Information system U2

Q2-3 How Does Analysis of Industry Structure Determine Competitive Strategy?

An organization responds to the structure of its industry by choosing a competitive strategy. Porter followed his five forces model with the model of four competitive strategies, shown in Figure 2-5.2 According to Porter, firms engage in one of these four strategies. An organization can focus on being the cost leader, or it can focus on differentiating its products or services from those of the competition. Further, the organization can employ the cost or differentiation strategy across an industry, or it can focus its strategy on a particular industry segment.

See the Ethics Guide to learn how new technologies may be used in questionable ways to achieve strategic goals.

Consider the car rental industry. According to the first column of Figure 2-5, a car rental company can strive to provide the lowest-cost car rentals across the industry, or it can seek to provide the lowest-cost car rentals to an industry segment—say, U.S. domestic business travelers.

 Figure 2-5: Porter’s Four Competitive Strategies

As shown in the second column, a car rental company can seek to differentiate its products from the competition. It can do so in various ways—for example, by providing a wide range of high-quality cars, by providing the best reservation system, by having the cleanest cars or the fastest check-in, or by some other means. The company can strive to provide product differentiation across the industry or within particular segments of the industry, such as U.S. domestic business travelers. According to Porter, to be effective, the organization’s goals, objectives, culture, and activities must be consistent with the organization’s strategy. To those in the MIS field, this means that all information systems in the organization must reflect and facilitate the organization’s competitive strategy.

Knowledge Check

Q2-4 How Does Competitive Strategy Determine Value Chain Structure?

Organizations analyze the structure of their industry, and, using that analysis, they formulate a competitive strategy. They then need to organize and structure the organization to implement that strategy. If, for example, the competitive strategy is to be cost leader, then business activities need to be developed to provide essential functions at the lowest possible cost. A business that selects a differentiation strategy would not necessarily structure itself around least-cost activities. Instead, such a business might choose to develop more costly processes, but it would do so only if those processes provided benefits that outweighed their costs. Jessica at eHermes knows that creating mobile storefronts is expensive, and she judges the costs worthwhile. She may find that developing eHermes’ own AI is worthwhile, too. Porter defined value as the amount of money that a customer is willing to pay for a resource, product, or service. The difference between the value that an activity generates and the cost of the activity is called the margin. A business with a differentiation strategy will add cost to an activity only as long as the activity has a positive margin. A value chain is a network of value-creating activities. That generic chain consists of five primary activities and four support activities.

To understand the essence of the value chain, consider a medium-sized drone manufacturer (see Figure 2-6). First, the manufacturer acquires raw materials using the inbound logistics activity. This activity concerns the receiving and handling of raw materials and other inputs. The accumulation of those materials adds value in the sense that even a pile of unassembled parts is worth something to some customer. A collection of the parts needed to build a drone is worth more than an empty space on a shelf. The value is not only the parts themselves, but also the time required to contact vendors for those parts, to maintain business relationships with those vendors, to order the parts, to receive the shipment, and so forth.

 Figure 2-6: Drone Manufacturer’s Value Chain

In the operations activity, the drone maker transforms raw materials into a finished drone, a process that adds more value. Next, the company uses the outbound logistics activity to deliver the finished drone to a customer. Of course, there is no customer to send the drone to without the marketing and sales value activity. Finally, the service activity provides customer support to the drone users. Each stage of this generic chain accumulates costs and adds value to the product. The net result is the total margin of the chain, which is the difference between the total value added and the total costs incurred. Figure 2-7 summarizes the primary activities of the value chain.

Figure 2-7: Task Descriptions for Primary Activities of the Value Chain

Source: Based on Michael E. Porter, Competitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance (The Free Press, a Division of Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group). Copyright © 1985, 1998 by Michael E. Porter.

Support Activities in the Value Chain

The support activities in the generic value chain contribute indirectly to the production, sale, and service of the product. They include procurement, which consists of the processes of finding vendors, setting up contractual arrangements, and negotiating prices. (This differs from inbound logistics, which is concerned with ordering and receiving in accordance with agreements set up by procurement.) Porter defined technology broadly. It includes research and development, but it also includes other activities within the firm for developing new techniques, methods, and procedures. He defined human resources as recruiting, compensation, evaluation, and training of full-time and part-time employees. Finally, firm infrastructure includes general management, finance, accounting, legal, and government affairs. Supporting functions add value, albeit indirectly, and they also have costs. Hence, as shown in Figure 2-6, supporting activities contribute to a margin. In the case of supporting activities, it would be difficult to calculate the margin because the specific value added of, say, the manufacturer’s lobbyists in Washington, D.C., is difficult to know. But there is a value added, there are costs, and there is a margin—even if it is only in concept.

Porter’s model of business activities includes linkages, which are interactions across value activities. For example, manufacturing systems use linkages to reduce inventory costs. Such a system uses sales forecasts to plan production; it then uses the production plan to determine raw material needs and then uses the material needs to schedule purchases. The end result is just-in-time inventory, which reduces inventory sizes and costs. By describing value chains and their linkages, Porter recognized a movement to create integrated, cross-departmental business systems. Over time, Porter’s work led to the creation of a new discipline called business process design. The central idea is that organizations should not automate or improve existing functional systems. Rather, they should create new, more efficient business processes that integrate the activities of all departments involved in a value chain. You will see an example of a linkage in the next section. Value chain analysis has a direct application to manufacturing businesses like the drone manufacturer. However, value chains also exist in service-oriented companies such as medical clinics. The difference is that most of the value in a service company is generated by the operations, marketing and sales, and service activities. Inbound and outbound logistics are not typically as important.

Q2-5 How Do Business Processes Generate Value?

A business process is a network of activities that generate value by transforming inputs into outputs. The cost of the business process is the cost of the inputs plus the cost of the activities. The margin of the business process is the value of the outputs minus the cost. A business process is a network of activities. Each activity is a business function that receives inputs and produces outputs. An activity can be performed by a human, by a computer system, or by both. The inputs and outputs can be physical, like drone parts, or they can be data, such as a purchase order. A repository is a collection of something; a database is a repository of data, and a raw material repository is an inventory of raw materials. We will refine and extend these definitions in Lesson 8 and again in Lesson 12, but these basic terms will get us started. Consider the three business processes for a drone manufacturer shown in Figure 2-8. The materials ordering process transforms cash3 into a raw materials inventory. The manufacturing process transforms raw materials into finished goods. The sales process transforms finished goods into cash. Notice that the business processes span the value chain activities. The sales process involves sales and marketing as well as outbound logistics activities, as you would expect. Note, too, that while none of these three processes involve a customer-service activity, customer service plays a role in other business processes.

Figure 2-8: Three Examples of Business Processes

Also notice that activities get and put data resources from and to databases. For example, the purchase-drone parts activity queries the raw materials database to determine the materials to order. The receiving activity updates the raw materials database to indicate the arrival of materials. The make-drone activity updates the raw materials database to indicate the consumption of materials. Similar actions are taken in the sales process against the finished goods database. Business processes vary in cost and effectiveness. In fact, the streamlining of business processes to increase margin (add value, reduce costs, or both) is key to competitive advantage. You will learn about process design when we discuss business process management in Lesson 12. To get a flavor of process design, however, consider Figure 2-9, which shows an alternate process for the drone manufacturer. Here the purchase-drone-parts activity not only queries the raw materials inventory database, it also queries the finished goods inventory database. Querying both databases allows the purchasing department to make decisions not just on raw materials quantities but also on customer demand. By using this data, purchasing can reduce the size of raw materials inventory, reducing production costs and thus adding margin to the value chain. This is an example of using a linkage across business processes to improve process margin.

 Figure 2-9: Improved Material Ordering Process

As you will learn, however, changing business processes is not easy to do. Most process design requires people to work in new ways and to follow different procedures, and employees often resist such change. In Figure 2-9, the employees who perform the purchase-drone-parts activity need to learn to adjust their ordering processes to use customer purchase patterns. Another complication is that data stored in the finished goods database likely will need to be redesigned to keep track of customer demand data. As you will learn in Lesson 12, that redesign effort will require that some application programs be changed as well.

Q2-6 How Does Competitive Strategy Determine Business Processes and the Structure of Information Systems?

Figure 2-10 shows a business process for renting bicycles. The value-generating activities are shown in the top of the table, and the implementation of those activities for two companies with different competitive strategies is shown in the rows below.

Figure 2-10: Operations Value Chains for Bicycle Rental Companies

The first company has chosen a competitive strategy of low-cost rentals to students. Accordingly, this business implements business processes to minimize costs. The second company has chosen a differentiation strategy. It provides “best-of-breed” rentals to executives at a high-end conference resort. Notice that this business has designed its business processes to ensure superb service. To achieve a positive margin, it must ensure that the value added will exceed the costs of providing the service. Now, consider the information systems required for these business processes. The student rental business uses a shoebox for its data facility. The only computer/software/data component in its business is the machine provided by its bank for processing credit card transactions. The high-service business, however, makes extensive use of information systems, as shown in Figure 2-11. It has a sales tracking database that tracks past customer rental activity and an inventory database that is used to select and up-sell bicycle rentals as well as to control bicycle inventory with a minimum of fuss to its high-end customers.

 Figure 2-11: Business Process and Information Systems for High-Service Bike Rental

Q2-7 How Do Information Systems Provide Competitive Advantages?

In your business strategy class, you will study the Porter models in greater detail than we have discussed here. When you do so, you will learn numerous ways that organizations respond to the five competitive forces. For our purposes, we can distill those ways into the list of principles shown in Figure 2-12. Keep in mind that we are applying these principles in the context of the organization’s competitive strategy.

 Figure 2-12: Principles of Competitive Advantage

Some of these competitive techniques are created via products and services, and some are created via the development of business processes. Consider each.

The first three principles in Figure 2-12 concern products or services. Organizations gain a competitive advantage by creating new products or services, by enhancing existing products or services, and by differentiating their products and services from those of their competitors. Information systems create competitive advantages either as part of a product or by providing support to a product. Consider, for example, a car rental agency like Hertz or Avis. An information system that produces information about the car’s location and provides driving instructions to destinations is part of the car rental, and thus is part of the product itself (see Figure 2-13a). In contrast, an information system that schedules car maintenance is not part of the product but instead supports the product (see Figure 2-13b). Either way, information systems can help achieve the first three principles in Figure 2-12.

ABC, Inc., a major transportation company that did not want its name published in this textbook, is a worldwide shipper with sales well in excess of $1B. From its inception, ABC invested heavily in information technology and led the shipping industry in the application of information systems for competitive advantage. Here we consider one example of an information system that illustrates how ABC successfully uses information technology to gain competitive advantage. ABC maintains customer account data that include not only the customer’s name, address, and billing information but also data about the people, organizations, and locations to which the customer ships. ABC provides customers with a Web interface that automatically populates dropdown lists with the names of companies that the customer has shipped to in the past. When the user clicks the company name, the underlying ABC information system reads the customer’s contact data from a database. The data consist of names, addresses, and phone numbers of recipients from past shipments. The user then selects a contact name, and the system inserts that contact’s address and other data into the form using data from the database. Thus, the system saves customers from having to reenter data for recipients to whom they have shipped in the past. Providing the data in this way also reduces data-entry errors. Using ABC’s system, customers can also request that email messages be sent to the sender (the customer), the recipient, and others as well. The customer can opt for ABC to send an email when the shipment is created and when it has been delivered. The customer can choose who receives delivery notifications, but only the sender will receive shipment notification. The customer can add a personal message and generate a shipping label. Automatically generating a shipping label on the customer’s premises reduces errors in the preparation of shipping labels and results in considerable cost savings to the company. By adding these capabilities to the shipment scheduling system, ABC has extended its product from a package-delivery service to a package- and information-delivery service.

Now consider the ABC shipping information system in light of the competitive advantage factors in Figure 2-12. This information system enhances an existing service because it eases the effort of creating a shipment to the customer and reduces errors. The information system also helps to differentiate the ABC package delivery service from competitors that do not have a similar system. Further, the generation of email messages when ABC picks up and delivers a package could be considered a new service. Because this information system captures and stores data about recipients, it reduces the amount of customer work when scheduling a shipment. Customers will be locked in by this system: If a customer wants to change to a different shipper, he or she will need to rekey recipient data for that new shipper. The disadvantage of rekeying data may well outweigh any advantage of switching to another shipper. This system achieves a competitive advantage in two other ways as well. First, it raises the barriers to market entry. If another company wants to develop a shipping service, it will not only have to be able to ship packages, but it will also need to have a similar information system. In addition, the system reduces costs. It reduces errors in shipping documents, and it saves ABC paper, ink, and printing costs. Of course, to determine if this system delivers a net savings in costs, the cost of developing and operating the information system will need to be offset against the gains in reduced errors and paper, ink, and printing costs. It may be that the system costs more than the savings. Even still, it may be a sound investment if the value of intangible benefits, such as locking in customers and raising entry barriers, exceeds the net cost. Before continuing, review Figure 2-12. Make sure you understand each of the principles of competitive advantage and how information systems can help achieve them. In fact, the list in Figure 2-12 probably is important enough to memorize because you can also use it for non-IS applications. You can consider any business project or initiative in light of competitive advantage.

Q2-8 2031?

