IT Strategy

Borderless Innovation

February 20, 2010 by Raj Sheelvant  |  No Comments

Many of the world’s top multinationals have been leveraging the latest technological developments, their expanding global business networks and even competitors’ expertise to change the way they harness new ideas. But while these tools may make global collaboration easier than ever, there’s plenty of work left to do to make “borderless innovation” deliver, according to Knowledge@Wharton article titled “Borderless Innovation: Stretching Company Boundaries to Come Up with New Ideas”.

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Crowd Sourcing Business Process Improvement

February 13, 2010 by Raj Sheelvant  |  No Comments

Essay in McKinsey Quarterly titled “Using knowledge brokering to improve business process” pose a challenging concept about the possibility of using of open-innovation principles to enhance not only the company’s products but also their core internal business processes.

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Long Tail of Manufacturing

February 1, 2010 by Raj Sheelvant  |  No Comments

I am back from sabbatical.  It’s time to start blogging on IT Strategy.  Well, I read interesting article in Wired “Next Industrial Revolution Atoms are the New Bits” by Chris Anderson (of Long Tail Fame).

Chris writes that “Transformative change happens when industries democratize, when they’re ripped from the sole domain of companies, governments, and other [...]

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Cisco’s alignment of IT with Business

October 27, 2009 by Raj Sheelvant  |  1 Comment

IT department’s role is to leverage the virtualized architecture and collaboration technology to quickly support each acquired company’s business processes. Thus, IT department of Cisco under the leadership of CIO Rebecca Jacoby, intends to lower the acquired company’s costs, while enabling it to add value to Cisco.

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Wikimedia’s “Open” Strategy Planning Session

September 25, 2009 by Raj Sheelvant  |  No Comments

Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization that supports Wikipedia has grown without a strategy. But Barry Newstead in the HBR article titled “Inside Wikimedia’s Open-Source Strategic Planning” says that there are some strategic issues that needs to resolved.

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Role of IT Infrastructure in Virtual Collaboration

May 27, 2009 by Raj Sheelvant  |  No Comments

The combination of expense cuts and increased productivity is driving a push towards a growing use of remote collaboration software and equipments according to FT.com article ‘Virtual conference victory for Cisco Systems’. The article states that companies are accelerating their deployments of high-definition video conferencing gear made by the likes of Cisco and Hewlett-Packard.
Rapid acceptance [...]

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IBM’s ‘Smarter’ Growth Strategy – From Big Blue to Big Green?

April 19, 2009 by Raj Sheelvant  |  No Comments

IBM, a premier computer hardware company, I think is known for reinventing itself successfully.  First after being outsmarted by Microsoft in late1980s, IBM reinvented itself.  Lot of people believed, IBM cannot survive.  Read the details of the turnaround by the then CEO Louis Gerstner in his book titled ‘Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance? Inside IBM’s [...]

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Institutions vs. Collaboration

March 31, 2009 by Raj Sheelvant  |  No Comments

Clay Shirky, in his TED talk, shows how closed groups and companies will give way to looser networks where small contributors have big roles and fluid cooperation replaces rigid planning.  He highlights the constraints of institutions and demonstrates how collaborative Web 2.0 fills in the gap left by the institution.
Shirky, a prescient voice on the [...]

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Technology Empowers Innovation

February 3, 2009 by Raj Sheelvant  |  No Comments

Executives in wired organizations need to have a sharper understanding of how technology empowers innovation, says Google’s chief economist Hal Varian.  More than ten years into the widespread business adoption of the Web, some managers still fail to grasp the economic implications of cheap and ubiquitous information on and about their business according to Varian [...]

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Google, P&G Swap Employees: A New Era in Collaborative Marketing Strategy?

November 25, 2008 by Raj Sheelvant  |  No Comments

It’s all over the news. Google and P&G have swapped workers to spur innovation.   Each organization thinks that they have something to gain from one another.  Hence they have started swapping employees. WSJ has reported in the article titled ‘A New Odd Couple: Google P&G Swap Workers to Spur Innovation‘, that about two-dozen staffers from [...]

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