want to move in this direction.

It's disingenuous for companies to pretend they are passive observers of regulations, laws, or the political climate. Corporate political responsibility is a new variation of corporate social responsibility, describing the ideal ways in which businesses should engage with the key systems of society. It requires companies to manage conflicting views about when and how to use their voices and their political influence.

Supplements the (A) case, describing actions taken by SolarWinds as well as by regulatory agencies in the aftermath of the immediate crisis. The case also includes reflections by SolarWinds managers on the choices they made with respect to disclosure, media relations, cybersecurity preparedness, and the sometimes-contending agendas of companies and government agencies SolarWinds interacted with.

On December 12, 2020, SolarWinds learned that malware had been inserted in its software, potentially granting hackers access to thousands and thousands of its 300,000 customers. General Counsel Jason Bliss needed to orchestrate the company response without knowing how many of its customers had been affected, or how severely. The SolarWinds CEO was already scheduled to step down within three weeks, and the incoming CEO was as yet unaware of the incident. Bliss needed to address three immediate issues. First, did the incident qualify as a material event, and if so, what information did SolarWinds need to report to whom, and when? Second, what posture should SolarWinds take with respect to its customers and to the media, where the news was expected to break within a day? Third, how should SolarWinds balance helping its customers understand and recover from the breach with protecting itself from a negative stock price impact and potential legal implications?

Supplements "SolarWinds Confronts Sunburst" (723-357, -368) to provide context on types of cyberattacks and their costs, as well as-at the time of the Sunburst cyberattack in December 2020-the fragmentary regulatory regimes through which U.S. states and regulatory agencies attempted to encourage disclosure of cyberattacks and pursue enforcement action against negligence in failing to adequately safeguard personally identifiable information (PII), payment card information (PCI), and protected health information (PHI).

There is no impending threat of large-scale automation and displacement of human labor on the horizon. That's the conclusion reached by the authors after reviewing the research around smart machines in workplaces, and speaking with leaders in hundreds of organizations. In an adaption of their book Working With AI: Real Stories of Human-Machine Collaboration, they lay out where they see limitations of AI in the workplace and where practitioners can expect job continuity for the immediate future.

The OneMotoring portal is a one-stop gateway to vehicle-related services and an integral resource for the motoring community in Singapore. From real-time traffic updates to renewing road tax, paying transport-related fees, and supporting the entire lifecycle of vehicle ownership, the portal offers more than a hundred digital services delivered by the Land Transport Authority (LTA), the government agency overseeing land transport in the country. In the early 2000s, LTA was among the forerunners in the digitalisation of public services and had battled its fair share of challenges commonly encountered by agencies embarking on a digital transformation journey. Users' lack of computer literacy, the loss of human touch in service delivery, the difficulty in authenticating user digital identity, and workforce transition were among the common pertinent issues. Through stakeholder engagement, work redesign, employee retraining, leveraging government-wide shared services, and active partnership with multiple entities, LTA had succeeded in surmounting those obstacles. While the portal continued to serve and meet most of the motorists' needs, LTA did not rest on its laurels. Moving forward to 2022, LTA saw the opportunity to push the envelope further to serve motorists better. In the pipeline was a new round of system upgrades, which included the evaluation of newer technologies to speed up the delivery of services and policy changes. With so many digital possibilities presented by technological advancements, how best could LTA reimagine the delivery of vehicle services from the future of mobility perspective?

In September 2019, Mircom Technologies Limited faced a serious crisis after sustaining a ransomware attack. The medium-sized manufacturer based in Toronto, Canada had been offering smart building solutions for almost two decades. The attackers encrypted all of the company's data, halting all business systems and processes that relied on information technology, including email, voice-over-Internet phones, manufacturing, billing, shipping, and receiving. The company was suddenly unable to conduct basic business operations. The attackers demanded a large payment in bitcoin in exchange for a decryption key that would allow the company to access its data. Over the next several weeks, Mircom Technologies Limited faced unforeseen challenges in its attempt to recover its data, negotiate with the attackers, and eventually find a way to successfully restore normal operations.

Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are a highly nascent and emerging phenomenon revolutionizing how digital assets are traded. NFTs embody immutable rights to unique digital assets such as digital art and collectibles and are represented as digital tokens that can be traded across marketplaces utilizing blockchain technologies. NFTs engender new ways to organize, consume, move, program, and store digital information and have experienced a rapid rise in various adaptations across art, sports, broadcasting, content creation, and tech-crypto businesses. In this article, we define NFTs and look at how they fit with blockchain and cryptocurrencies, how they are used by various industries, and the opportunities and risks they present. Our key contribution is a conceptual map of an initial NFT ecosystem. In doing so, we provide relational mapping between and among key stakeholders: content creators, core and related technical and business intermediaries, consumers, investors, and speculators. We also highlight implications for managers and tie them to conceptual exploration and exploitation frameworks.

When regulators suspended the high profile initial public offering (IPO) of the Chinese fintech company Ant Group, investors and businesspeople were surprised and unsettled. The offering was halted just two days before the planned listing, after Ant had received routine regulatory approvals. Ant Group leadership needed to understand what the government's expectations were and how to reposition the company to move forward and build on its powerful brand and business model, to maintain success in the absence of an immediate IPO.