Over the next 10 years, business models, strategies, and competitive advantages will evolve, and new models will rise to the surface. Innovative startups, or companies that are in their initial stage of development, will use technology to create new products or services. They want to become the next unicorn, or tech company that reaches a $1 billion valuation in a short period of time. Existing companies will improve their existing business models and augment their existing business processes. The adoption of low-code systems, or systems that require little to no programming to develop business applications, will be one of the most common ways businesses change. Users will be able to quickly build applications in a visual way similar to creating a flow chart. Companies will adopt platforms that allow their employees to change their internal systems as their business model develops. Hiring teams of developers can be expensive. Low-code systems provide companies with the ability to rapidly adapt to a changing environment without expensive traditional application development. Another way technology will change existing businesses is through the adoption of robotic process automation (RPA), or using software robots to automate routine business processes. Don’t confuse RPA with actual physical robots. It doesn’t have anything to do with hardware robots. RPA uses software “bots” to watch how workers process transactions, manipulate data, or respond to requests and then repeat the rule-based process in the same way. RPA can dramatically reduce labor costs, internal fraud, and human errors. While RPA is focused on automating existing business processes, businesses also want to be able to use artificial intelligence (Lesson 3) to improve future business decision making. The combination of using RPA to automate business processes and using AI to improve decision making is called intelligent automation. Intelligent automation allows companies to reduce costs, make better decisions, and be more adaptable to changes in the competitive environment. By 2031 businesses will also see a dramatic increase in automated collaboration. Instead of waiting for one worker to report an anomaly to another worker, we’ll see workers automatically getting messages from information systems. Automated collaboration will improve business process, data sharing, and workplace communication. We’ll also see a dramatic rise in the use of chatbots to interact with customers. We’re also seeing a rapid change in the pace of innovation due to faster Internet speeds, greater processing power, new IoT devices, and improved hardware. Smartphones, artificial intelligence, drones, self-driving cars, 3D printing, and cloud computing have all matured in the past 20 years. Companies like Apple, Alphabet (Google), Microsoft, and Facebook are competing in all of these product spaces. You’ll learn more about innovations in hardware and software in Lesson 4.

So What? Amazon Everywhere

Think back to the last time that you bought groceries at a supermarket. At face value, the process of going through a grocery checkout may seem trivial. But if you really think about it, there is a lot more going on in this process than meets the eye. Customers enter checkout lines and often engage in some last-minute shopping as they are bombarded with magazines, drinks, candy, and so on. Elements like conveyor belts and grocery dividers are used to avoid transaction errors and promote efficiency. Information systems, including barcode scanners, digital scales, automatic coupon application, and order tabulation, make summing the costs of all the items a breeze. In fact, many stores link point-of-sale systems with their inventory databases so they have real-time information to inform upcoming orders to suppliers. And finally, traditional grocery stores support multiple transaction types for shoppers’ convenience and automatically print receipts with coupons printed on the back to speed up order processing and promote customer loyalty. You may now think about your next grocery checkout experience a bit differently with this new perspective, especially if you consider how different this process used to be years ago. Before customers were allowed to wander through stores to select their own items (Piggly Wiggly was the first store to allow this back in the early 1900s), shoppers would tell grocery clerks what they wanted. The clerks would then retrieve these items and manually tabulate the total. Today’s grocery checkout process is obviously much different, much more efficient, and more technologically advanced than early-20th-century grocery stores, but roughly a century later, we are witnessing the next revolution in checkout processes and technology.

Source: MariaX/Shutterstock

Amazon’s Amazin’ Automation Over the past several years, Amazon has become very active in the grocery industry. For example, Amazon announced its acquisition of Whole Foods for over $13 billion back in 2017. The following year, Amazon revealed an entirely new store concept called Amazon Go: a smaller store format (similar to a convenience store) that would not require staffed checkout lanes or self-checkout kiosks. This new format would feature what Amazon refers to as “Just Walk Out” technology, which, from a hardware perspective, is composed of cameras, sensors, computer vision techniques, and deep learning algorithms. Working together these technologies enable people to select the items that they want and walk out of the store without having to wait in line.4 Amazon describes this technology in more detail as a system that keeps track of shoppers as they take items off of shelves; these items are then added to a virtual shopping cart that the system manages. If someone decides they do not want an item and they place something back on the shelf, this item is removed from their virtual shopping cart. When a shopper has finished selecting items, they can simply walk out and be charged automatically without engaging in any sort of overt transaction.5 Since the launch of the first store in 2018, there are now 26 Amazon Go locations in four states: Washington, Illinois, California, and New York.6 More recently, Amazon has indicated that numerous retailers have been interested in purchasing this technology to use in their own businesses. For example, Amazon has received interest from OTG’s CIBO Express stores in airports, Cineworld’s Regal theaters, and concession stands in baseball stadiums.7 It looks like this new checkout format won’t be exclusive to Amazon but may change the overall landscape of retail if it is widely adopted. Cruisin’ with Sensor Fusion The evolution of the grocery checkout process is witnessing its latest transformation thanks to Amazon. This process evolved from grocery clerks and manual tabulation to staffed checkout lines supported by information systems to now completely automated checkouts. This paradigm shift is just one more example of how technology continues to disrupt business processes in virtually every industry. An example of another industry currently experiencing similar innovation is the automotive industry. Consider autonomous vehicles, which also operate using a variety of cameras, sensors, and computer vision technologies. Ride-hailing companies are interested in the use of autonomous vehicles to transport passengers because machines would not be subjected to the scheduling regulations placed on human operators. As a result, these companies have an incentive to transition to driverless cars as quickly as possible. Ironically, the gig economy workers who have worked for ride-hailing companies and displaced countless traditional taxi drivers could themselves soon be displaced by machines. The big picture is that workers in many industries are witnessing the rise of automation and artificial intelligence, and there is uncertainty about how truly disruptive new technologies will be to workers and economies around the world. Will machines take over and leave the masses unemployed, or will workers largely be augmented by machines and thereby perform more efficiently and effectively? It is too soon to tell, but grocery stores may be one of the first dominos to fall as Amazon begins deploying its “Just Walk Out” technology en masse. Questions

1. Some of the most innovative and powerful companies in the world are technology companies (e.g., Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and Netflix). Out of the five companies on this list, could a case be made that Amazon should be considered the most powerful company of them all? Why?  Show Answer

2. Can you think of any other technologies that employ sensor fusion, cameras, and computer vision?  Show Answer

3. Can you think of any other industries that have been disrupted, or seen processes drastically changed, due to innovations in technology over the past 10-plus years?  Show Answer

4. Can you think of any emerging technologies that will disrupt, or change, processes in industries over the next 10-plus years?  Show Answer

Security Guide

Critical Ransom An employee walks into the office and takes a seat in their cubicle. They flip up the keyboard sitting on the desk to look at their credentials (shame on them!) and then proceed to log in to their computer. The first task of the day is getting a grip on urgent emails. There are a few messages from the boss, an email with the “!!” designation from a frustrated customer, and an HR notice indicating that out-of-pocket rates have gone up to cover changes in employees’ healthcare coverage. A phone call comes in, and as the employee talks with a vendor about some missing details on a recent purchase order, the employee clicks on a PDF attachment in the HR benefits email named “FAQ–How Rate Changes on Your Healthcare Benefits Will Impact Pay.” Already stressed about some unexpected expenses piling up recently, the employee wants to see how much they stand to lose on upcoming paychecks because of this change. Due to the distraction of reviewing email while on a phone call, the employee fails to notice that the email address of the sender does not look familiar and does not match the domain of the employer or the health insurance provider. The employee also fails to notice two typos in the body of the email and the poor quality of the graphic depicting the health insurance provider’s logo. The employee downloads the file to their desktop, double-clicks to open it, and poof–one more organization has been victimized by a ransomware attack. All of the files on the employee’s system are rapidly being encrypted, and the attackers indicate that they are demanding a hefty ransom to decrypt the system and restore the files to working order. To protect their anonymity and reduce the chances of prosecution, the cybercriminals are requesting payment via Bitcoin, a form of cryptocurrency that is difficult to trace. When a ransomware attack succeeds, individuals and organizations must make a determination about how to respond based on a number of factors. Is it critical that access to systems and data is restored immediately (e.g., computers in the emergency room of a hospital where lives are at stake)? Are recent backups available that would make recovery a viable option (e.g., a cloud backup is available from 48 hours ago)? Can we find other instances of this specific attack and find evidence of the criminals actually unlocking the encrypted files if the ransom is made? For most individuals and organizations, some downtime can be tolerated; however, when it comes to critical infrastructure, the implications of a ransomware attack succeeding are quite profound.

Source: Posteriori/Shutterstock

Grid-Lock Recall the last time a violent thunderstorm or blizzard knocked the power out in your neighborhood. Residents probably scrambled to find flashlights and entertainment to pass the time while utility crews restored power (and power is typically restored within hours). Now imagine the power staying off for days or even weeks in a large geographic area due to a ransomware attack against a utility company’s systems. It sounds like a scenario pulled from a mediocre Hollywood script, but security experts and government officials have been increasingly pointing to the possibility that just such an attack could occur. In fact, in early 2020, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) notified all organizations designated as being critical infrastructure to be especially vigilant about the possibility of a ransomware attack.8 This warning was based on a successful ransomware attack that targeted a natural gas facility. While the facility was not at risk of being remotely controlled by attackers, operators were forced to disrupt operations and redeploy new systems before they could resume operations, leading to lost time and money. While this is just one example of an attack on critical infrastructure, these types of attacks are now commonplace and specifically target the following infrastructure sectors as defined by CISA: chemical companies, commercial facilities, communications, critical manufacturing, dams, defense, emergency services, energy, financial services, food and agriculture, government facilities, health care, information technology, nuclear operations, transportation, and water/wastewater systems.9 Circling back to the power grid specifically, in 2019 it was reported that a hacking group known for previously targeting safety instruments at a Saudi Arabian oil refinery in 2017 was actively surveilling the U.S. power grid in hopes of identifying vulnerabilities.10 In short, it is clear that in cyberwar, civilian entities, and entities that support civilian life in the form of providing critical infrastructure, are fair game for possible attack. These attacks can take many forms, including ransomware attacks that lock up systems and prevent access to important data. Sadly, the same types of tools that can be employed against government and military assets can also be used to disrupt businesses and even families. We must all be vigilant to ensure that we do not become victims of the next attack–not if but when it comes. Furthermore, we need to take the necessary precautions so that when the attack comes, we are able to intelligently and rapidly respond. Discussion Questions

1. Do you think criminals will actually decrypt your data if you pay them the ransom?  Show Answer

2. If you are 100 percent certain that paying the ransom for your data will result in it being decrypted, should you do it? Explain.  Show Answer

3. The article mentions that surveillance of and attacks against critical infrastructure are growing commonplace. Take a few minutes to search for the latest examples of these types of attacks against critical infrastructure organizations. (Refer to the CISA list in the article to help guide your search of relevant industries.)  Show Answer

4. Can you think of any examples of known international cyberattacks that have succeeded in damaging their targets?  Show Answer

Consider how quickly corporate strategies must adapt to this dynamic environment. Companies will need to redesign or entirely recreate their business processes. Their value chains will continually be disrupted, and they’ll have to frequently reevaluate their business model. This rapid pace of change may seem daunting at first, but it’s important to understand that it’s also creating a lot of opportunities for hard-working, entrepreneurial-minded people who love to learn. Change can be hard, but it’s never boring. Plus, you know it’s coming. Knowing that, how can you take advantage of it? Maybe you want to be an innovator and use technology to create new products like self-driving cars, drones, or 3D printers. If so, do it. But maybe, like eHermes, you want to use the innovative products that others are making and create new strategies or build new businesses that take advantage of the opportunities that new products create. You can be certain that, 10 years from now, you will have even more opportunity to do so.

Career Guide

· Name: Andrew Yenchik

· Company: Charles Schwab

· Job Title: Managing Director

· Education: Carnegie Mellon University

Source: Andrew Yenchik, Managing Director, Charles Schwab

1. How did you get this type of job? I’ve continued to seek roles that stretch my knowledge and ability. During my undergraduate studies, and with no technology skills, I worked as an intern for a software development company. While there, I learned all I could–networking, systems administration, software development, and data center operations. I then completed a graduate degree and joined USAA. While there, I worked as a technical manager in Banking Technology and then as a technical director in FinTech and Operations. In all my prior roles, I focused on building my network, acquiring technical skills, and taking on leadership challenges. Those opportunities led me to my current role at Charles Schwab as a managing director, where I oversee software development and operations in the Cross Enterprise Services group.

2. What attracted you to this field? I wanted to find a field that mixed business and technical skills and that requires a problem-solving mind-set. I didn’t want to only have technical abilities and not understand the whys and hows of business functions. The field of information systems blends technical skills and business acumen. I spent time with professors and professionals in fields that interested me. This included job shadowing, lunch meetings, phone calls, and private meetings. These mentors provided valuable advice that led me to choose the information systems field.

3. What does a typical workday look like for you (duties, decisions, problems)? I work daily with my management team and usually attend (or run) quite a few meetings. My team and I are globally dispersed and rely on meetings, agile ceremonies, and one-on-ones to share information, provide updates, solve challenges, and work toward strategic priorities. My work requires collaboration, partnership, and negotiation. My outputs and achievements are those of my teams, and the core part of my role is to help my teams be successful. On occasion, I travel to spend time with my team members at their locales. As a managing director, I provide technical and strategic leadership and am responsible for the delivery and operations of all project work and applications that I own.

