Information Systems: A Manager’s Guide To Harnessing Technology

Information Systems: A Manager's Guide to Harnessing Technology Information Systems: A Manager's Guide to Harnessing Technology [Author removed at request of original publisher] UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA LIBRARIES PUBLISHING EDITION, 2015. THIS EDITION ADAPTED FROM A WORK ORIGINALLY PRODUCED IN 2011 BY A PUBLISHER WHO HAS REQUESTED THAT IT NOT RECEIVE ATTRIBUTION. MINNEAPOLIS, MN Information Systems: A Manager's Guide to Harnessing Technology by University of Minnesota is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted. This book was produced using Pressbooks.com, and PDF rendering was done by PrinceXML. Contents Publisher Information ix About the Author x Acknowledgments xi Dedication xiv Preface xv Chapter 1: Setting the Stage: Technology and the Modern Enterprise 1.1 Tech’s Tectonic Shift: Radically Changing Business Landscapes 1.2 It’s Your Revolution 1.3 Geek Up—Tech Is Everywhere and You’ll Need It to Thrive 1.4 The Pages Ahead 2 4 7 14 Chapter 2: Strategy and Technology: Concepts and Frameworks for Understanding What Separates Winners from Losers 2.1 Introduction 2.2 Powerful Resources 2.3 Barriers to Entry, Technology, and Timing 2.4 Key Framework: The Five Forces of Industry Competitive Advantage 20 28 40 43 Chapter 3: Zara: Fast Fashion from Savvy Systems 3.2 Don’t Guess, Gather Data 3.3 Moving Forward 3.1 Introduction 48 54 57 Chapter 4: Netflix: The Making of an E-commerce Giant and the Uncertain Future of Atoms to Bits 4.1 Introduction 4.2 Tech and Timing: Creating Killer Assets 4.3 From Atoms to Bits: Opportunity or Threat? 63 66 77 Chapter 5: Moore’s Law: Fast, Cheap Computing and What It Means for the Manager 5.1 Introduction 5.2 The Death of Moore’s Law? 85 98 5.3 Bringing Brains Together: Supercomputing and Grid Computing 5.4 E-waste: The Dark Side of Moore’s Law 103 107 Chapter 6: Understanding Network Effects 6.1 Introduction 6.2 Where’s All That Value Come From? 6.3 One-Sided or Two-Sided Markets? 6.4 How Are These Markets Different? 6.5 Competing When Network Effects Matter 113 115 119 121 125 Chapter 7: Peer Production, Social Media, and Web 2.0 7.4 Electronic Social Networks 137 7.5 Twitter and the Rise of Microblogging 7.6 Other Key Web 2.0 Terms and Concepts 7.7 Prediction Markets and the Wisdom of Crowds 7.8 Crowdsourcing 7.9 Get SMART: The Social Media Awareness and Response Team 7.1 Introduction 7.2 Blogs 7.3 Wikis 144 150 157 160 163 176 183 187 Chapter 8: Facebook: Building a Business from the Social Graph 8.1 Introduction 8.2 What’s the Big Deal? 8.3 The Social Graph 8.4 Facebook Feeds—Ebola for Data Flows 8.5 Facebook as a Platform 8.6 Advertising and Social Networks: A Work in Progress 8.7 Privacy Peril: Beacon and the TOS Debacle 8.8 Predators and Privacy 8.9 One Graph to Rule Them All: Facebook Takes Over the Web 8.10 Is Facebook Worth It? 193 197 201 204 206 210 217 221 223 229 Chapter 9: Understanding Software: A Primer for Managers 9.1 Introduction 9.2 Operating Systems 9.3 Application Software 9.4 Distributed Computing 234 237 242 247 9.5 Writing Software 9.6 Total Cost of Ownership (TCO): Tech Costs Go Way beyond the Price Tag 253 257 Chapter 10: Software in Flux: Partly Cloudy and Sometimes Free 10.2 Open Source 10.3 Why Open Source? 10.4 Examples of Open Source Software 10.5 Why Give It Away? The Business of Open Source 10.6 Cloud Computing: Hype or Hope? 10.7 The Software Cloud: Why Buy When You Can Rent? 10.8 SaaS: Not without Risks 10.9 The Hardware Cloud: Utility Computing and It