Tag Archives: MIT Center for Digital Business

Leading Your Company’s Digital Transformation — George Westerman

From Sloan Management Review


George Westerman (MIT Center for Digital Business), interviewed by Michael Fitzgerald
October 29, 2012

Big traditional companies get overlooked when it comes to digital transformation. But companies across all industry sectors are remaking their operations, their customer interactions, and even their business models. George Westerman tells us how they’re doing it, whether they are technology champions or beginners.

Read more from MIT Sloan Management Review about Digital Transformation

George Westerman is a research scientist at the MIT Center for Digital Business

Andrew McAfee: Are droids taking our jobs?

Robots and algorithms are getting good at jobs like building cars, writing articles, translating — jobs that once required a human. So what will we humans do for work? Andrew McAfee walks through recent labor data to say: We ain’t seen nothing yet. But then he steps back to look at big history, and comes up with a surprising and even thrilling view of what comes next. (Filmed at TEDxBoston.)

Andrew McAfee is Associate Director and Principal Research Scientist at the MIT Center for Digital Business and co-author of  “Race Against the Machine”

Erik Brynjolfsson on Big Data: A revolution in decision-making improves productivity

MIT Sloan Prof. Erik Brynjolfsson

There is a fundamental change underway in the way that companies make decisions. Instead of relying on a leader’s gut instincts, an increasing number of companies are embracing a new method that involves data-based analytics. This ‘Big Data’ revolution is occurring mainly because technology enables firms to gather extremely detailed information from and propagate knowledge to their consumers, suppliers, alliance partners, and competitors.

Companies that use this type of ‘data driven decision making’ actually show higher performance. Working with Lorin Hitt and Heekyung Kim, I analyzed 179 large publicly-traded firms and found that the ones that adopted this method are about 5% more productive and profitable than their competitors.  Furthermore, the study found a relationship between this method and other performance measures such as asset utilization, return on equity and market value. There is a lot of low-hanging fruit for companies that are able to use Big Data to their advantage. Read More »

Erik Brynjolfsson: New e-book outlines promise and peril of digital revolution

MIT Sloan Prof. Erik Brynjolfsson

From Economics of Information Blog

Andy McAfee and I have just released a short e-book, Race Against the Machine. In it, we try to reconcile two important facts. 1) Technology continues to progress rapidly. In fact, the past decade has seen the fastest productivity growth since the 1960s, but 2) median wages and employment have both stagnated, leaving millions of people worse off than before. This presents a paradox: if technology and productivity are improving so much why are millions being left behind?

In the book, we document remarkable advances in digital technologies in particular. Innovations like IBM’s Watson, Google’s self-driving car, Apple’s Siri are turning science fiction into reality. Machines are doing more and more tasks that once only humans could do.

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Big data drives security, risk discussion at MIT CIO affair

From Enterprise CIO Forum

I’ve  sat through the first two two sessions at the MIT Sloan CIO Symposium, expecting to hear all about the wonderful opportunities doing digital business.

Was I wrong!  The sessions, entitled 1) “Opportunities in the Digital Business World” and 2) “What every CIO should Know about the Future impact of Digital Business,”  focused on security, risk, privacy and how to manage infinite oceans of data were the dominant topic. We heard words like “headaches” and “hacker.”

Certainly, no one has corned the market for a playbook that explains how CIOs deal with vast amounts of data, all that threatens it and how to exploit it.

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