4. What do you like most about your job? I enjoy the challenge of continual learning. I rarely have all the information or skills I need to make a decision or to execute a project. I thrive when I need to quickly learn and grow in order to be successful.

5. What skills would someone need to do well at your job? Problem solving is a critical skill. I’m confronted with complex problems–such as fixing a technical outage or hiring the right person to join the team–on a daily basis. No matter the job, the ability to assess a problem, gather the right information and tools, and resolve the problem is key. Teamwork and leadership are other crucial skills. No single person knows all the answers. The abilities to work with, assist, teach, and motivate others in a collaborative manner are important.

6. Are education or certifications important in your field? Why? Yes, education and certifications are important and provide career capital–the more you acquire, the more valuable you become. They provide a foundation of skills and competencies needed to be a successful IT professional. They illustrate your ability to study, learn, and gain knowledge. A degree from a reputable institution validates your acumen and skills.

7. What advice would you give to someone who is considering working in your field? Stretch yourself to gain a broad range of skills and experiences while in school and in the early years of your career. Take a difficult class in an area outside your comfort zone–a class that is not an easy A–that will require a commitment of learning, work, and sacrifice on your part to pass the class. Ask questions and be inquisitive. If you’re not growing or stretching yourself, and even failing, you’re hanging out in the wrong neighborhood.

8. What do you think will be hot tech jobs in 10 years? Network engineering–with an ever-increasing number of connected devices and the IoT revolution, network engineering skill sets will be in high demand. Information security–this rapid increase in the type and number of connected devices, coupled with the prevalence of technology in businesses and personal lives, makes security a hot job.

Ethics Guide

The Robot Will Hire you Now Thank you for the opportunity to meet with you today about our automated hiring platform.” Brian dimmed the lights and started presentation mode on his laptop to begin his sales pitch. “The demo you are about to see represents the culmination of about a decade’s worth of work. Our technology was built from the ground up by some of the leading scientists in their respective fields, including communication, engineering, information systems, data science–heck, you get the picture!”

Source: Kung_tom/Shutterstock

He clicked on the “Next Slide” button to reveal a detailed diagram showing the progression of a hypothetical applicant going through the hiring system’s protocol. “Applicants submit a copy of their résumé, and the first thing the system does is a complete analysis of their credentials, automatically. The system uses cutting-edge algorithms to parse through every single word of their résumé to identify only the most qualified candidates. We can even collect the résumés of some of your top performers in the company and then have the system try to find applicants who are just like them–the system will find the best, but you can help us to define what ‘best’ actually means based on the specific needs of your company.” Brian continued, “Once the top résumés have been identified, the system will automatically use contact info in the résumés to send out an email invitation to arrange an online interview with each applicant. You won’t have to lift a finger–at the appropriate time, each interviewee will simply access our company’s website and begin the online interview. A digital interviewer is used to ask a variety of questions, and while the interviewee responds, we capture multiple data streams about their behavior, including linguistics, vocal behaviors, body movements, eye movements, and so on. Our system analyzes features from each of these data streams to identify people who are confident and truthful in their responses. In other words, we care about not just what people say but how they say it! Even cooler, we have conducted thousands of these interviews. Our existing clients have agreed to tell us which applicants they hired, using our platform, actually ended up being superstar employees. We can now use unique features associated with superstar interviewees to help find the superstars of tomorrow from your own set of applicants.” Everyone in the conference room was nodding their heads in such a way that Brian felt things were going extremely well. He continued to the next slide, which displayed a variety of ways in which the digital interviewer could be modified. Your Bot, Your Way He went on, “One of the most interesting parts of our software is that the digital interviewer can be modified in countless ways to set a tone that is most appropriate for your industry. Are you a defense contractor? We can have the interviewer appear more formal and ask questions that could even approach interrogation style. Is your company a fun, innovative startup? We can have the interviewer appear friendlier, lighthearted, yet inquisitive. In short, you can pick an interviewer that works best for you, and we can even morph the digital interviewer’s facial features to resemble those of the interviewee–research shows that people prefer to interact with others who closely resemble themselves.” Brian could sense that with his latest comments there had been a shift in the mood of the room. Some people found the morphing functionality creepy and, in a way, like some sort of psychological manipulation. He tried to recover. “However, one of the most important parts of this system is that it really does come down to science and to prioritizing people based on qualifications. The beauty of our platform is that it removes the subjectivity and bias of a human interviewer. How many times have you entrusted a person to sift through applications and conduct interviews, and ultimately, the hiring decision comes down to picking the person you would rather grab a drink with after work and is not necessarily based on the most qualified person? Our system removes these human flaws that may be translating to organizational missed opportunities.” Brian covered a few more slides that talked about the system’s granular paper trail of every single interaction with each applicant. At any time, customers of this platform could log in and look at any of the application documents, review online survey results, or watch any part of recorded interviews. He further explained that ultimately, all of this data would be used to generate a ranked list of recommended hires based on the system’s rigorous analysis. Brian finished up the last slide and turned to face everyone in the conference room. This is the fun part, he thought to himself, and asked, “Does anyone have any questions?” Embedded Bias At first, the entire room was motionless, but then one of the managers in the back started to speak. “Thanks for your time, Brian, but I would like to ask you some questions. You pointed out that humans tend to be subjective and biased in their decision making, and hiring personnel is no different–that we can agree on. “However, you claim that your technology eliminates these biases, but wasn’t your system developed by human scientists, engineers, and software developers? Don’t these people have biases that could have been embedded in your system either accidentally or, in a worst-case scenario, intentionally? Furthermore, you talked about ‘training the system’ to help find us new stars based on the top performers we already have. Wouldn’t this approach perpetuate a very homogenous organizational culture that would lack diversity in numerous senses of the word? Finally, have you looked at the hiring data of your customers since they adopted your technology to see if your tool has either promoted or stifled organizational diversity?” Brian turned back to the screen, started clicking through slides, and with a shaking voice responded, “I can try to get access to some of that data when I get back to the office, but I think I have a few more slides that may help to address at least part of your question.” His mind was racing as he tried to come up with an answer that could salvage closing the deal–he already knew he had nothing in the slides that would do it, and things weren’t looking good. Utilitarianism The Ethics Guide in Lesson 1 introduced Kant’s categorical imperative as one way of assessing ethical conduct. This guide introduces a second way, one known as utilitarianism. According to utilitarianism, the morality of an act is determined by its outcome. Acts are judged to be moral if they result in the greatest good to the greatest number or if they maximize happiness and reduce suffering. Using utilitarianism as a guide, killing can be moral if it results in the greatest good to the greatest number. Killing Adolf Hitler would have been moral if it had stopped the Holocaust. Similarly, utilitarianism can assess lying or other forms of deception as moral if the act results in the greatest good to the greatest number. Lying to someone with a fatal illness that you’re certain he or she will recover is moral if it increases that person’s happiness and decreases his or her suffering. Discussion Questions

1. Think about the hiring platform Brian described in his sales pitch.

a. Do you think the use of such a system is ethical according to the categorical imperative?

b. Do you think the use of such a system is ethical according to the utilitarian perspective?

2. If you were applying for a job, would you want to experience a traditional hiring process, or would you rather use the hiring platform Brian describes? Explain your preference.

3. Consider the questions that the manager asks Brian. Would you want to invest in and use this technology if you were a manager? Why or why not? Does your answer to this question align with your response to question 2? Why or why not?

4. How does the VW emissions scandal relate to the scenario presented in this article? (Do an Internet search to research it if you are not familiar with it.) What problems do the VW scandal and this article point to when it comes to technology?

Active Review

Use this Active Review to verify that you understand the ideas and concepts that answer the lesson’s study questions.

· Q2-1 How does organizational strategy determine information systems structure? Diagram and explain the relationship of industry structure, competitive strategy, value chains, business processes, and information systems. Working from industry structure to IS, explain how the knowledge you’ve gained in these first two lessons pertains to that diagram.

· Q2-2 What five forces determine industry structure? Name and briefly describe the five forces. Give your own examples of both strong and weak forces of each type, similar to those in Figure 2-3.

· Q2-3 How does analysis of industry structure determine competitive strategy? Describe four different strategies as defined by Porter. Give an example of four different companies that have implemented each of the strategies.

· Q2-4 How does competitive strategy determine value chain structure? Define the terms value, margin, and value chain. Explain why organizations that choose a differentiation strategy can use value to determine a limit on the amount of extra cost to pay for differentiation. Name the primary and support activities in the value chain and explain the purpose of each. Explain the concept of linkages.

· Q2-5 How do business processes generate value? Define business process, cost, and margin as they pertain to business processes. Explain the purpose of an activity and describe types of repository. Explain the importance of business process redesign and describe the difference between the business processes in Figure 2-8 and those in Figure 2-9.

· Q2-6 How does competitive strategy determine business processes and the structure of information systems? In your own words, explain how competitive strategy determines the structure of business processes. Use the examples of a clothing store that caters to struggling students and a clothing store that caters to professional businesspeople in a high-end neighborhood. List the activities in the business process for the two companies and create a chart like that in Figure 2-9. Explain how the information systems’ requirements differ between the two stores.

· Q2-7 How do information systems provide competitive advantages? List and briefly describe eight principles of competitive advantage. Consider your college bookstore. List one application of each of the eight principles. Strive to include examples that involve information systems.

· Q2-8 2031? Explain why low-code systems will help businesses lower costs and improve adaptability. How will robotic process automation improve existing business processes? Describe the benefits of intelligent automation. What forces drive new innovations, and how might that change technology over the next 10 years? Explain how business strategies might change due to these new innovations.

Using Your Knowledge with eHermes Explain in your own words how eHermes competitive strategy might be threatened by relying on a large corporate account. Describe eHermes’ planned response and summarize the problems that Kamala perceives with that response. Recommend a course of action for eHermes. Use Kamala’s idea of diversifying the types of services the company provides to illustrate your answer.

Using Your Knowledge

Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) is an Amazon service by which other sellers can ship goods to Amazon warehouses for stocking, order packaging, and shipment. FBA customers pay a fee for the service as well as for inventory space. Amazon uses its own inventory management and order fulfillment business processes and information systems to fulfill the FBA customers’ orders.14 FBA customers can sell their goods on Amazon, sell them via their own sales channels, or both. If the FBA customer sells on Amazon, Amazon will provide customer service for order processing (handling returns, fixing erroneously packed orders, answering customer order queries, and the like). The costs for Fulfillment by Amazon depend on the type and size of the goods to be processed. The FBA fees for standard-size products as of May 2020 are shown in the table.

If goods are sold via Amazon, Amazon uses its own information systems to drive the order fulfillment process. However, if the goods are sold via an FBA customer’s sales channel, then the FBA customer must connect its own information systems with those at Amazon. Amazon provides a standardized interface by which this is done called Amazon Marketplace Web Service (MWS). Using Web-standard technology (see Lesson 6), FBA customers’ order and payment data are directly linked to Amazon’s information systems. FBA enables companies to outsource order fulfillment to Amazon, thus avoiding the cost of developing their own processes, facilities, and information systems for this purpose. Questions

· 2-4. Based on the facts presented in this case, what do you think is Amazon’s competitive strategy? Justify your answer.  Show Answer

· 2-5. Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, has stated that the best customer support is none. What does that mean?  Show Answer

· 2-6. Suppose you work for Amazon or a company that takes innovation as seriously as Amazon does. What do you suppose is the likely reaction to an employee who says to his or her boss, “But I don’t know how to do that!”?  Show Answer

· 2-7. Using your own words and your own experience, what skills and abilities do you think you need to have to thrive at an organization like Amazon?  Show Answer

· 2-8. What should UPS and FedEx be doing in response to Amazon’s interest in drone delivery via Amazon Prime Air?  Show Answer

· 2-9. Summarize the advantages and disadvantages for brick-and-mortar retailers to sell items via Amazon. Would you recommend that they do so?  Show Answer

· 2-10. If a brick-and-mortar retailer were to use FBA, what business processes would it not need to develop? What costs would it save?  Show Answer

· 2-11. If a brick-and-mortar retailer were to use FBA, what information systems would it not need to develop? What costs would it save?  Show Answer

· 2-12. If a brick-and-mortar retailer were to use FBA, how would it integrate its information systems with Amazon’s? (To add depth to your answer, Google the term Amazon MWS.)  Show Answer

Complete the following writing exercises

· 2-13. Samantha Green owns and operates Twigs Tree Trimming Service. Samantha graduated from the forestry program of a nearby university and worked for a large landscape design firm, performing tree trimming and removal. After several years of experience, she bought her own truck, stump grinder, and other equipment and opened her own business in St. Louis, Missouri. Although many of her jobs are one-time operations to remove a tree or stump, others are recurring, such as trimming a tree or groups of trees every year or every other year. When business is slow, she calls former clients to remind them of her services and of the need to trim their trees on a regular basis. Samantha has never heard of Michael Porter or any of his theories. She operates her business “by the seat of her pants.”

a. Explain how an analysis of the five competitive forces could help Samantha.

b. Do you think Samantha has a competitive strategy? What competitive strategy would seem to make sense for her?

c. How would knowledge of her competitive strategy help her sales and marketing efforts?

d. Describe, in general terms, the kind of information system that she needs to support sales and marketing efforts.

