Publications

August 2005 (Revised August 2006)
Case

Grupo Martica

Grupo Martica commissions a computer security expert to conduct an audit of its systems, network, and processes. This audit reveals that Martica is quite vulnerable, and the company's de facto CIO must decide what steps to take to improve security. He wonders how... View Details

Keywords: Safety; Information Infrastructure; Information Technology; Information Infrastructure; Complexity

01 Sep 2014
News

Ask the Expert: Byte-Testing Bitcoin

that will make anonymity an afterthought. I think the Bitcoin public ledger will eventually hold so much valuable information that some very interesting analytics companies are going to emerge to make sense of the data. Has there ever... View Details

Keywords: alumni; Information; Information

11 Feb 2010
Working Paper Summaries

The Architecture of Complex Systems: Do Core-periphery Structures Dominate?

Keywords: by Alan MacCormack, Carliss Y. Baldwin & John Rusnak; Video Game; Web Services

19 Mar 2019
News

A Quick Study

medical students retain information through the use of online study tools and with the help of a vast library of Khan Academy video content. The company has more than 440,000 registered users and 930,000 YouTube subscribers. The tech... View Details

April 2001 (Revised November 2001)
Case

AvantGo

By: Alan D. MacCormack and Kerry Herman

Richard Owen, CEO of AvantGo, is preparing for a meeting in which he will set the human resource policy for the firm going forward. It has been three months since the company's IPO, and given the tremendous cramp in hiring over the six months prior to the IPO, he knows... View Details

Keywords: Initial Public Offering; Management Teams; Selection and Staffing; Retention; Growth and Development Strategy; Performance Evaluation; Information Technology; Decisions; Information Technology Industry; Information Technology Industry; United States

Find at Harvard

January 2000 (Revised June 2000)
Case

Alloy.com: Marketing to Generation Y

By: John A. Deighton and Gil McWilliams

A profitable dot com company? Alloy.com retails clothing to teens by catalog. Alloy uses a Web site to convert prospects and build community. The result is a business with the economics of a direct marketer and the market capitalization of an Internet start-up. The... View Details

Keywords: Marketing Strategy; Internet and the Web; Business and Community Relations; Partners and Partnerships; Customer Relationship Management; Decision Choices and Conditions; Business Startups; Information Technology Industry; Information Technology Industry

01 Oct 1997
News

Shaping the Way Business Does Business: HBR at 75

professor of social sciences, now emeritus, wrote "Communications Technology - For Better or for Worse," in which he laid out concepts that paved the way for the Information Superhighway. The year was 1979.... View Details

01 Oct 1998
News

A Message from Dean Clark

is a particular need for managers to be entrepreneurial in spirit, to view business from a global perspective, and to know how to use information technology to their companies' best advantage. To meet this... View Details

01 Mar 2006
News

Using IT to Heal U.S. Health Care

2004. Brailer’s mission is to give every American an electronic health-care record by 2014 and to link those records to a national medical data network. “It’s time to put health information technology center... View Details

Keywords: Colleges, Universities, and Professional Schools; Educational Services; Health, Social Assistance

01 Sep 2012
News

Anti-Social Media

Li Photo courtesy Altimeter Group A former executive at Forrester Research and consultant at Monitor, in 2008 Charlene Li (MBA 1993) founded the Altimeter Group, which designs pragmatic strategies to help companies leverage disruptive trends. She is also the author and... View Details

Keywords: Information; Information

13 Nov 2020
News

Faculty Focus Their Research on COVID-19 Issues

make the next crisis easier to manage but also to ensure that the ongoing operation of our health care system is improved in a fundamental manner.” Leveraging Technology to Gain an Edge In a Working Knowledge article, five faculty members... View Details

January 1996 (Revised September 2001)
Teaching Note

General Dynamics and Computer Sciences Corporation: Outsourcing the IS Function Series TN

By: F. Warren McFarlan

Teaching Note for (9-193-144), (9-193-145), and (9-193-178). View Details

Keywords: Job Cuts and Outsourcing; Information Technology; Technology Industry

03 Aug 2015
Research & Ideas

Why Fierce Competitors Apple and Amazon Became ’Frenemies’ Over eReaders

Technology and Operations Management unit at Harvard Business School. And why would Apple ever allow a Kindle app in its App Store in the first place? "We all know historically Apple often says no to apps that directly compete with... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding; Information; Information; Information

28 May 2019
News

From Das’s Desk

a source of support. Alumni list leadership development, high-level industry insights, and the impact of technology as the top subjects for additional learning or information. So what will we do with this information? As we dig deeper... View Details

01 Apr 2000
News

At Cyberposium, Amazon's Bezos Debunks Internet Myths

movie theaters did with the advent of television. Myth #2: There are no barriers to entry on the Internet. What about the huge sums, asked Bezos, that Amazon and other e-commerce companies invest in their businesses? Barriers to entry are actually getting higher in the... View Details

August 2013
Technical Note

Raising the Level of Abstraction

By: Willy Shih

This technical note discusses abstraction as a way of generalizing a process or component for wider application. By hiding complexity inside a module, abstraction enables system designers to think at a higher level. This lowers entry barriers to using (and reusing) a... View Details

Keywords: Abstraction; Modularity; Commercialization; Information Technology; Information Infrastructure; Information Technology; Applications and Software; Digital Platforms; United States; Asia; Europe

01 Jun 2005
News

New Magazine Makes Its Mark

didn’t set out to be magazine publishers or, for that matter, to even work together. Each married a classmate and went their separate ways upon graduation. By 2001, they both were technology executives in the San Francisco Bay Area. Each... View Details

Keywords: Roger Thompson; Bookmarks; Information; Information; Information; Information

January 2004
Case

Nokia and MIT's Project Oxygen (Abridged)

By: David B. Yoffie and Rebecca Henderson

Looks at how Nokia should respond to a future vision of computing and communications that was developed at MIT's Project Oxygen. View Details

Keywords: Mobile and Wireless Technology; Adaptation; Strategic Planning; Technology Industry; Technology Industry