MIT Sloan Website




STORE
Search   
 
Home View Cart Check Out Contact Us Help/FAQs

Business Ethics and Public Policy
Corporate Strategy
Financial Management
Human Resources
Global Business
Leadership
Information Systems
Technology and Innovation
Managerial Economics
Marketing
Operations
Service and Quality
Miscellaneous
Back Issues
Sustainability
Collections
Learning From the Internet Giants
By Leigh M. Weiss, Marla M. Capozzi and Laurence Prusak
Summer 2004
Reprint 45412
Volume 45, Number 4, pages 79-84, 6 pages
Primary Topic: Information Systems
Secondary Topic: Leadership

Summary

Getting more value from knowledge -- especially from a firm's own hard-won knowledge -- is one of the central challenges facing companies today. Many organizations have approached this problem in recent years by making big investments in IT systems, but the payoff has often been disappointing. Companies would do better to emulate the innovative giants of the Internet -- Google, eBay and Amazon -- whose success has in part derived from their ability to make it easy for customers to find what they are looking for, to browse for products and services, and to evaluate potential purchases. These are exactly the things that are hard to do in most companies. That is, employees find that it is not intuitive to search for information in company repositories; they cannot easily browse within categories of knowledge; and they are not given the context they need in order to evaluate the quality of the knowledge they do find. The authors assert that if organizations apply the basic, proven approaches of the Internet success stories to capture the attention of their employees, they should be able to improve their ROI on sunk IT costs, while increasing knowledge-worker productivity.

OR

Includes one pdf to copy from.
Pricing is based on # of
copies made.

Info on pricing and academic discounts.


 
 
Copyright © Massachusetts Institute of Technology
1977-2009. All rights reserved.
877-727-7170, mitsmr@pubservice.com