New 'digital enterprise' center created at Broad School

Michigan State University recently provided funding for a new research center established at the Broad School. The Center for Leadership of the Digital Enterprise (CLODE) will study how firms can creatively — and successfully — combine information technologies (IT) with business processes and strategies

According to the center's executive director, V. Sambamurthy, The Eli Broad Professor of Information Technology, the question of IT's role in a company's success has recently taken on new urgency. "During the past five to eight years, there has been convincing evidence that information technologies have contributed to consumer welfare and firm productivity," says Sambamurthy. "However, in many firms, there is a significant anxiety about how to sustain business innovation through IT."

Sambamurthy also says the center will be an intellectual infrastructure of research projects, databases and case studies with a keen focus on the strategic needs of an innovative corporation. The tangible outcomes of the center's activities include annual conferences for industry and academic partners, doctoral dissertations, industry sponsored research projects and research papers. Sambamurthy expects to receive continuing funding from various sources such as the National Science Foundation and corporations interested in the center's mission.

The center currently focuses on four different program research "tracks":

• Competitive strategy and agility.
• Digitized supply chain networks.
• Digitized governance and coordination.
• Transformational IT management.

From those tracks, three research projects are underway:

• One deals with insights into the digital enterprise, including a "value chain simulator" for training managers to handle complex environments and the subsequent data flows needed for decision making. Other possibilities, such as complex adaptive system simulation, can bring to light new metrics and regimes for the control of complex phenomena;
• Another research area examines the design of collaborative inter-organizational relationships through decision rights and collaboration principles, along with metrics definition and architecture that includes development of new organizational yardsticks;
• The final research area looks at when a firm should emphasize agility and alignment in its strategic orientation, what structures and processes will enable it to institutionalize innovation and transformation, and what metrics should be used.

"We hope the new center will emerge as a premier source of research and insights about how firms can embrace the transformation to a digital enterprise, as we generate related economic, strategic, managerial and organizational knowledge," says Sambamurthy.

Several key Broad School faculty will direct these research tracks: From the Marketing and Supply Chain Management department: The Eli Broad University Professor of Business Roger Calantone and The John H. McConnell Chair in Business Administration David J. Closs; and from the Accounting and Information Systems department: Professor Brian Pentland and Associate Professor Cheri Speier. The center is directed by Frederick Rodammer, Supply Chain Management professor of practice.

A Corporate Partnership Board was recently established to help guide the center toward solving real-world business problems. "I believe the digital enterprise is inevitable," says IBM Global Procurement Policies Director and Board Member Hector Granda. "The winners are going to be those who proactively start to move that way versus those who wait for it to happen to them. CLODE will provide its true value if it can help the winner get there proactively."