IMPORTANT TERMS
3G Teams – Teams of three generations (25+, 35+, 45+) that work together.
Action Labs – A strategic approach to planning, utilizing employees in an intensive retailing and explorative environment, in hopes to identify local opportunities and capitalize on them.
Advanced Technology Group – A group within the IS department that is responsible for spotting and evaluating new technologies, often by conducting a pilot project.
Critical Success Factors (CSF) – The few key areas of an executive’s job where things must go right in order for the organization to flourish.
Dashboard – A type of executive information system that allows executives to access a company’s data warehouse (via a display screen that resembles a car dashboard), allowing real-time analysis of how well a division, region, or other part of the business is progressing on meeting its forecasts.
Electronic Channel – An electronic link used to create, distribute, and present information and knowledge as part of a product or service or as an ancillary good.
Extended Enterprise – All of one’s own organization plus those organizations with which one interacts, such as suppliers, buyers, and government agencies; interconnected single-organization networks that are not limited by industry and provide a type of electronic information consortium.
Knowware– Advanced groupware information technology that helps people and organizations share knowledge.
Linkage Analysis Planning – A planning approach that studies the links between an organization and its suppliers and customers.
Network Effect – When the value of a product or service offered on a platform (such as a gaming platform or an operating system) increases as the number of users increases, thereby creating a “virtuous” circle of upward spiraling product value and customers. The opposite is a downward spiraling “vicious” circle where a product continually loses its value and its customers.
Planning – Developing a view of the future that guides decision making today.
Scenario – A way to manage planning assumptions by creating a speculation of what the future will be like drawing on trends, events, environmental factors, and the relationships among them.
Sense-and-Respond Strategy Making – A methodology for strategy making that keeps in close contact with the business world, continually sensing for important changes, and then responding quickly to changes by conducting experiments that test different possible futures – as opposed to betting on one strategy for the future.
Stages of Growth– The four stages that many organizations go through in the introduction and assimilation of new technologies. These are early successes (leading to increased interest and experimentation), contagion (the learning period for the field), control (integration of systems is attempted but proves difficult), and integration (use of the particular new technology is mature). An organization can be in several stages simultaneously for different technologies.
Strategic– Having a significant, long-term impact on the growth rate, industry, and revenue of an organization.
Strategy– Stating the direction you want to go and how you intend to get there.
Worknets – Informal groups of people whose collective knowledge is used to accomplish a specific task.