· 2-14. YourFire, Inc. is a small business owned by Curt and Julie Robards. Based in Brisbane, Australia, YourFire manufactures and sells a lightweight camping stove called the YourFire. Curt, who previously worked as an aerospace engineer, invented and patented a burning nozzle that enables the stove to stay lit in very high winds–up to 90 miles per hour. Julie, an industrial designer by training, developed an elegant folding design that is small, lightweight, easy to set up, and very stable. Curt and Julie manufacture the stove in their garage, and they sell it directly to their customers over the Internet and via phone.

a. Explain how an analysis of the five competitive forces could help YourFire.

b. What does the YourFire competitive strategy seem to be?

c. Briefly summarize how the primary value chain activities pertain to YourFire. How should the company design these value chains to conform to its competitive strategy?

d. Describe business processes that YourFire needs in order to implement its marketing and sales and its service value chain activities.

e. Describe, in general terms, information systems to support your answer to part d.

· 2-15. A friend of yours from college, who you haven’t talked to in 3 years, sends you an email asking you to meet him for lunch. He says he’s got a great idea for a business and wants to run it by you. At first you’re hesitant because your friend, while obviously intelligent, doesn’t always think things though. You agree to meet for lunch and talk about the idea. At lunch, he explains that he’s been developing new flexible screens for his employer that are incredibly tough and waterproof and use very little energy. His idea is to use these new flexible screens to create wearable computing clothing that can connect directly to smartphones and push ads, promotions, and video. His only problem is that he knows nothing about business. He’s not sure where to start.

a. Explain how you could use the five forces model to help your friend understand the potential success of his wearable flex screens.

b. How might understanding the unique forces affecting this industry determine the competitive advantage for your friend’s new company?

· Lesson 7

· Collaboration Information Systems

Lesson Preview

Business is a social activity. While we often say that organizations accomplish their strategy, they don’t. People in organizations accomplish strategy by working with other people, almost always working in groups. People do business with people. Over the years, technology has increasingly supported group work. In your grandfather’s day, communication was done using letter, phone, and office visits. Those technologies were augmented in the 1980s and 1990s with fax and email and more recently by texting, conference calls, and videoconferencing. Today, products such as Microsoft 365 provide a wide array of tools to support collaborative work. This lesson investigates ways that information systems can support collaboration. We begin by defining collaboration, discussing collaborative activities, and setting criteria for successful collaboration. Next, we’ll address the kinds of work that collaborative teams do. Then we’ll discuss requirements for collaborative information systems and illustrate important collaborative tools for improving communication and sharing content. After that, we’ll bring this closer to your needs today and investigate the use of three different collaboration IS that can improve your student collaborations. Finally, we’ll wrap up with a discussion of collaboration in 2031!

Q7-1 What Are the Two Key Characteristics of Collaboration?

To answer this question, we must first distinguish between the terms cooperation and collaboration. Cooperation is a group of people working together, all doing essentially the same type of work, to accomplish a job. A group of four painters, each painting a different wall in the same room, are working cooperatively. Similarly, a group of checkers at the grocery store or clerks at the post office are working cooperatively to serve customers. A cooperative group can accomplish a given task faster than an individual working alone, but the cooperative result is usually not better in quality than the result of someone working alone. In this text, we define collaboration as a group of people working together to achieve a common goal via a process of feedback and iteration. Using feedback and iteration, one person will produce something, say, the draft of a document, and a second person will review that draft and provide critical feedback. Given the feedback, the original author or someone else will then revise the first draft to produce a second. The work proceeds in a series of stages, or iterations, in which something is produced, members criticize it, and then another version is produced. Using iteration and feedback, the group’s result can be better than what any single individual can produce alone. This is possible because different group members provide different perspectives. “Oh, I never thought of it that way” is a typical signal of collaboration success. Many, perhaps most, student groups incorrectly use cooperation rather than collaboration. Given an assignment, a group of five students will break it up into five pieces, work to accomplish their piece independently, and then merge their independent work for grading by the professor. Such a process will enable the project to be completed more quickly, with less work by any single individual, but it will not be better than the result obtained if the students were to work alone. In contrast, when students work collaboratively, they set forth an initial idea or work product, provide feedback to one another on those ideas or products, and then revise in accordance with feedback. Such a process can produce a result far superior to that produced by any student working alone.

Given this definition, for collaboration to be successful, members must provide and receive constructive criticism. Constructive criticism is both positive and negative advice given to improve an outcome. Most group members have no problem giving favorable feedback. It’s easy and socially acceptable. It’s critical feedback that is much more difficult for members to give—and receive. A group in which everyone is too polite to say anything critical cannot collaborate. In fact, groups that only provide positive feedback are susceptible to groupthink, a phenomenon where the desire for group cohesion leads to poor decision making. On the other hand, a group that is so critical and negative that members come to distrust, even hate, one another cannot effectively collaborate either. Critical feedback needs to be presented in a friendly, well-reasoned manner. Learning how to effectively give critical feedback takes practice. For most groups, success is achieved when group members are able to give both favorable and critical feedback. To underline this point, consider the research of Ditkoff, Allen, Moore, and Pollard. They surveyed 108 business professionals to determine the qualities, attitudes, and skills that make a good collaborator.1 Figure 7-1 lists the most and least important characteristics reported in the survey. Most students are surprised to learn that 5 of the top 12 characteristics involve disagreement (highlighted in blue in Figure 7-1). Most students believe that “we should all get along” and more or less have the same idea and opinions about team matters. Although it is important for the team to be sociable enough to work together, this research indicates that it is also important for team members to have different ideas and opinions and to express them to each other.

When we think about collaboration as an iterative process in which team members give and receive feedback, these results are not surprising. During collaboration, team members learn from each other, and it will be difficult to learn if no one is willing to express different, or even unpopular, ideas. The respondents also seem to be saying, “You can be negative as long as you care about what we’re doing.” These collaboration skills do not come naturally to people who have been taught to “play well with others,” but that may be why they were so highly ranked in the survey. The characteristics rated not relevant are also revealing. Experience as a collaborator or in business does not seem to matter. Being popular also is not important. A big surprise, however, is that being well organized was rated 31st out of 39 characteristics. Perhaps collaboration itself is not a very well-organized process.

Guidelines for Giving and Receiving Constructive Criticism

Giving and receiving constructive criticism is the single most important collaboration skill. You need to know how to give critical feedback in a positive way. So, before we discuss the role that information systems can play for improving collaboration, study the guidelines for giving and receiving critical feedback shown in Figure 7-2.

Many students have found that when they first form a collaborative group, it’s useful to begin with a discussion of constructive criticism guidelines like those in Figure 7-2. Begin with this list, and then, using feedback and iteration, develop your own list. Of course, if a group member does not follow the agreed-upon guidelines, someone will have to provide constructive criticism to that effect as well.

If you are like most undergraduate business students, especially freshmen or sophomores, your life experience is keeping you from understanding the need for collaboration. So far, almost everyone you know has the same experiences as you and, more or less, thinks like you. Your friends and associates have the same educational background, scored more or less the same on standardized tests, and have the same orientation toward success. So, why collaborate? Most of you think the same way, anyway: “What does the professor want, and what’s the easiest, fastest way to get it to her?” So, consider this thought experiment. Your company is planning to build a new facility that is critical for the success of a new product line and will create 300 new jobs. The county government won’t issue a building permit because the site is prone to landslides. Your engineers believe your design overcomes that hazard, but your chief financial officer (CFO) is concerned about possible litigation in the event there is a problem. Your corporate counsel is investigating the best way to overcome the county’s objections while limiting liability. Meanwhile, a local environmental group is protesting your site because it believes the site is too close to an eagle’s nest. Your public relations director is meeting with these local groups every week. Do you proceed with the project? To decide, you create a working team of the chief engineer, the CFO, your legal counsel, and the PR director. Each of those people has different education and expertise, different life experience, and different values. In fact, the only thing they have in common is that they are paid by your company. That team will participate collaboratively in ways that are far different from your experience so far. Keep this example in mind as you read this lesson. Bottom line: The two key characteristics of collaboration are iteration and feedback.

Q7-2 What Are Three Criteria for Successful Collaboration?

J. Richard Hackman studied teamwork for many years, and his book Leading Teams contains many useful concepts and tips for future managers.2 According to Hackman, there are three primary criteria for judging team success:

· Successful outcome

· Growth in team capability

· Meaningful and satisfying experience

Most students are primarily concerned with the first criterion. They want to achieve a good outcome, measured by their grade, or they want to get the project done with an acceptable grade while minimizing the effort required. For business professionals, teams need to accomplish their goals: make a decision, solve a problem, or create a work product. Whatever the objective is, the first success criterion is “Did we do it?” Although not as apparent in student teams, most business teams also need to ask, “Did we do it within the time and budget allowed?” Teams that produce a work product too late or far over budget are not successful, even if they did achieve their goal.

Growth in Team Capability

The other two criteria are surprising to most students, probably because most student teams are short-lived. But, in business, where teams often last months or years, it makes sense to ask, “Did the team get better?” If you’re a football fan, you’ve undoubtedly heard your college’s coach say, “We really improved as the season progressed.” (Of course, for the team with 2 wins and 12 losses, you didn’t hear that.) Football teams last only a season. If the team is permanent, say, a team of customer support personnel, the benefits of team growth are even greater. Over time, as the team gets better, it becomes more efficient; thus, over time the team provides more service for a given cost or the same service for less cost. How does a team get better? For one, it develops better work processes. Activities are combined or eliminated. Linkages are established so that “the left hand knows what the right hand is doing” or needs or can provide. Teams also get better as individuals improve at their tasks. Part of that improvement is the learning curve; as someone does something over and over, he or she gets better at it. But team members also teach task skills and give knowledge to one another. Team members also provide perspectives that other team members need.

The third element of Hackman’s definition of team success is that team members have a meaningful and satisfying experience. Of course, the nature of team goals is a major factor in making work meaningful. But few of us have the opportunity to develop a life-saving cancer vaccine or engineer a new strain of wheat that could stop world hunger. For most of us, it’s a matter of making the product, creating the shipment, accounting for the payment, or finding the prospects, and so on. So, in the more mundane world of most business professionals, what makes work meaningful? Hackman cites numerous studies in his book, and one common thread is that the work is perceived as meaningful by the team. Keeping prices up to date in the product database may not be the most exciting work, but if that task is perceived by the team as important, it will become meaningful. Furthermore, if an individual’s work is not only perceived as important but the person doing that work is also given credit for it, then the experience will be perceived as meaningful. So, recognition for work well done is vitally important for a meaningful work experience. Another aspect of team satisfaction is camaraderie. Business professionals, just like students, are energized when they have the feeling that they are part of a group, each person doing his or her own job and combining efforts to achieve something worthwhile that is better than any could

Q7-3 What Are the Four Primary Purposes of Collaboration?

Collaborative teams accomplish four primary purposes:

· Become informed

· Make decisions

· Solve problems

· Manage projects

These four purposes build on each other. For example, making a decision requires that team members be informed. In turn, to solve a problem, the team must have the ability to make decisions (and become informed). Finally, to conduct a project, the team must be able to solve problems (and make decisions and become informed). Before we continue, understand you can use the hierarchy of these four purposes to build your professional skills. You cannot make good decisions if you do not have the skills to inform yourself. You cannot solve problems if you are unable to make good decisions. And you cannot manage projects if you don’t know how to solve problems! In this question, we will consider the collaborative nature of these four purposes and describe requirements for information systems that support them, starting with the most basic: becoming informed.

Informing is the first and most fundamental collaboration purpose. Recall from Lesson 1 that two individuals can receive the same data but conceive different information. The goal of the informing is to ensure, as much as possible, that team members are conceiving information in the same way. For example, as you read in the opening scenario, Dr. Greg Solomon has assigned the iMed Analytics team several tasks with the ultimate goal of increasing revenues. One of the team’s first tasks is to ensure that everyone understands that goal and, further, understands the different ways they can achieve that goal. Informing, and hence all of the purposes of collaboration, presents several requirements for collaborative information systems. As you would expect, team members need to be able to share data and to communicate with one another to share interpretations. Furthermore, because memories are faulty and team membership can change, it is also necessary to document the team’s understanding of the information conceived. To avoid having to go “over and over and over” a topic, a repository of information, such as a wiki, is needed. We will say more about this in Q7-5.

