Strategic Info Technology

Don't Get Caught Breaking the Rules of the Game

You'll be ejected if you use an educational case study as an underlying source. Educational case studies are often found in books, published seperately by academic presses or sometimes presented in journals. For instance every issue of the Harvard Business Review includes a "HBR case study". Most issues of Computerworld include "Trouble Ticket" cases. These case studies often present real life scenarios or hypotheticals and are accompanied by expert commentary. Cases found on sites such as these will be considered fouls:

Keywords-Topics-Subjects-Descriptors

Virtual Team,Value Chain, Supply Chain, Logistics, Knowledge Management,Business Intelligence, Competitive Intelligence, Enterprise Integration,Business Processes, Outsource, Customer Relationship Management, Decision Support Systems, Data Mining, Data Warehousing, Enterprise Resource Planning

Choosing a Compelling IT Challenge

Browsing

Browsing professional or scholarly magazines focused on information technology is a good way to identify a target organization that has tackled or solved a tough business problem with the astute deployment of technology.

Professional and trade magazines are more likely to publish articles about the implementation or adoption of a product by an organization, whereas scholarly journals more often publish research on the success, failure and consequences of technology strategies.

All of the following recommended sources are available in Business Source Premier.

Computerworld (professional)
Information & Organization (scholarly)
Information Management Journal (professional, records management)
Information Polity (government use of information management)
Information Economics & Policy (scholarly)
Information Management (trade)
Information Systems Management (scholarly)
Journal of Managment Information Systems (scholarly)

Searching

You may prefer to search for a case study or interview about an organization's use of technology to solve a business problem. The suggested Keywords, Topics and Subjects in the left hand bar may yield fruitful results when combined with the words " technology" and "case study" or "interview."

Another way to find notable information technology projects is to search for award winners.

Be sure to avoid the use of educational case studes such as those occassionally published by Harvard Business Review.

ABI Inform
Business Source Premier
Business Full Text & Applied Science & Technology To search simultaneously, in the Subject area use the control key to select both databases.

You're Not Done Yet!

Once you've found an interesting business problem that lends itself to a IT solution you need to learn more about the business issue in general and gather background information about the organization facing the challenge.

Company Background Info

The following sources provide basic descriptive company information with links to recent news items.

Lexis Nexis Academic Select the "Business" tab and then "Company Dossier"

Datamonitor Reports only, without recent news.

Mergent Only includes publically traded companies

Business Problem Research

Find articles in both professional business publications and scholarly business journals on the defined problem. You can expect to try multiple searches for the terms, tags, keywords, subjects and descriptors capturing the essence of the problem. More than one database is listed because you may get what you need but not what you want at one database. Shop around for the perfect publication!

ABI Inform

Business Source Premier

Business Full Text

Applied Science & Tehnology In Subject Area, select AS&T file.

Last Modified: Sunday, February 5th, 2012