Competing With Information - A Manager'S Guide To Creating Business Value With Information Content

In the e-business economy, managers are faced with too much data and too little meaningful information about markets, customers, products, company operations and finances. Their greatest challenge is to identify, manage and use the right information to compete. Information management is too important to a company's performance and growth to be delegated primarily to IT, information or financial specialists. This book is based on the idea that information management is the responsibility of every manager. Managers may not be IT specialists, but they must create the conditions for effective information use that creates real business value. Donald Marchand and his colleagues at IMD invite you to learn your information responsibilities, so your company can use information faster, better and smarter than the competition. By using the business framework of 'strategic information alignment,' this book shows how information can create business value through delighting customers, being more innovative, managing risks and being the low-cost leader in your markets and industries. Learn the why, what and how of better information use and management in your company. At last, here is a book about managing information written specifically for business managers. Developed from the executive teaching, consulting and real world research of a team of faculty who work with the world's leading global companies every day, this book provides managers with the mindset and guidance to leverage the company's capabilities to use and manage information to create business value.

Don Marchand, International Institute of Management Development (IMD), Lausanne, Switzerland
IMD is an independent not-for-profit foundation based in Switzerland. IMD was set up over 50 years ago by a few leading corporations to address the real challenges that leading managers face in everyday business. Since then, IMD has been working closely with businesses to develop people through a number of different courses at Executive and MBA level. IMD takes a Real World. Real Learning approach that combines academic rigour with practical solutions. IMD is a truly international school, with faculty from 18 countries, close links with over 130 corporations worldwide, and was ranked in Business Week and the US News & World Report in 1997 as one of the world's most eminent business schools.

Foreword

Preface

Acknowledgements

Part One Competing with Information -
A Role for Every Manager

1 Why Information is the Responsibility of Every Manager

Donald Marchand

2 Creating Business Value with Information

Donald Marchand

Part Two Putting Information to Work

Section A Adding Value with Customers

3 Using Information to Bond with Customers

Jacques Horovitz

4 Information as a Service to the Customer

Jacques Horovitz

5 Releasing the Power of Market Sensing

Sean Meehan

6 Decisions at the Speed of Light -
The Impact of Information Technology

John Walsh

Section B Creating New Reality

7 From Information to Knowledge -
How Managers Learn

Xavier Gilbert

8 From Information and Knowledge to Innovation

Jean-Philippe Deschamps

Section C Reducing Costs

9 Co-configuration: Efficient Personalization through Information and IT

Andrew Boynton and Bart Victor

10 Using Information for Strategic Cost Reduction

Robert Howell

Section D Minimizing Risks

11 Information and the Management of Risk

Stewart Hamilton

12 Controlling Risks

Stewart Hamilton

Part Three How your Company can Compete with Information

13 Competing with Information - a Diagnostic for Managers

Donald Marchand

14 Open Company Values: Transforming Information into Knowledge-Based Advantages

Piero Morosini

15 The New Wave of Business Process Redesign and IT in Demand and Supply Chain Management

Donald Marchand

16 The IT Advantage: Competing Globally with Business Flexibility and Standardization

Donald Marchand

17 Building E-Commerce Capabilities: the Four-Net Challenge

Donald Marchand

Contributors

Index