Center For Digital Strategies

A Field Study of Extended Enterprise Security

Scott Dynes

M. Eric Johnson, M. Eric Johnson
Proceedings of the Third CABIT, 2005

As organizations increasingly rely on the internet for their internal and external business processes, each firm’s security decisions have an impact on the overall security of the information infrastructure for the thousands of suppliers, collaborators, and channel partners that they interact with as part of that firm’s extended enterprise (a collection of firms that design, produce, and market a product or service

In PDF Format (20K)

Topics: Extended Enterprise, Information Security, Operations, Process

Inter-temporal Economics of Scope, Organizational Modularity and the Dynamics of Diversification

Constance E. Helfat
Strategic Management Journal, Volume 25, 2004

The question of whether corporations add value beyond that created by individual businesses has engendered much debate in recent years. Some of this debate has focused on the pros and cons of related vs. unrelated diversification. A standard explanation of the benefits of related diversification has to do with the ability to obtain intra-temporal economies of scope from contemporaneous sharing of resources by related businesses within the firm. In contrast, this paper deals with inter-temporal economies of scope that firms achieve by redeploying resources and capabilities between related businesses over time, as firms exit some markets while entering others. The transfer of resources due to market exit distinguishes our treatment of inter-temporal economies of scope from standard intra-temporal economies of scope. In addition, these intertemporal economies can benefit from a decentralized and modular organizational structure. This ability to obtain inter-temporal economies of scope via organizational modularity and recombination suggests that corporations do not necessarily need a high degree of coordination between business units in order to benefit from a strategy of related diversification.

Paper in PDF Format (183J)

Topics: Data, Process, Product Development

Static and Dynamic Pricing of Excess Capacity in a Make-to-Order Environment

David Pyke, Praveen K. Kopalle, Joseph M. Hall
CDS Working Paper Series 2003-2

The interactions between pricing and production/supply chain performance are not well understood. Can a firm benefit from knowing the status of the supply chain or production facility when making pricing decisions? How much can be gained if pricing decisions explicitly and optimally account for this status? This paper addresses these questions by examining a make-to-order manufacturer that serves two customer classes – core customers who pay a fixed negotiated price and are guaranteed job acceptance, and “fill-in” customers who make job submittal decisions based on the instantaneous price set by the firm for such orders. We examine four pricing policies that span a range of complexity and required knowledge about the status of the production system at the manufacturer, including the optimal policy of setting a different price for each possible state of the queue. We demonstrate properties of the optimal policy, and we illustrate numerically the financial gains a firm can achieve by following this policy vs. simpler pricing policies. The four policies we consider are (1) state-independent (static) pricing, (2) allowing fill-in orders only when the system is idle, (3) setting a uniform price up to a cut-off state, and (4) general state-dependent pricing. Although general state dependent pricing is optimal in this setting, we find that charging a uniform price up to a cut-off state performs quite well in many settings and presents an attractive trade-off between ease of implementation and profitability. Thus, a fairly simple heuristic policy may actually out-perform the optimal policy when costs of design and implementation are taken into account.

Paper in PDF Format (190K)

Topics: Knowledge Management, Manufacturing, Marketing, Process, Supply Chain