Making Decisions

Collaboration is used for some types of decision making, but not all. Consequently, to understand the role of collaboration, we must begin with an analysis of decision making. Decisions are made at three levels: operational, managerial, and strategic. Operational Decisions Operational decisions are those that support operational, day-to-day activities. Typical operational decisions are: How many widgets should we order from vendor A? Should we extend credit to vendor B? Which invoices should we pay today? Managerial Decisions Managerial decisions are decisions about the allocation and utilization of resources. Typical decisions are: How much should we budget for computer hardware and programs for department A next year? How many engineers should we assign to project B? How many square feet of warehouse space do we need for the coming year? In general, if a managerial decision requires consideration of different perspectives, then it will benefit from collaboration. For example, consider the decision of whether to increase employee pay in the coming year. No single individual has the answer. The decision depends on an analysis of inflation, industry trends, the organization’s profitability, the influence of unions, and other factors. Senior managers, accountants, human resources personnel, labor relationships managers, and others will each bring a different perspective to the decision. They will produce a work product for the decision, evaluate that product, and make revisions in an iterative fashion—the essence of collaboration. Strategic Decisions Strategic decisions are those that support broad-scope, organizational issues. Typical decisions at the strategic level are: Should we start a new product line? Should we open a centralized warehouse in Tennessee? Should we acquire company A? Strategic decisions are almost always collaborative. Consider a decision about whether to move manufacturing operations to China. This decision affects every employee in the organization, the organization’s suppliers, its customers, and its shareholders. Many factors and many perspectives on each of those factors must be considered. The Decision Process Information systems can be classified based on whether their decision processes are structured or unstructured. These terms refer to the method or process by which the decision is to be made, not to the nature of the underlying problem. A structured decision process is one for which there is an understood and accepted method for making the decision. A formula for computing the reorder quantity of an item in inventory is an example of a structured decision process. A standard method for allocating furniture and equipment to employees is another structured decision process. Structured decisions seldom require collaboration. An unstructured decision process is one for which there is no agreed-on decision-making method. Predicting the future direction of the economy or the stock market is a classic example. The prediction method varies from person to person; it is neither standardized nor broadly accepted. Another example of an unstructured decision process is assessing how well suited an employee is for performing a particular job. Managers vary in the manner in which they make such assessments. Unstructured decisions are often collaborative. The Relationship Between Decision Type and Decision Process The decision type and decision process are loosely related. Decisions at the operational level tend to be structured, and decisions at the strategic level tend to be unstructured. Managerial decisions tend to be both structured and unstructured. We use the words tend to be because there are exceptions to the relationship. Some operational decisions are unstructured (e.g., “How many taxicab drivers do we need on the night before the homecoming game?”), and some strategic decisions can be structured (e.g., “How should we assign sales quotas for a new product?”). In general, however, the relationship holds. Decision Making and Collaboration Systems As stated, few structured decisions involve collaboration. Deciding, for example, how much of product A to order from vendor B does not require the feedback and iteration among members that typify collaboration. Although the process of generating the order might require the coordinated work of people in purchasing, accounting, and manufacturing, there is seldom a need for one person to comment on someone else’s work. In fact, involving collaboration in routine, structured decisions is expensive, wasteful, and frustrating. “Do we have to have a meeting about everything?” is a common lament. The situation is different for unstructured decisions because feedback and iteration are crucial. Members bring different ideas and perspectives about what is to be decided, how the decision will be reached, what criteria are important, and how decision alternatives score against those criteria. The group may make tentative conclusions and discuss potential outcomes of those conclusions, and members will often revise their positions. Figure 7-3 illustrates the change in the need for collaboration as decision processes become less structured.

Figure 7-3: Collaboration Needs for Decision Making

Solving problems is the third primary reason for collaborating. A problem is a perceived difference between what is and what ought to be. Because it is a perception, different people can have different problem definitions. Therefore, the first and arguably the most important task for a problem-solving collaborative group is defining the problem. For example, the iMed Analytics team has been assigned the problem of finding ways to increase revenues. As stated, as part of the informing purpose, the group needs first to ensure that the team members understand this goal and have a common understanding of the different ways they could increase revenues. However, because a problem is a difference between what is and what ought to be, the statement “increase revenues” does not go far enough. Is generating $1 enough of an increase? Is generating $100,000 enough? Does it take $1,000,000 for the increase to be enough? A better problem definition would be to increase revenues by 10 percent or by $100,000 or some other more specific statement of what is desired. Figure 7-4 lists the principal problem-solving tasks. Because this text is about information systems and not about problem solving per se, we will not delve into those tasks here. Just note the work that needs to be done, and consider the role of feedback and iteration for each of these tasks.

Managing projects is a rich and complicated subject, with many theories and methods and techniques. Here we will just touch on the collaborative aspects of four primary project phases.

See the Career Guide to learn more about the importance of real-world project management in MIS careers.

Projects are formed to create or produce something. The end goal might be a marketing plan, the design of a new factory, or a new product, or it could be performing the annual audit. Because projects vary so much in nature and size, we will summarize generic project phases here. Figure 7-5 shows project management with four phases, the major tasks of each, and the kinds of data that collaborative teams need to share.

Starting Phase The fundamental purpose of the starting phase is to set the ground rules for the project and the team. In industry, teams need to determine or understand what authority they have. Is the project given to the team? Or is part of the team’s task to identify what the project is? Is the team free to determine team membership, or is membership given? Can the team devise its own methods for accomplishing the project, or is a particular method required? Student teams differ from those in industry because the team’s authority and membership are set by the instructor. However, although student teams do not have the authority to define the project, they do have the authority to determine how that project will be accomplished. Other tasks during the starting phase are to set the scope of the project and to establish an initial budget. Often this budget is preliminary and is revised after the project has been planned. An initial team is formed during this phase with the understanding that team membership may change as the project progresses. It is important to set team member expectations at the outset. What role will each team member play, and what responsibilities and authority will he or she have? Team rules are also established as discussed under decision making. Planning Phase The purpose of the planning phase is to determine “who will do what and by when.” Work activities are defined, and resources such as personnel, budget, and equipment are assigned to them. As you’ll learn when we discuss project management in Lesson 12, tasks can depend on one another. For example, you cannot evaluate alternatives until you have created a list of alternatives to evaluate. In this case, we say that there is a task dependency between the task Evaluate alternatives and the task Create a list of alternatives. The Evaluate alternatives task cannot begin until the completion of the Create a list of alternatives task. Once tasks and resources have been assigned, it is possible to determine the project schedule. If the schedule is unacceptable, more resources can be added to the project or the project scope can be reduced. Risks and complications arise here, however, as will be discussed in Lesson 12. The project budget is usually revised at this point as well. Doing Phase Project tasks are accomplished during the doing phase. The key management challenge here is to ensure that tasks are accomplished on time and, if not, to identify schedule problems as early as possible. As work progresses, it is often necessary to add or delete tasks, change task assignments, add or remove task labor or other resources, and so forth. Another important task is to document and report project progress. Finalizing Phase Are we done? This question is an important and sometimes difficult one to answer. If work is not finished, the team needs to define more tasks and continue the doing phase. If the answer is yes, then the team needs to document its results, document information for future teams, close down the project, and disband the team. Review the third column of Figure 7-5. All of this project data needs to be stored in a location accessible to the team. Furthermore, all of this data is subject to feedback and iteration. That means there will be hundreds, perhaps thousands, of versions of data items to be managed. We will consider ways that collaborative information systems can facilitate the management of such data in Q7-6.

Q7-4 What Are the Requirements for a Collaboration Information System?

As you would expect, a collaboration information system, or, more simply, a collaboration system, is an information system that supports collaboration. In this section, we’ll discuss the components of such a system and use the discussions in Q7-1 and Q7-2 to summarize the requirements for a collaboration IS. A collaboration information system is a practical example of IS, one that you and your teammates can, and should, build. Because you are new to thinking about IS, we begin first with a summary of the five components of such a system, and then we will survey the requirements that teams, including yours, should consider when constructing a collaboration IS.

As information systems, collaboration systems have the five components of every information system: hardware, software, data, procedures, and people. Concerning hardware, every team member needs a device for participating in the group’s work, either a personal computer or a mobile device like an iPad. In addition, because teams need to share data, most collaboration systems store documents and other files on a server like Google Drive or Microsoft OneDrive. Collaboration programs are applications like email or text messaging, Google Docs, Microsoft 365, and other tools that support collaborative work. We will survey those tools in Q7-5 through Q7-7. Regarding the data component, collaboration involves two types. Project data is data that is part of the collaboration’s work product. For example, for a team designing a new product, design documents are examples of project data. A document that describes a recommended solution is project data for a problem-solving project. Project metadata is data used to manage the project. Schedules, tasks, budgets, and other managerial data are examples of project metadata. Both types of data, by the way, are subject to iteration and feedback. Collaboration information systems procedures specify standards, policies, and techniques for conducting the team’s work. An example is procedures for reviewing documents or other work products. To reduce confusion and increase control, the team might establish a procedure that specifies who will review documents and in what sequence. Rules about who can do what to which data are also codified in procedures. Procedures are usually designed by the team; sometimes they need to be adjusted because of limitations in the collaboration tools being used. The final component of a collaboration system is, of course, people. We discussed the importance of the ability to give and receive critical feedback in Q7-1. In addition, team members know how and when to use collaboration applications.

Primary Functions: Communication and Content Sharing

Figure 7-6 shows requirements categorized according to Hackman’s three criteria for team success (discussed in Q7-2). For doing the work on time and on budget, teams need support from their collaboration system to communicate, to manage many versions of content, and to manage tasks. We will discuss tools that support each of those requirements in Q7-5 through Q7-7. Notice that these requirements support iteration and feedback, as you would expect for an IS that supports collaboration. Figure 7-6 also shows requirements for growth in team capability and for creating a meaningful and satisfying experience.

As you will learn, there are numerous alternatives for constructing an IS to meet those requirements. We will investigate three in Q7-8. Then in Collaboration Exercise 7 you will look at the effectiveness—or ineffectiveness—of the collaboration system you created in Collaboration Exercise 1. Doing so will be greatly beneficial because it will allow you to reflect on your collaborative experiences and apply the principles presented in this lesson. It will also give you insights that you can use with other teams, in other courses, and, of course, during your career. Figure 7-7 lists the four purposes of collaboration activities discussed in Q7-3 and summarizes IS requirements for collaboration systems for each purpose. When you analyze your own collaboration IS, first determine the type of effort you are engaged in and then use Figure 7-7 to help you determine your requirements.

Q7-5 How Can You Use Collaboration Tools to Improve Team Communication?

Because of the need to provide feedback, team communication is essential to every collaborative project. In addition to feedback, however, communication is important to manage content, project tasks, and the other requirements shown in Figures 7-6 and 7-7. Developing an effective communication facility is the first thing your team should do, and it is arguably the most important feature of a collaboration IS. The particular tools used depend on the ways that the team communicates, as summarized in Figure 7-8. Synchronous communication occurs when all team members meet at the same time, such as with conference calls or face-to-face meetings. Asynchronous communication occurs when team members do not meet at the same time. Employees who work different shifts at the same location or team members who work in different time zones around the world must meet asynchronously.

 Figure 7-8: Collaboration Tools for Communication

The most primitive way to share content is via email attachments. However, email attachments have numerous problems. For one, there is always the danger that someone does not receive an email, does not notice it in his or her inbox, or does not bother to save the attachments. Then, too, if three users obtain the same document as an email attachment, each changes it, and each sends back the changed document via email, three different, incompatible versions of that document will be floating around. So, although email is simple, easy, and readily available, it will not suffice for collaborations in which there are many document versions or for which there is a desire for content control. Another way to share content is to place it on a shared file server, which is simply a computer that stores files . . . just like the disk in your local computer. If your team has access to a file server at your university, you can put documents on the server and others can download them, make changes, and upload them back onto the server. You can also store files on the cloud servers listed in Figure 7-13. Storing documents on servers is better than using email attachments because documents have a single storage location. They are not scattered in different team members’ email boxes, and team members have a known location for finding documents. However, without any additional control, it is possible for team members to interfere with one another’s work. For example, suppose team members A and B download a document and edit it, but without knowing about the other’s edits. Person A stores his version back on the server and then person B stores her version back on the server. In this scenario, person A’s changes will be lost. Furthermore, without any version management, it will be impossible to know who changed the document and when. Neither person A nor person B will know whose version of the document is on the server. To avoid such problems, some form of version management is recommended.

Shared Content with Version Management on Google Drive

Version management systems improve the tracking of shared content and potentially eliminate problems caused by concurrent document access. They do not, however, provide version control, the process that occurs when the collaboration tool limits, and sometimes even directs, user activity. Version control involves one or more of the following capabilities:

· User activity limited by permissions

· Document checkout

· Version histories

· Workflow control

Microsoft SharePoint is a large, complex, and very robust application for all types of collaboration. It has many features and functions, including all of those just listed. It also contains features for managing tasks, sharing non-Office documents, keeping calendars, publishing blogs, and many more capabilities. Some organizations install SharePoint on their own Windows servers; others access it over the Internet using SharePoint Online. Microsoft 365 Professional and other versions of Microsoft 365 include SharePoint. SharePoint is an industrial-strength product, and if you have an opportunity to use it, by all means learn to do so. SharePoint is used by thousands of businesses, and SharePoint skills are in high demand. Consider the SharePoint implementation of the four functions listed.

Even highly competitive companies can benefit from collaborating. The Security Guide discusses why sharing information about cyberattacks can benefit competing companies.

Permission-Limited Activity With SharePoint (and other version control products), each team member is given an account with a set of permissions. Then shared documents are placed into shared directories, sometimes called libraries. For example, on a shared site with four libraries, a particular user might be given read-only permission for library 1; read and edit permission for library 2; read, edit, and delete permission for library 3; and no permission even to see library 4. Document Checkout With version control applications, document directories can be set up so that users are required to check out documents before they can modify them. When a document is checked out, no other user can obtain it for the purpose of editing it. Once the document has been checked in, other users can obtain it for editing. Figure 7-19 shows a screen for a user of Microsoft SharePoint. The user is checking out the document UMIS 11e Lesson 7 Insert B. Once it has been checked out, the user can edit it and return it to this library. While it is checked out, no other user will be able to edit it, and the user’s changes will not be visible to others.

Figure 7-19: Checking Out a Document

Source: Windows 10, Microsoft Corporation.

