Information Technology
Information Technology Institute
When HBS professors Marco Iansiti and Alan MacCormack studied the 1995 America’s Cup sailing competitors, they found that all the groups used simulation software to help them design their boat keels. Most teams labored with universities and aerospace firms to construct subtle simulations and used both mainframes or supercomputers to do the work.
Their decisive type runs counter to the standard advice about how executives ought to get customers to simply accept and personal new applied sciences. For example, in 1999, when a mutual fund company arrange a CRM system, it asked its salespeople to enter the information about their meetings with brokerages and institutional traders into the system.
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They were all crushed by Team New Zealand, which used much less highly effective workstations but introduced the computer systems all the way down to the docks the place its boats were built. The New Zealand staff additionally encouraged experimentation and teamwork and pushed keel modification selections down the organization.
The sales reps saw this, appropriately, as an attempt to capture knowledge that existed solely of their heads. They refused to make use of the system, which delivered little value to anyone for years. The president’s policy …