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Articles 1 - 8 of 8
Full-Text Articles in Management Information Systems
Circos: Tapping Into Social Media (A), Kevin W. Sproule, C. Jason Woodard
Circos: Tapping Into Social Media (A), Kevin W. Sproule, C. Jason Woodard
C. Jason Woodard
Social media was a topic that had entered into the daily vocabulary of teenagers and business executives alike. With this surge in popularity and influence worldwide the open question was what this new way of interacting would mean for businesses and whether or not social media could really be a driver of company profitability or just a nice way to share photos with friends? Circos, a Singapore-based company, developed a business that it hoped would help to answer those questions. By using a proprietary sentiment analysis tool, Circos had mined the vast world of online reviews available on various social …
Circos: Tapping Into Social Media (B), Kevin W. Sproule, C. Jason Woodard
Circos: Tapping Into Social Media (B), Kevin W. Sproule, C. Jason Woodard
C. Jason Woodard
After a successful presentation in the (A) case, Frederic Langlois, Circos.com general manager in Singapore, headed back to the company headquarters. He brought back not only the possibility of a new client, but also a specific request. The Raffles Hotel had asked him to provide new functionality beyond the existing social media analytics dashboard Circos had become known for. The Raffles Hotel manager had asked, “It would be great to have a simple and meaningful analysis of what people are saying about our property online. What would be really great, though, would be to know who is saying what. I …
Architectural Dualities In Complex Systems: Components, Interfaces, Technologies And Organizations, C. Jason Woodard, Joel West
Architectural Dualities In Complex Systems: Components, Interfaces, Technologies And Organizations, C. Jason Woodard, Joel West
C. Jason Woodard
Research on technological innovation and product development has long recognized the importance of product architecture, and many scholars have explored its relationship to the organizational structure of the product development process. Product architecture, in turn, has long encompassed both the allocation of functionality to components and the pattern of linkages between them. In this paper, we forge new connections among these established ideas by examining them as two pairs of dual relationships. First, we draw attention to the duality between components and interfaces. While innovation and product development researchers have historically emphasized the partitioning of products and systems into components, …
Platform Competition In Digital Systems: Architectural Control And Value Migration, C. Jason Woodard
Platform Competition In Digital Systems: Architectural Control And Value Migration, C. Jason Woodard
C. Jason Woodard
Digital systems give rise to complex layered architectures in which products at one layer serve as platforms for applications and services in adjacent layers. Platform owners face a difficult balancing act. On one hand, they need to make their platforms attractive to potential complementors by mitigating the threat of architectural lock-in. On the other hand, platform owners must be careful not to give away too much too soon, or risk being unable to recoup their own investments. This paper presents an agent-based model that explores this tension at both the firm and industry levels. Computational experiments show that boundedly rational …
Competition In Modular Clusters, Carliss Y. Baldwin, C. Jason Woodard
Competition In Modular Clusters, Carliss Y. Baldwin, C. Jason Woodard
C. Jason Woodard
The last twenty years have witnessed the rise of disaggregated “clusters,” “networks,” or “ecosystems” of firms. In these clusters the activities of R&D, product design, production, distribution, and system integration may be split up among hundreds or even thousands of firms. Different firms will design and produce the different components of a complex artifact (like the processor, peripherals, and software of a computer system), and different firms will specialize in different stages of a complex production process. This paper considers the pricing behavior and profitability of these so-called modular clusters. In particular, we investigate a possibility hinted at in prior …
Architectural Control Points, C. Jason Woodard
Architectural Control Points, C. Jason Woodard
C. Jason Woodard
System designers and technology strategists have long recognized the concept of an architectural control point as a way to identify parts of a system that have particular strategic importance. Despite the vast body of work on system architecture in the engineering design literature, however, few authors have attempted to define architectural control points or study them systematically. Moreover, some industry participants have questioned whether architectural control is still a valuable or achievable goal in an era of increasingly open standards. This paper offers tentative definitions of architectural control, architectural control points, and architectural strategy. In a longer version of the …
Modeling Product Development As A System Design Game, C. Jason Woodard
Modeling Product Development As A System Design Game, C. Jason Woodard
C. Jason Woodard
A system design game is a model of a situation in which agents’ actions determine the structure of a system, which in turn affects the system’s value and the share of value that each agent may capture through bargaining or market competition. This paper describes a class of games in which agents design interdependent products, for example software programs, which may be complements or substitutes for each other. These relationships are epresented by an object called a design structure network (DSN). Depending on the modeler’s choice of allocation rules, agents may benefit from owning critical nodes in the DSN, corresponding …
Modeling Architectural Strategy Using Design Structure Networks, C. Jason Woodard
Modeling Architectural Strategy Using Design Structure Networks, C. Jason Woodard
C. Jason Woodard
System architects face the formidable task of purposefully shaping an evolving space of complex designs. Their task s further complicated when they lack full control of the design process, and therefore must anticipate the behavior of other stakeholders, including the designers of component products and competing systems. This paper presents a conceptual tool called a design structure network (DSN) to help architects and design scientists reason effectively about these situations. A DSN is a graphical representation of a system’s design space. DSNs improve on existing representation schemes by providing a compact and intuitive way to express design options—the ability to …