IT fails and may not increase firms productivity These are not the words one expects to hear in the first session of a course which was supposedly about IT. The instructor justified these words by giving a long two page list of examples citing failed IT implementation projects in big multinational organizations which have led to losses worth millions of dollars. He also showed us a graph correlating IT expenditure with productivity increases in which it was clearly shown that big expenditure in IT may not lead to big increase in productivity; in fact productivity may actually come down after IT deployment due to organizational slack. The instructor further challenged another common assumption by paraphrasing the golden words of Nicholas Carr-IT is a commodity, it cant bring any competitive advantage. This was mainly because the build-up phase of IT was almost over; now IT is comparable to utilities like electricity and water. By end of first session, we all had more questions than answers. The objective of the course subsequently became clear. It was meant to instruct not preach. To make us use our own judgment rather than following a bandwagon. IT was not something magical anymore, but just another important part of day to day business activities. Caution and Prudence are essential in making decisions related to IT. I realized that Nic Carrs guidelines as mentioned below, was one to live by. Spend less (IT is a commodity) Follow dont lead (Reduce risk) Focus on vulnerabilities (Cede control over IT and focus on resulting vulnerabilities) All these does not mean that IT is worthless, but that IT should be used efficiently so as to gain maximum return on ones investment. Cautiously justified spending in IT can lead to a large increase in business value. The professor illustrated this by giving the example of Zara, and the success it achieved in the fashion industry by leveraging technology. In subsequent sessions the focus shifted from IT to IS. Information System is a sum total of Hardware, Software, Data, Procedures, and People in an organization. By coordinating organizations efforts in all these spheres, the overall productivity can be immensely increased leading to substantial profits. We further learnt how we could leverage information system in an organization to gain competitive advantage. The Porters five force model given on the next page illustrates the means of creating competitive advantage in an industry.
Figure 1 Porter's five force model The above model shows how one could use IT to change the positioning of the business in an industry. The model assists the management in taking strategic initiatives that will make the organization more competitive. Streamlining processes is a very important step in increasing productivity. Tough problems can often be solved by simply optimizing the underlying process structure. Professor Agrahari repeatedly asked us never to shoehorn IT into a process, but to first analyze whether the problems could be solved without IT implementation. The benefits must justify IT investments that went into optimization. The course did indeed had some concepts which were familiar to students who had some experience in the IT industry. I had no such prior experience; yet I never felt like a fish out of water owing to the simplistic ways in which the professor taught them. By the end of course we were all adept at making data flow, entity-relationship and star schema diagrams which enabled us to analyze the relationship between actors and processes in a very detailed way. The analyzing was followed by implementation. The theoretical frameworks were complemented by case studies which enabled us to test our knowledge in real world scenarios. The cases like CVS Pharmacies, Amazon Web services, Facebook, Harrahs entertainment, etc. were enjoyable to read and solve. The customized textbook and comprehensive polycopy articles served as an effective source of knowledge. And lets not forget the numerous guest lectures. It was always a memorable experience when topics in course were taught by specialists in that field. Who better to talk about ecommerce and revenue models than Mr. Mrugendra Shintre, the person managing Amazons appstore content operations? And the data analytics sessions were highly enriched by presence of Mr. Rajiv Pratap, the cofounder of Abzooba (and his stories about his involvement with the NBA teams).
The course was successful in informing us about the technologies like cloud and big data, which we had heard about, but had no specific knowledge about their relevance in the business world. The course also made us aware of the ways in which current social trends can be leveraged to obtain new customers and increase profits. On the other hand, the session on privacy made us aware about the impact on business due to breach of privacy. Many more concepts and theories were discussed in the class aimed at making us better managers. After attending 30 hours of the course, I can safely say that the course succeeded in its objective of preparing us to be an effective exploiter of IT/IS for business value and strategic benefits.
The course is excellent as it is; but if I had to make some recommendations I would request the instructor to include more current content in course pertaining to topics like Technology in mobile world (is mobile penetration changing businesses) Machine to Machine (M2M) IT/IS in the Indian context (differences and similarities) Impact on environment, etc As an after note, I would also like to request to make the midterm and end term exams a mixture of case and theory questions so that a lot more concepts can be tested. Case studies are often fun to solve but they are restrictive in the number of concepts being tested at a time. Overall, I would say that attending the course was a very enjoyable experience. It enabled me, a student not having an IT background, to learn a lot about new trends in technology and how they can be exploited in the business environment. I am sure that this course will have a lot of relevance in my future endeavors in the business world. -Anurag Lale PGP29078, Section B