MIT Sloan Management Review

Image courtesy of Flickr user ben matthews :::.

As the use of social tools for internal collaboration and knowledge management grows rapidly, there is much discussion in the CIO/CTO community about the role of the technology officer in this evolution.

How the smartest organizations are embedding analytics to transform information into insight and then action. Findings and recommendations from the first annual New Intelligent Enterprise Global Executive study.

How do you win with data? SMR surveyed global executives about turning the data deluge and analytics into competitive advantage. Here’s an early snapshot of how managers are answering the most important question organizations face.

“To heck with what the technology can do,” says Michael Schrage of the MIT Center for Digital Business. Great managers, he says, first think about what kind of value they want to create and then consider how IT can help them create it.

In a Spring 2006 MIT Sloan Management Review article, “Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration,” Andrew McAfee first started to popularize the term “Enterprise 2.0” to describe the use of Web 2.0 collaboration technologies such as wikis and blogs within organizations.

An increasing number of Internet applications take advantage of the large amount of data accessible via the Web. These applications — now often called “mashups” — make relevant information from multiple Web sites easily accessible at a single Web site.

Information-visualization guru and famed PowerPoint debunker Edward Tufte explains how businesses would think better, make better decisions and present themselves more powerfully if only they would learn to talk — both internally and externally — in facts.

We’ve long been able to personalize what information the Internet tells us — but now comes “Web site morphing,” and an Internet that personalizes how we like to be told. For companies, it means that communicating — and selling — will never be the same.

There’s no sense in denying it: interpreting weak signals into useful decision making takes time and focus. These three stages can help you see the periphery—and act on it—much more clearly.

It often seems that changes and threats come out of nowhere – until we learn later that the signals were there all along and we just didn”t read them correctly. One step toward reading them better is understanding why we misinterpret them in the first place.

Informal decision networks – both within teams and throughout organizations – can systematically bias the way decisions are framed and carried out. Here”s how to build your networks right.

In surveys, customers have long claimed that they’d pay more for ethically produced goods. But is that what happens when they actually buy things? New experiments offer answers.

The nominally independent board of directors is in fact often dependent on management for information. But new pressures on companies, more cooperative approaches and new technologies can render directors increasingly effective as evaluators and advisers.

If information is power, you might assume that getting information more often should be powerful, too. Not so fast, say two business school professors.&

In her biography of the Nobel Prizewinning geneticist Barbara McClintock, Evelyn Fox Keller asks, “What enabled McClintock to see further and deeper into the mysteries of genetics than her colleagues?”1 Keller answers that McClintock was able to take the time to look and to hear what the material had to

Knowledge sharing between partners has more upsides than downsides, provided that the right kind of knowledge goes back and forth.

More than ever, CEOs must develop their peripheral vision, scanning for faint — but vital — signals that will help them give their companies an edge.

Technology use, diverse networks and access to new information all enhance productivity. Multitasking also can offer productivity benefits — but only in moderation.

Many large and mature firms — which still form most of the economy — have difficulty analyzing the opportunities and difficulties created by the Internet. Here is a planning process, validated at several established companies, that puts e-business into perspective and helps make it manageable.

I was in a meeting in Dallas when I looked out the window to see dark clouds on the horizon. Armed with my laptop, I monitored the storms around Dallas on weather.com, checked delays at Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport at dfwairport.com, and clicked over to flightstats.c