The case is set in 2021, amid accelerating digitalisation in Singapore, as Marriott International is facing pressure to innovate and review the AI strategy for its hotel brands. Marriott is the second largest hospitality player in terms of market share in Singapore, with AccorHotels Group holding market leadership. In 2016, Marriott merged with Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide, valued at US$12.2 billion, making it the largest hotel chain in the world. Before the merger, Starwood had established itself as a technical innovation leader in the hospitality industry, which aligns with Marriott's goals to improve the guest experience and build loyalty using technology. For example, Starwood invested in an array of services such as a mobile app which guests can bypass check-ins and use their mobile devices for keyless entry. Marriott has also channelled efforts toward digitalisation and innovation, and is one of the pioneers in deploying guest-facing technologies such as keyless entries and smart rooms. The company had partnered with Alibaba Group in a joint venture to pilot test a facial recognition check-in system with Fliggy, Alibaba's travel service platform. This seamless and convenient alternative sought to meet the needs of tech-savvy Chinese travellers, who are receptive to technology powered by facial recognition.

The case presents the real-life situation of XRM Vision, an SME IT consulting firm specializing in the design and implementation of CRM solutions. Like most SMEs, XRM Vision faces major, sometimes conflicting, management challenges such as which growth strategies to pursue while simultaneously increasing process efficiency and urging employees to identify business opportunities while fostering operational excellence. This case focuses on the challenges and difficulties SME managers face in their struggle to strike a balance between exploiting and exploring. The case describes the exploitation-exploration tensions faced by XRM Vision's management since the company's founding and outlines the strategies and actions/practices it has deployed to navigate the choppy waters between exploitation and exploration.

ShotSpotter, Inc. is a company that leverages Internet of Things (IoT) technology and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to provide services to police departments. In 2022, ShotSpotter had over 20,000 sensors deployed in over 125 cities to alert customers when gunshots were detected. In addition, a tool known as Connect uses AI to analyze data and predict where crimes might occur during each patrol shift. The case presents the different products that ShotSpotter offers and describes the roles of data, AI, and IoT in developing the capabilities within the products. The case also presents the ethical dilemma in the use of AI and data-driven policing. The case asks students to assess ShotSpotter's capabilities in 2022 and determine what steps senior management should take to enable the continued growth of the company.

The use of big data to help explain fluctuations in the broader economy and key business performance indicators is now so commonplace that in some instances it has even begun to rival more traditional measures. Big data sources can very often provide advantages when compared with these more traditional data sources, but with these advantages also come potential pitfalls. We lay out a checklist called SMALL that we have developed in order to help interested parties as they navigate the big data minefield. Based on a set of five questions, the SMALL checklist should help users of big data draw justifiable conclusions and avoid making mistakes in matters of interpretation. To demonstrate, we provide several case studies that demonstrate the subtle nuances of several of these new big data sets and show how the problems they face often closely relate to age-old concerns that more traditional data sources are also forced to tackle.

Infosys, an India-based global IT consulting and software services provider, had more than 200,000 employees, mainly software specialists and technical consultants, who were assigned to projects by a talent allocation team that made staffing recommendations based on detailed manual assessments of employees' skill sets and experience. However, Infosys delivery managers, responsible for managing the talent assigned to projects, often rejected the matches proposed by the talent team and hoarded human resources for their own projects. In fall 2017, Infosys leaders assembled a cross-functional team and tasked it with developing a new AI-based talent management system to replace the old manual process. The new system was to provide a 360-degree view of open positions and available employees and use an algorithm to make hiring recommendations for projects. The AI team members had to make various data, design, and deployment decisions before they could begin building the new solution. First, they had to select data variables to define "supply" (i.e., employees available for assignments) and "demand" (i.e., staffing needs for client engagements). They also had to establish a system for ensuring this data was kept accurate and up to date after launch. Last--but perhaps most critical--the team had to develop a plan for maintenance and continuous improvement of the model, even at this early stage.

Most companies struggle to capture the enormous potential of their data. Typically, they launch massive programs that try to meet the needs of every data end user or have individual application--development teams set up customized data pipelines that can't easily be repurposed. Firms instead need to figure out how to craft data strategies that deliver value in the near term and at the same time lay the foundations for future data use. Successful companies do this by treating data like a commercial product. When a business develops a product, it tries to maximize sales by addressing the needs of as many kinds of customers as possible with it--often by creating a standard offering that can be tailored for different users. A data product works similarly. It delivers a high-quality, easy-to-use set of data that people across an organization can apply to various business challenges. It might, say, provide 360-degree views of customers, of employees, or of a channel. Because they have many applications, data products can generate impressive returns. The customer data product at one large bank, for instance, has nearly 60 use cases, and those applications generate $60 million in incremental revenue and eliminate $40 million in losses annually.

Artificial intelligence poses a lot of ethical risks to businesses: It may promote bias, lead to invasions of privacy, and in the case of self-driving cars, even cause deadly accidents. Because AI is built to operate at scale, when a problem occurs, the impact is huge. Consider the AI that many health systems were using to spot high-risk patients in need of follow-up care. Researchers found that only 18% of the patients identified by the AI were Black--even though Black people accounted for 46% of the sickest patients. And the discriminatory AI was applied to at least 100 million patients. The sources of problems in AI are many. For starters, the data used to train it may reflect historical bias. The health systems' AI was trained with data showing that Black people received fewer health care resources, leading the algorithm to infer that they needed less help. The data may undersample certain subpopulations. Or the wrong goal may be set for the AI. Such issues aren't easy to address, and they can't be remedied with a technical fix. You need a committee--comprising ethicists, lawyers, technologists, business strategists, and bias scouts--to review any AI your firm develops or buys to identify the ethical risks it presents and address how to mitigate them. This article describes how to set up such a committee effectively.

Most companies have digital platforms that support specific functions, such as supply chain management, product design, or operations, and they tightly regulate who may join the platform. The Chinese appliance manufacturer Haier has extended its supply chain management platform to facilitate a broader range of collaborations from innovation and design to supplying materials and components to solving technical problems and providing new services. The platform allows Haier to capitalize on the expertise and resources of its ecosystem, rapidly exploit new business opportunities, respond quickly to disruptions, and achieve efficiencies in a wide range of activities.