With SharePoint, Microsoft manages concurrent updates on office documents (Word, Excel, etc.) and documents need not normally be checked out. In Figure 7-19, the user has checked out an Acrobat PDF (indicated by a green arrow next to the PDF icon), which is not an Office document. Version History Because collaboration involves feedback and iteration, it is inevitable that dozens, or even hundreds, of documents will be created. Imagine, for example, the number of versions of a design document for the Boeing 787. In some cases, collaboration team members attempt to keep track of versions by appending suffixes to file names. The result for a student project is a file name like Project1_lt_kl_092911_most_ recent_draft.docx or something similar. Not only are such names ugly and awkward, no team member can tell whether this is the most current version. Collaboration tools that provide version control have the data to readily provide histories on behalf of the users. When a document is changed (or checked in), the collaboration tool records the name of the author and the date and time the document is stored. Users also have the option of recording notes about their version. Workflow Control Collaboration tools that provide workflow control manage activities in a predefined process. If, for example, a group wants documents to be reviewed and approved by team members in a particular sequence, the group would define that workflow to the tool. Then the workflow is started, and the emails to manage the process are sent as defined. For example, Figure 7-20 shows a SharePoint workflow in which the group defined a document review process that involves a sequence of reviews by three people. Given this definition, when a document is submitted to a library, SharePoint assigns a task to the first person, Joseph Schumpeter, to approve the document and sends an email to him to that effect. Once he has completed his review (the green checkmark means that he has already done so), SharePoint assigns a task for and sends an email to Adam Smith to approve the document. When all three reviewers have completed their review, SharePoint marks the document as approved. If any of the reviewers disapprove, the document is marked accordingly and the workflow is terminated.

Figure 7-20: Example Workflow

Source: Windows 10, Microsoft Corporation.

cribeListen

 Figure 7-12: Example Survey Report

Source: Windows 10, Microsoft Corporation.

Video and audio recordings are also useful for asynchronous communication. Key presentations or discussions can be recorded and played back for team members at their convenience. Such recordings are also useful for training new employees

Q7-7 How Can You Use Collaboration Tools to Manage Tasks?

As you will learn in project management classes, one of the keys for making team progress is keeping a current task list. Good project managers make sure that every team meeting ends with an updated list of tasks, including who is responsible for getting each task done and the date by which he or she will get it done. We’ve all been to meetings in which many good ideas were discussed, even agreed upon, but nothing happened after the meeting. When teams create and manage task lists, the risks of such nonaction diminish. Managing with a task list is critical for making progress. Task descriptions need to be specific and worded so it is possible to decide whether the task was accomplished. “Create a good requirements document” is not an effective, testable task description, unless all team members already know what is supposed to be in a good requirements document. A better task would be “Define the contents of the requirements document for the XYZ project.” In general, one person should be made responsible for accomplishing a task. That does not mean that the assigned person does the task; it means that he or she is responsible for ensuring that it gets done. Finally, no benefit will come from this list unless every task has a date by which it is to be completed. Further, team leaders need to follow up on tasks to ensure they are done by that date. Without accountability and follow-up, there is no task management. As you’ll learn in your project management classes, you can add other data to the task list. You might want to add critical resources that are required, and you might want to specify tasks that need to be finished before a given task can be started. We will discuss such task dependencies further in Lesson 12, when we discuss the management of systems development projects. For team members to utilize the task list effectively, they need to share it. In this question, we will consider two options: sharing a task spreadsheet on Google Drive and using the task list feature in Microsoft SharePoint. Google gmail and Calendar also have a task list feature, but as of this writing, it is impossible to share it with others, so it is not useful for collaboration.

Sharing a task list on Google Drive is simple. To do so, every team member needs to obtain a Google account. Then one team member can create a team folder and share it with the rest of the team, giving everyone edit permission on documents that it contains. One of the team members then creates a task spreadsheet in that folder. Figure 7-21 shows a sample task list containing the name of each task, the name of the person to whom it is assigned, the date it is due, the task’s status, and remarks. Because every member of the team has edit permission, everyone can contribute to this task list. Google Drive will allow simultaneous edits. Because Google Drive tracks version history, it will be possible, if necessary, to learn who made which changes to the task list.

Figure 7-21: Sample Task List Using Google Drive

Source: ©2020 Google LLC, used with permission. Google and the Google logo are registered trademarks of Google LLC.

Setting up such a list is easy, and having such a list greatly facilitates project management. The key for success is to keep it current and to use it to hold team members accountable.

SharePoint includes a built-in content type for managing task lists that provides robust and powerful features. The standard task list can be readily modified to include user-customized columns, and many different views can be constructed to show the list in different ways for different users. Like the rest of SharePoint, its task lists are industrial-strength. Figure 7-22 shows a task list that we used for the production of this text. The first three columns are built-in columns that SharePoint provides. The last column, named Book Title, is the book for which the task was assigned. For example, UMIS stands for the book titled Using MIS. When one of our team members opens this site, the view of the task list shown in Figure 7-23 is displayed. The tasks in this view are sorted by Due Date value and are filtered on the value of Task Status so any task that has been completed is not shown. Hence, this is a to-do list. Another view of this list, shown in Figure 7-24, includes only those tasks in which Status equals Completed. That view is a “what we’ve done so far” list.

Figure 7-22: UMIS Production Task List in SharePoint

Source: Windows 10, Microsoft Corporation.

Figure 7-23: UMIS To-Do List in SharePoint

Source: Windows 10, Microsoft Corporation.

Figure 7-24: UMIS Completed Tasks in SharePoint

Source: Windows 10, Microsoft Corporation.

Alerts are one of the most useful features in SharePoint task lists. Using alerts, team members can request SharePoint to send emails when certain events occur. Our team sets alerts so SharePoint sends a team member an email whenever a task is created that is assigned to him or her. We also have SharePoint send alerts to a task’s creator whenever a task is modified. SharePoint task lists provide features and functions that are far superior to the spreadsheet shown in Figure 7-21. Again, if you can obtain access to SharePoint, you should strongly consider using it, a possibility we address in the next question.

Q7-8 Which Collaboration IS Is Right for Your Team?

Your MIS class will help you gain knowledge and skills that you’ll use throughout your business career. But why wait? You can benefit from this knowledge right now and put it to use tonight. Most business courses involve a team project; why not use what you’ve learned to construct a collaboration IS that will make teamwork easier and can help your team achieve a better product? In this question, we will define and set up your evaluation of three sets of collaboration tools.

Figure 7-25 summarizes three different sets of collaboration tools that you might use.

The Minimal Collaboration Tool Set The first, the Minimal set, has the minimum possible set of tools and is shown in the second column of Figure 7-25. With this set, you should be able to collaborate with your team, though you will get little support from the software. In particular, you will need to manage concurrent access by setting up procedures and agreements to ensure that one user’s work doesn’t conflict with another’s. Your collaboration will be with text only; you will not have access to audio or video so you cannot hear or see your collaborators. You also will not be able to view documents or whiteboards during your meeting. This set is probably close to what you’re already doing. The Good Collaboration Tool Set The second set, the Good set, shown in the third column of Figure 7-25, shows a more sophisticated set of collaboration tools. With it, you will have the ability to conduct multiparty audio and video virtual meetings, and you will also have support for concurrent access to document, spreadsheet, and presentation files. You will not be able to support surveys, wikis, and blogs and share pictures and videos with this set. If you want any of them, you will need to search the Internet to find suitable tools. The Comprehensive Collaboration Tool Set The third set of collaboration tools, the Comprehensive set, is shown in the last column of Figure 7-25. You can obtain this tool set with certain versions of Microsoft 365. However, Microsoft continually revises the versions and what’s included in them, so you’ll need to investigate which version provides the features of the comprehensive tool set. Look for a version (perhaps a free trial) that includes all the products shown in Figure 7-26. If your school has adopted Microsoft 365 for Education, then you should be able to obtain these features for free.

This set is the best of these three because it includes content management and control, workflow control, and online meetings with sharing as just described. Furthermore, this set is integrated; SharePoint alerts can send emails via the Microsoft email server Exchange when tasks or other lists and libraries change. You can click on users’ names in emails or in SharePoint, and Microsoft 365 will automatically start a Skype for Business text, audio, or video conversation with that user if he or she is currently available. All text messages you send via Skype for Business are automatically recorded and stored in your email folder.

Choosing the Set for Your Team

Which set should you choose for your team? Unless your university has already standardized on the Microsoft 365 version you need, you will have to pay for it. You can obtain a 30-day free trial, and if your team can finish its work in that amount of time, you might choose to do so. Otherwise, your team will need to pay a minimum of $10 per month per user. So, if cost is the only factor, you can rule out the comprehensive tool set. And even if you can afford the most comprehensive set, you may not want to use it. As noted in Figure 7-25, team members need to be willing to invest something on the order of 3 hours to begin to use the basic features. Less time, on the order of an hour, will be required to learn to use the Good tool set, and you most likely already know how to use the Minimal set. When evaluating learning time, consider Figure 7-27. This diagram is a product power curve, which is a graph that shows the relationship of the power (the utility that one gains from a software product) as a function of the time using that product. A flat line means you are investing time without any increase in power. The ideal power curve starts at a positive value at time zero and has no flat spots.

Figure 7-27: Product Power Curve

The Minimal product set gives you some power at time zero because you already know how to use it. However, as you use it over time, your project will gain complexity and the problems of controlling concurrent access will actually cause power to decrease. The Good set has a short flat spot as you get to know it. However, your power then increases over time until you reach the most capability your team can do with it. The Comprehensive set has a longer flat spot in the beginning because it will take longer to learn. However, because it has such a rich collaboration feature set, you will be able to gain considerable collaborative power, much more so than the Good set, and the maximum capability is much greater than the Good set. Finally, consider the next-to-last row in Figure 7-25. The Minimal set has no value to you as a future professional and contributes nothing to your professional competitive advantage. The Good set has some limited value; as you know, there are organizations that use Google Drive and Meet. The Comprehensive set has the potential to give you a considerable competitive advantage, particularly because SharePoint skills are highly valued in industry. You can use knowledge of it to demonstrate the currency of your knowledge in job interviews.

One last and very important point: Most of this lesson focuses on collaboration tools, the software component of an information system. Regarding the other four components, you need not worry about hardware, at least not for the Good or Comprehensive sets, because those tools are hosted on hardware in the cloud. The data component is up to you; it will be your content as well as your metadata for project management and for demonstrating that your team practiced iteration and feedback. As you evaluate alternatives, however, you need to think seriously about the procedure and people components. How are team members going to use these tools? Your team needs to have agreement on tools usage, even if you do not formally document procedures. As noted, such procedures are especially necessary for controlling concurrent access in the minimal system. You need to have agreement not only on how to use these tools but also on what happens when teammates don’t use these tools. What will you do, for example, if teammates persist in emailing documents instead of using Google Drive or SharePoint? Additionally, how will your team train its members in the use of these tools? Will you divvy up responsibility for learning features and then teach the skills to one another? You will find a plethora of training materials on the Web.5 But who will find them, learn them, and then teach the others? Finally, does your team need to create any special jobs or roles? Do you want to identify, for example, someone to monitor your shared documents to ensure that deliverables are stored appropriately? Do you want someone identified to store minutes of meetings? Or to remove completed tasks from a task list? Or to keep the task list in agreement with current planning? Consider these and similar needs and, if needed, appoint such a person before problems develop. Remember this example as a future business professional: In commerce, we are never selecting just software; to put that software to use as a system, we need to create all five of the IS components!

Q7-9 2031?

Collaboration in 2031 will look much different than it does today. What workers do, how they do it, and why they do it are changing rapidly. The worldwide coronavirus lockdown that occurred in 2020 forced nearly everyone to learn how to work from home. Remote collaboration became mandatory, with most workers given a week’s notice to entirely change the way they did their work. Organizations changed overnight too. The quarantine lockdown made remote work acceptable and discouraged large group work. Other changes to how people collaborate are happening just as quickly. For example, consider a person who works as an Uber driver. That type of a job didn’t exist 20 years ago. Yes, cab companies did exist, and they still do. But a non-employee driver giving customers rides during his or her free time didn’t. There wasn’t an app for that. Workers in 2031 may be independent contractors or part of the gig economy, in which businesses hire many people as independent contractors for a short period of time. These short-term employees can work remotely over high-speed Internet connections. Collaboration among these types of employees will become even more important. This same Uber driver is also part of the sharing economy, where consumers can temporarily share their assets or services with other consumers via renting or lending. This collaborative consumption allows the Uber driver to earn income from an otherwise idle unproductive asset. Enabling the collaboration between consumers has spawned companies like Uber, Airbnb, and DogVacay. By 2031, collaborative consumption will be even more important. Consider that Airbnb is the largest hotel chain in the world. And it doesn’t own a single hotel property. By 2031, the way people collaborate will be different. Physical face-to-face (F2F) meetings might be rare, and holographic face-to-face meetings could be commonplace. High-speed ubiquitous network connections will make collaboration systems cheaper, faster, and easier to use. A surge in augmented reality (AR) glasses and 3D applications may make it possible for workers to holographically collaborate face-to-face from locations around the world. That might sound impossible at first. But consider how AR glasses are going to change the workplace. Holograms are cheap, take up little space, use little energy, and can be upgraded immediately. Employers may not buy physical monitors anymore. They may opt for a mixed-reality workspace where some objects are real and others are holograms in order to reduce costs. The same is true for all physical office objects—and employees. Microsoft’s demonstration of “holoportation” showed how people can interact with 3D holographic representations of other people. During the demonstration, detailed 3D holograms of remote users were created in a separate physical space using HoloLens and several 3D cameras. Individuals in another room could see and hear everything the remote users did as if they were physically standing right in the same room. But the person holoporting to work may be physically located across town or even in another country. By 2031, you may be working with mixed-reality coworkers. Some may be real, and others may be holograms. Workers may come from different countries. Employers will get all the benefits of face-to-face interactions at a much lower cost. Remote holographic (virtual) collaboration may boost companies’ bottom lines. Think about all the costs that go away with virtual collaboration. No more expensive business air travel, waiting in TSA lines, sitting next to sick people on a plane, checking into hotels, sitting in traffic, burning fuel, waiting in lobbies, or riding in elevators. By 2031, collaboration systems will greatly ease international business. If teams meet virtually most of the time and if it doesn’t matter where team members are located, then projects can involve the best—or perhaps the most affordable—workers worldwide. From an employee’s point of view, virtual work will be great. Getting a new job will be easy, but losing a job will be easy, too. The smartest, most talented knowledge workers will compete for jobs around the world. Because of these trends, now is a great time for you to learn online, asynchronous collaboration skills. It’s also a good time for you, as a future knowledge worker, to prepare yourself for global opportunities . . . and global competition. By 2031, you may be collaborating with people you’ve never met in person. And none of the people on your team may actually work for the company signing your paychecks! You’ll be able to work anywhere in the world and do it all from your home office—wherever you want that to be.

