Research shows that IT investments pay off nicely in general, and that IT is a big contributor to labor productivity. So why are so many companies frustrated with their IT department, and complain about disappointing and inflexible enterprise technology?
My presentation on what I call the ‘IT Innovation Gap’ tries to show why so little IT investment is spent on innovation, and how the next generation of ‘Open innovation models’ might provide a much needed innovation boost to a tech industry that sometimes gets in the way of change.
The presentation slides are available here. This talk was given as part of USF’s executive education program for the Management Institute of Paris, France. Thanks to my colleague Nick Imparato for inviting me to speak.
Sadly, I never had a chance to try out my Français très mauvais on the group.
During FastTrack advising last week, some of the new students asked “can you recommend particular teachers?” Not knowing the different first-year writing, math, and econ profs, I told them to check out RateMyProfessors.com — the market-leading faculty evaluation site, now owned by the noted research firm MTV/Viacom. Many professors are not big fans of the site, but that’s the back-alley where our undergraduates go for information because they have no good alternatives.
A recent study (somewhat surprisingly) showed that the online ratings on RateMyProfessors.com correlate very highly with the “official” teaching evaluations, at least in one state university system.
This result has been interpreted in at least two different ways:
- RateMyProfessors.com is more accurate than we think
- most “official” evaluations are less accurate than we think, being no better than the methodological disaster zone known as RateMyProfessors.com
Taking a break from my extensive summer duties, I downloaded the summary scores (’quality’ and ‘ease’) for the 38 faculty categorized as Business or Business Administration at USF. Our average ‘quality’ score is 3.6 out of 5, with the average ‘ease’ score at 3.2 (5 easiest, 1 hardest). For our ‘chili pepper’ faculty, rated as ‘hot’ by the students, the ‘quality’ average jumps to 4.52! Cool! (Maybe our students can’t tell the difference between physical beauty and pedagogical effectiveness? Or are the beautiful just better than the rest of us?).
And to add to the eternal debate about whether faculty who are ‘easy’ get higher evaluations, the answer from RateMyProfessors.com is…seems like it. ‘Quality’ and ‘ease’ scores are correlated at 0.52 (p<0.001). When you remove faculty that have fewer than 5 evaluations, that correlation increases to 0.60 (p<0.005).
A big part of the web’s future impact on business will be through its ability to share knowledge almost effortlessly over large social networks. I call this ‘lightweight knowledge sharing’ (LKS - licks? lucks?), and in an upcoming presentation I’ll be contrasting LKS with what I call ‘traditional Knowledge Management’ (KM).
Traditional KM assumes that people need to be bribed or coerced into sharing knowledge. KM also requires a large up-front investment on pre-defined categorization schemes, and large knowledge bases. Lightweight knowledge sharing, in contrast, assumes that people want to share. Simple tools such as blogs and wikis can become a means for large-scale knowledge sharing through the combination of: 1) simple syndication (subscription), and 2) simple ’social graphs’ that naturally define which subscriptions are of interest. LinkedIn and Facebook are two interesting examples of this trend.
Both the slides and the abstract are available online. These slides will be presented at IFIP 9.1 Computers & Work workshop in St. Gallen, Switzerland.
J.P. Allen is an Associate Professor of Information Technology at the School of Business and Management, University of San Francisco. 