MIS Research Center Seminar Series
8:30 AM - 11:00 AM
1st Floor Auditorium, Carlson School of Management

Abstract

Information Technology’s (IT) role in generating business options and to make firms more agile has stimulated interest among researchers as well as practitioners. There is evidence that firms have exploited the power of IT to generate value beyond that was planned or anticipated. The challenge for practitioners, however, is to convert this know-how into actions that can lead to genuine business options.

I will discuss steps in functional areas – cost management, design and product conversion, logistics and customer service, where firms can deploy IT to create business options. This discussion will be supplemented with illustrations from several exemplar companies that successfully created business options. I will further discuss three companies -- GE Aircraft Engines, Trinity Health and United Parcel Service (UPS) that used IT to generate business options. Finally, through a 3-minute clip of UPS’ IT investments in its Worldport facility in Louisville, KY, we will interactively discuss the options generated by UPS.

Biography

Rajiv Kohli is an Assistant Professor in the Management Department at the University of Notre Dame. Dr. Kohli received his PhD in information systems from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County in 1994. He has taught at Lehigh University, University of Maryland College Park, and University of Maryland University College where he was awarded the Teaching Recognition Award. He was a visiting faculty in the Department of Information Systems at City University of Hong Kong during summer 2004.

For over 15 years, Dr. Kohli has worked or consulted with IBM Global Services, SAS Corporation, United Parcel Service, AM General, MCI Telecommunications, Westinghouse Electronics, Wipro Corporation and Godrej Industries (India), in addition to several healthcare organizations. Dr. Kohli also serves on the Board of Trustees of The Montessori Academy at Edison Lakes, Mishawaka. Prior to joining full-time academia in 2001, he was a Project Leader in Decision Support Services at Trinity Health.

Dr. Kohli has published over 30 refereed journal articles in MIS Quarterly, Management Science, Information Systems Research, MIS Quarterly Executive, Journal of Management Information Systems, Communications of the ACM, and Decision Support Systems, among other journals. He is a coauthor of the book The IT Payoff: Measuring Business Value of Information Technology Investment, (2002) published by Financial Times Prentice-Hall. Dr. Kohli's research interests include Business Value of Information Technology, Decision Support Systems, and Organizational Impacts of Information Systems.

Read more at http://www.nd.edu/~rkohli/rajiv/