So What? Zoombombing

Today, we take for granted a variety of innovations that were just not technically feasible for most people a decade or two ago. Videoconferencing is one of these innovations. Before the advent of videoconferencing, businesses were forced to rely on either simple phone calls or business travel. Simple telephone calls don’t have the rich nonverbal behaviors like facial expressions, gestures, and posture that come with videoconferencing. And business travel is much more expensive than videoconferencing. Over the past several years, video calling platforms have not only become more widespread, but they have drastically improved in terms of stability, video quality, handling multiple concurrent callers, support for mobile devices, and other improved features. Some of these features include screensharing, participant interaction tools (real-time feedback cues like raising hands to ask questions), the ability to form smaller subgroup meetings within larger group meetings, and options to record meetings for review purposes or for those unable to attend. Zoom is a publicly traded company that emerged as a leading communications and collaboration platform provider for enterprises during the 2010s. It started in 2011 and steadily gained customers, business-to-business partnerships, and integrations with other products before the company went public in 2019 with an IPO valuation of $16 billion. While Zoom was clearly having success, no one could have anticipated the rapid growth that would occur in 2020 in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. As stay-at-home and shelter-in-place orders were issued by countries around the world, many types of organizations, including corporations and universities, scrambled to find online platforms that could support business and education processes. Traditional face-to-face interactions, upon which they used to rely, were no longer an option. The customer base of Zoom skyrocketed in early 2020. Installs of the Zoom app rose 1,126 percent in March 2020.6 Hundreds of millions of new users, many of whom were not technologically savvy, were suddenly in charge of managing virtual meetings, virtual classrooms, and virtual boardrooms. While this transition to virtual meeting spaces could have been predicted by some due to the looming crisis, what was not predictable was the rampant use of this specific video calling platform for anonymously trolling, disrupting, and spreading offensive and hateful information in meetings.

Source: F8 studio/Shutterstock

Productivity, Please Hold . . . As organizations made the transition to Zoom in early 2020, warnings started circulating about a new trend: Zoombombing (also referred to as Zoom raiding). Zoombombing is the act of joining a Zoom meeting and sharing shocking, offensive, or even explicit pornographic content with the other attendees.7 This behavior could be accomplished by yelling offensive statements into a microphone, using the screensharing functionality to display graphic or offensive content from the Zoombomber’s desktop, or even changing the virtual background imagery of the Zoombomber to something offensive. For non-savvy meeting hosts, muting the perpetrator or booting them from the meeting entirely could be difficult (especially in a flustered state). In an unfortunate case of irony, Zoom was intentionally designed so that meeting attendees could easily join the session with few steps or obstacles (what Zoom referred to as being “frictionless”). This very functionality is what ultimately permitted Zoombombers to be uninvited yet so easily access sessions to accomplish their malicious goals. Furthermore, this activity was not simply conducted by a handful of random individuals; rather, one investigation found numerous social media accounts, chat rooms, and message boards that were being used to organize thousands of individuals interested in participating.8 Restoring Order in the Zoo(m) In response to this new threat, Zoom curtailed development of new functionality in the platform to focus on shoring up security and privacy controls. In April 2020, Zoom enabled the virtual waiting room feature for all meetings (even meetings that had already been created and scheduled without this feature enabled) and enabled password functionality. The waiting room feature allows meeting hosts to view all of the attendees standing by to join the meeting before actually letting them enter the virtual meeting space. The waiting room feature was available previously but was not mandated for all meetings. Other strategies that were encouraged for protecting Zoom meetings included using new meetings IDs for each meeting, disabling features like joining before the host, and locking meetings once all invited attendees had joined. Aside from making it more difficult for Zoombombers to gain access to meetings, law enforcement authorities (e.g., the Federal Bureau of Investigation10) also warned potential perpetrators that there could be legal ramifications for their behavior. As with many activities in the cyberworld, immoral or unethical behaviors often do not have existing legal penalties or precedents for punishing that type of behavior. Only time will tell if these new measures, and threats from authorities will ease the tide of harassment that has now invaded our digital meeting spaces. Questions

1. Why do you think malicious individuals targeted Zoom? Do you see any parallels between Zoom and Windows?  Show Answer

2. Are you aware of any other types of malicious digital activities that took place during the COVID-19 pandemic?  Show Answer

3. Were you or anyone you know impacted by cybercrime or nefarious digital actors during the COVID-19 pandemic? What happened?  Show Answer

4. Why are online criminal activities so difficult to prosecute?  Show Answer

Security Guide Exploiting Covid-19

The COVID-19 pandemic was the first global medical crisis of its kind in roughly a century. Despite early glimpses of how the virus could wreak havoc on medical infrastructures and disrupt daily life in both China and Italy, many countries still found themselves flat-footed in their efforts to prepare for the ominous wave of disaster that would soon reach their shores. Real-time newsfeeds of the impacts of COVID-19 were unsettling: deserted metropolitan city centers, stock market closures with record-setting losses, overwhelmed and undersupplied medical workers facing ethical dilemmas on how to appropriate life-saving resources, pleadings from politicians for supplies and testing equipment in an effort to understand and thereby contain the spread, images of empty shelves in stores and reports of hoarding, allegations of individuals shucking off shelter-in-place orders so they could continue congregating in large groups, and on and on. While it is hard to imagine that this situation could have been any worse, it is horrifying to realize that nefarious digital actors used the COVID-19 pandemic as an opportunity to exploit society with a barrage of cyberattacks. The following are just some of the attacks that were launched during this already-difficult time.

Source: Ozrimoz/Shutterstock

Fake Domains If you want to build a website, you can do it in an afternoon. A number of services allow you to quickly and easily register a domain name (e.g., www.johndoe.com) and load content to the site by employing a user-friendly graphical user interface (GUI). While many hackers are sophisticated and do not need these types of tools to create a site, the point is that registering a domain name and creating a website is exceptionally easy. At the end of February and in early March 2020, there was a 10-fold surge in the number of coronavirus website domains that were registered (relative to the preceding weeks and months). It was reported that 93 of the sites in this surge were found to be malicious and more than 2,000 sites were identified as being suspicious.11 By the end of March 2020 there had been 16,000 new COVID-19-related domains registered in just the previous 3 weeks.12 Specifically, one fraudulent site was designed to be a mirror image of the “Coronavirus COVID-19 Global Cases by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University (JHU)” site. This site was the go-to resource for media outlets to report statistics on confirmed cases, deaths, and total recovered. The fraudulent site that was created to exploit the popularity of the legitimate site was crafted to scrape usernames, passwords, and credit card numbers of visitors who had these data stored in their browsers.13 Phishing Attacks You are likely already familiar with the basic premise of a phishing attack: attackers disguise an attack in the form of a legitimate message that includes a call to action. The call to action usually takes the form of a link that the recipient is encouraged to click on or a file attachment that the recipient is encouraged to download. A key element of phishing attacks is creating a sense of urgency (e.g., “Your work email account’s memory space is at capacity—click this link to free up additional space or you will no longer receive new messages!!!”). Hackers love to take advantage of high-profile and high-stakes current events as the sense of urgency they are trying to create in these messages can be heightened during emergencies. With the arrival of COVID-19, attackers began launching a variety of phishing attacks to exploit very targeted groups. Healthcare providers were targeted with emails that appeared to be from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC); these messages were sent with malware attachments. Another email scam was used to distribute a malicious Word attachment that was claimed to include guidelines on how to prevent the virus from spreading. Hospitals also expressed concern about phishing attacks centered on the procurement of medical supplies and personal protective equipment (PPE) (e.g., “New inventory just in—click here to order N95 masks and respirators now!!!”). Malicious Goods Just like phishing attacks try to leverage emergency situations to heighten a sense of urgency in targets, hackers selling attack kits and criminal services online also used the COVID-19 outbreak to drive up sales. It is not general knowledge that the dark Web serves as an obscure marketplace for buying and selling hacking tools. Shoppers who may be lacking legitimate technical skills can go to the dark Web to purchase automated hacking tools that allow them to carry out much more sophisticated attacks than they would be able to carry out otherwise. It was reported during the pandemic that hackers were offering reduced fees for services (e.g., breaking into Facebook accounts) and were giving 10 percent discounts on hacking toolkits when shoppers used COVID-19 coupon codes.15 In other words, criminals peddling hacking tools used the pandemic as an opportunity to make money and thereby make our highly connected digital ecosystem even more infected. We can use all of these examples as a lesson that we must be vigilant in protecting ourselves against cybercriminals, especially when there is turmoil elsewhere in the world. Discussion Questions

1. Have you or someone you know become the victim of a phishing attack? What mechanisms did the attacker use to get the victim to fulfill the call to action? What was the outcome of the attack?  Show Answer

2. One measure used to slow the infection rate of COVID-19 was the order to shelter in place. This forced many workers to begin working from home. How does this new working format introduce security risks to organizations?  Show Answer

3. What can be done to help reduce some of the risks identified in your response to question 3?  Show Answer

4. If the dark Web is such a hotbed of criminal activity for hackers, why isn’t it shut down, or at least, why aren’t the criminals arrested and prosecuted?  Show Answer

Career Guide

· Name: Christi Wruck

· Company: Instructure

· Job Title: Software Product Manager

· Education: University of Utah

Source: Christi Wruck, Instructure, Software Product Manager

1. How did you get this type of job? I hired a friend who was working at Instructure Inc. at the time to come work for me. A few months later, that person decided to go back to Instructure. I asked them to take me with them . . . and they did.

2. What attracted you to this field? I was working in a different field but was regularly considered the resident techie. I built websites and databases and set up networks and systems for the nonprofits that employed me. I was good at it, and I enjoyed it. So I decided to move into this field.

3. What does a typical workday look like for you (duties, decisions, problems)? I spend a lot of time defining and documenting user problems. To do that, I talk to users on phone calls, I travel for site visits, and I engage in our user forums. I gather feedback from employees who frequently engage our clients. Once the problems are well documented, I work with a design team to try and solve the problems in innovative ways. Then we test with our users and iterate until we find the best solution. Once a solution is finalized, it’s handed off to engineering to execute.

4. What do you like most about your job? The best part of my job is doing site visits. Being able to see the pain points that users experience every day is incredibly valuable. There are some insights that can’t be gained via email or forums or phone calls. Watching users has proven to be the most inspiring and motivating part of my job.

5. What skills would someone need to do well at your job? Empathy, social skills, and curiosity. You have to be comfortable talking to strangers, and they need to trust you to solve their problems. If you are naturally curious and genuinely want to solve your users’ problems, you will ask the right questions that help you gain the insights you need to solve their problems with innovative solutions.

6. Are education or certifications important in your field? Why? Half of the product team I work with has a master’s degree. And I’ve never met a product manager who doesn’t have an undergraduate degree. So I guess the answer is yes. I think having a clear understanding of how business operates and how software engineering works is extremely important for a software product manager.

7. What advice would you give to someone who is considering working in your field? Study agile, UX/UI design, project management, and scrum, and learn how to write at least a little bit of code.

8. What do you think will be hot tech jobs in 10 years? Software engineering. Especially in the United States. The rest of the world is already leaps and bounds ahead of us in this department. A lot of people understand a little bit about code, but we need a lot more people who are experts and pioneers in the field.

Ethics Guide

Halt and Catch-22 Sophie walked out of the elevator and entered the office’s common workspace with her usual zeal. Her colleagues always joked about her being the quintessential summer intern—full of energy, enthusiasm, and naivete. But their teasing didn’t bother her—since taking several information systems courses during the previous school year, she finally knew that she wanted to focus on technology as a central part of her career.

Source: Scharfsinn/Shutterstock

Luckily, she had found a summer internship working for a local startup. The main focus of this company was developing new types of sensor fusion technologies that major car manufacturers could use in the mass production of self-driving cars. While the auto companies certainly had the core elements of a vehicle mastered (e.g., engines, drivetrains, etc.), the new systems and sensors that self-driving cars would require to “see the road” were out of their purview. The extra bounce in Sophie’s step today was due to the fact that this would be her first test drive in a self-driving car. The company had just finished creating prototypes of its latest sensors, and all of the modeling and simulating had been completed with promising results. The next phase of the development cycle required an actual road test to see how a sensor would perform in a real world-environment. Sophie and one of the developers grabbed a set of keys and walked down to the garage. While the parking area was mainly filled with employee vehicles, there was a special section for the company’s small fleet of test vehicles. Sophie always liked to joke around and refer to the cars as Ecto-1, since all of the lights and sensors on top of the cars’ roofs made the cars look like the Ectomobile from the popular Ghostbusters movies. Meryl, the developer who would be sitting in the driver’s seat, affixed the sensor to the appropriate spot on the hood and plugged it in. She explained to Sophie that the sensor they would be testing today was designed to help the vehicle “see” the density of objects and hazards in the road more intelligently and allow the car to discern between the risks posed by a large rock in the road (abort, abort!) versus a paper bag (full steam ahead!). Upon starting the car, all of the diagnostics checked out—they were ready to hit the road! Look Ma, No Hands! Sophie had to admit that it was weird sitting in a car that was hurtling down the road without anyone touching the wheel. Meryl was constantly looking at the various screens in the vehicle to check how the sensor was performing—every time a car merged in front of them, Sophie clutched the armrest a bit tighter. She was constantly worried that the car wouldn’t see hazards in time and adjust its speed appropriately. As they turned onto State Street, Sophie looked over and asked, “How is the sound system in this thing?” Before they had time to laugh, a landscaping truck towing a trailer cut into their lane—the trailer was so close it looked like it was going to clip the front bumper. The self-driving car abruptly cut the tires to the right, and the car rocketed over a sidewalk and into the front yard of a contemporary home. As Sophie unbuckled her seat belt and opened the door to get out, she noticed that the landscapers had also pulled over and parked. The homeowner had heard the noise too and was coming out to investigate. In a matter of minutes, a small group had converged in the front yard near the car. A quick assessment of the vehicles revealed that no damage had been done to either the self-driving car or the landscaping truck/trailer. The yard, however, was a different story. A number of prized Japanese maples had been turned into mangled piles of sticks, and with the abrupt braking of the self-driving car, about 20 yards of grass and mulch beds had been torn up from the car sliding to a stop. The homeowner sighed and in a snarky voice queried, “Well, who is responsible so that I can be sure to send you my landscaping bill?” Sophie and Meryl looked at the landscapers, hoping they would recognize their reckless lane change and accept responsibility—they spoke, but it was not what they wanted to hear. “I think it is clear who is responsible—it is that newfangled Batmobile of a car that is sitting in the middle of your yard! If they can’t make a toaster that won’t burn my toast, how can they make a car that drives itself without killing someone? I would hate to pay for that landscaping bill. Based on my experience, this looks like about $2,500 of trees, bushes, and labor.” Seeing that the landscapers were trying to push the blame, Meryl decided the best bet would be to call the police and file an incident report. They would sit in the car until the cops arrived and not say another word. They both got in the car and sat down, still shaking from the accident. Sophie looked at Meryl with a concerned expression, and said, “We better not get a ticket. I mean, how could we get a ticket? Neither of us were even driving, technically speaking. How can they give us a ticket for just sitting in the car? On second thought, if this is ‘our’ fault, who really is to blame? This vehicle is the result of a massive collaborative effort between numerous companies: software developers, hardware developers, analytics and artificial intelligence experts, and so on. Did our car make a bad choice because a sensor failed, or was it an algorithm interpreting the data incorrectly that made the wrong choice?” Meryl looked out the side window and shook her head. She finally said: “I don’t know. Let’s just talk to the police—maybe they will know whom to blame. If not, maybe we can take them back to the office to help us sort his out.” Discussion Questions

1. Consider the accident described in this article and assume a hypothetical outcome that Meryl is given a ticket and assigned blame for the accident (even though she wasn’t actually driving the car).

a. Is this outcome ethical according to the categorical imperative?

b. Is this outcome ethical according to the utilitarian perspective?

2. Self-driving cars are continuing to be developed and tested, and experts believe that their widespread adoption and use are inevitable. In the case of an accident involving a self-driving car, who should be to blame?

3. Do you think the police officer(s) responding to the scene will be able to sort out the liable party? Why or why not? How does this dynamic generalize to other contexts/scenarios in which governments and law enforcement agencies are asked to govern technology and the outcomes stemming from new innovations?

4. Take a few minutes to do an Internet search on the “trolley problem.” Imagine that a pedestrian had been in the path of the car’s exit route to avoid hitting the landscaping truck/trailer. Also, factor in that the self-driving car determined that braking to avoid the landscaping truck/trailer would not be possible and that a collision would sustain serious damage (with injuries likely). Be prepared to discuss the trolley problem as it relates to self-driving cars and this hypothetical outcome.

Active Review

Use this Active Review to verify that you understand the ideas and concepts that answer the lesson’s study questions.

· Q7-1 What are the two key characteristics of collaboration? In your own words, explain the difference between cooperation and collaboration. Name the two key characteristics of collaboration and explain how they improve group work. Describe how effectively giving and taking constructive criticism can help avoid groupthink. Summarize important skills for collaborators and list what you believe are the best ways to give and receive critical feedback.

· Q7-2 What are three criteria for successful collaboration? Name and describe three criteria for collaboration success. Summarize how these criteria differ between student and professional teams.

· Q7-3 What are the four primary purposes of collaboration? Name and describe four primary purposes of collaboration. Explain their relationship. Describe ways that collaboration systems can contribute to each purpose.

· Q7-4 What are the requirements for a collaboration information system? Name and describe the five components of a collaboration information system. Summarize the primary requirements for collaboration information systems and relate those requirements to the need for iteration and feedback as well as the three criteria for successful collaboration.

· Q7-5 How can you use collaboration tools to improve team communication? Explain why communication is important to collaboration. Define synchronous and asynchronous communication and explain when each is used. Name two collaboration tools that can be used to help set up synchronous meetings. Describe collaboration tools that can be used for face-to-face meetings. Describe tools that can be used for virtual, synchronous meetings. Describe tools that can be used for virtual, asynchronous meetings.

· Q7-6 How can you use collaboration tools to manage shared content? Summarize alternatives for processing Office documents on the desktop as well as over the Internet. Describe two ways that content is shared with no control and explain the problems that can occur. Explain the difference between version management and version control. Describe how user accounts, passwords, and libraries are used to control user activity. Explain how check-in/checkout works. Describe workflows and give an example.

· Q7-7 How can you use collaboration tools to manage tasks? Explain why managing tasks is important to team progress. Demonstrate how a task should be described. List the minimal content of a task list. Summarize the advantages and disadvantages of using a spreadsheet and Microsoft SharePoint for managing tasks.

· Q7-8 Which collaboration IS is right for your team? Describe the three collaboration tool sets described and indicate how each meets the minimum requirements for collaboration. Explain the differences among them. Summarize the criteria for choosing the right set for your team. Explain the meaning of the power curve and discuss the power curve for each of the three alternatives described.

· Q7-9 2031? Define sharing economy and gig economy and explain why they will make collaboration skills increasingly necessary. Explain why F2F meetings are expensive in both cost and time. Explain why mixed-reality workspaces might be desirable. Describe how holoportation may change collaboration. Summarize the ways collaboration systems reduce the costs and difficulties of international business. Explain how collaboration systems are changing the scope of workers with whom you will compete. If you disagree with any of the conclusions in this 2031, explain how and why.

Using Your Knowledge with iMed Analytics Reread the iMed Analytics scenario at the start of this lesson. Using the knowledge you’ve gained from this lesson, explain how this team could use collaboration tools to complete the tasks assigned to them by Dr. Greg Solomon as well as result in better communication and higher-quality results for the team as a whole.

Using Your Knowledge

· 7-1. Reflect on your experience working on teams in previous classes as well as on collaborative teams in other settings, such as a campus committee. To what extent was your team collaborative? Did it involve feedback and iteration? If so, how? How did you use collaborative information systems, if at all? If you did not use collaborative information systems, describe how you think such systems might have improved your work methods and results. If you did use collaborative information systems, explain how you could improve on that use, given the knowledge you have gained from this lesson.

· 7-2. Using your experience working in past teams, give examples of unhelpful feedback according to the guidelines for providing critical feedback in Q7-1. Correct your examples to a more productive and helpful comment.

· 7-3. Using a past team project from your own experience, summarize how your team conducted the four phases (starting, planning, doing, and finalizing) in Q7-3. Evaluate how your team conducted problem-solving, decision-making, and informing activities. Rate your past team on Hackman’s criteria as discussed in Q7-2.

· 7-4. This exercise requires you to experiment with Microsoft OneDrive. You will need two Office IDs to complete this exercise. The easiest way to do it is to work with a classmate. If that is not possible, set up two Office accounts using two different Outlook.com addresses.

If someone gave you a penny every 2 seconds, how much money would you make in a year? Well, you would make $0.30 every minute. In an hour you would make $18. In a day you would make $432. In a month you would make $12,960. In a year you would make more than $155,000. All for earning just a penny every 2 seconds. Every 2 seconds someone books an Airbnb room. (One Mississippi . . . two Mississippi ...) There, someone just booked one again! It’s not hard to see why Airbnb is a $25 billion company. In fact, Airbnb is the largest hotel chain in the world. It’s even bigger than the next five largest hotel brands combined.16 And it doesn’t own a single hotel property.

From Airbeds to Billions

Airbnb is a business based on sharing. This has been referred to as collaborative consumption. Consumers can temporarily share their assets with other consumers via renting or lending. Companies like Airbnb help consumers find each other, and they charge a fee for this service. Airbnb founder Joe Gebbia said, “What we’re doing with Airbnb feels like the nexus of everything that is right. We’re helping people be more resourceful with the space they already have and we’re connecting people around the world.”17 Effectively using idle resources is key to understanding the success behind Airbnb. In a recent TEDx Talk, urban planner Darren Cotton noted that the average power drill is used for only 12 to 13 minutes in its entire life. If true, why buy one? Why not rent or borrow one? The same is true of underutilized space in people’s homes. Airbnb logs more than 100 million stays per year in spaces that would have otherwise remained unused. Thanks to Airbnb, consumers are now able to generate income from their previously unused spaces by temporarily renting to other consumers. Imagine if this were also done with cars (Uber), pets (DogVacay), or loans (Lending Club). Collaborative consumption can be applied to many types of underutilized assets if done effectively. A big part of collaborative consumption is feedback. Feedback in the accommodation industry, for example, gives consumers insight and understanding into the places they want to rent on Airbnb. After people book a room and stay there, they are encouraged to give feedback on their experience. If guests have a great experience, they may be inclined to give the host good reviews. Good reviews may encourage future guests to book rooms. Likewise, if feedback is negative and the reviews are poor, future guests may not book rooms there in the future. Hosts use the feedback to improve the experience for future guests. Questions

· 7-9. Airbnb launched its website and started renting rooms in 2008. But the Internet had been widely used starting in 1995. Why did it take 13 years for someone to start a company like Airbnb? Were there technological, social, or economic factors that kept this concept from becoming successful before 2008? Why didn’t any of the existing large technology companies like Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, or Facebook start a company like Airbnb? Show Answer

· 7-10. Many successful companies are started to fulfill a need. What need did Airbnb fill? Why weren’t hotels fulfilling this need? Are hotels and Airbnb fulfilling the same need, or are they offering different products for different needs? Would consumers use both traditional hotels and Airbnb for different purposes? Why? Show Answer

· 7-11. Suppose you work for a large investing firm. Your boss asks you to determine the value of Airbnb as a company because he plans on buying stock in its upcoming initial public offering (IPO).

a. How would you determine its value? Show Answer

b. Would you value Airbnb like a hotel chain, a tech startup, or another type of company? Show Answer

c. How would you determine Airbnb’s future growth potential? Could it expand into other markets? Which ones? Show Answer

· 7-12. Describe some of the economic impacts of collaborative consumption. Would companies like Airbnb and Uber help economies or hurt them? Why? Show Answer

· 7-13. What are some other markets that could benefit from collaborative consumption? What might hinder these new markets from being profitable? Show Answer

· 7-14. Why are customer reviews and ratings so important to hosts offering rooms on Airbnb? Why would reviews be more important to a smaller host compared to a large 200-room hotel? Would feedback be important to all collaborative consumption industries? Why? Show Answer

· 7-15. Collaborative consumption utilizes idle resources. Could this same principle be applied to the human labor market? How? What impact might this have on the workforce? Airbnb doesn’t own any hotels, yet it is the largest accommodation provider in the world. Could the largest organizations in the world have no employees? How?

Complete the following writing exercises

· 7-16. Reread about 2031 in Q7-9. Do you agree with the conclusions? Why or why not? If F2F meetings become rare, what additional impacts do you see on the travel industry? In light of this change, describe travel industry investments that make sense and those that do not. What are promising investments in training? What are promising investments in other industries? Show Answer

· 7-17. Consider how you might use information technology in group projects for your university classes. Using the discussion of IS requirements for collaboration presented in Q7-4, answer the following questions:

a. Suppose that a group member wants to use nothing but face-to-face meetings, email, and texting for communication. What problems can you expect if you use only these methods? How might these methods affect group communication and content sharing?

b. Assuming you are using only face-to-face meetings, email, texting, PowerPoint, and Excel, how will you share documents? What problems might you expect?

c. Consider the four purposes of collaboration activities mentioned in Q7-3. For which purpose(s) might you use online data storage tools like Google Drive, Dropbox, and OneDrive?

d. Describe what you think would be the single most important additional collaboration tool that you could add to your team.