May 2007 Industry Advisory Board Meeting Recap

The UC Irvine CRITO Consortium Industry Advisory Board meeting was held on Thursday, May 3, 2007 at the Beckman Center on the UC Irvine campus. The meeting focused on IT-enabled innovation, and it was an engaging and insightful day. The meeting kicked off with an introduction from the Dean of the Paul Merage School of Business, Andy Policano. Dean Policano presented exciting plans to enhance the impact of CRITO on the academic and business communities.

Dr. Jeanne Ross, Principal Research Scientist at the MIT Sloan Center for Information Systems Research, was the keynote speaker and presented an interactive talk titled Building Business Agility with IT. Her talk emphasized the relationship between architecture and agility. Much of her work involves development of case studies that examine how firms generate value from IT-enabled business initiatives. Her current research focuses on business agility, the structure of the IT organization, enterprise architecture and IT governance.

Her presentation was followed by a panel discussion featuring Karen Salem, Senior Vice President and CIO of Ingram Micro Inc, Phaneesh Murthy, CEO of iGate Global Solutions Ltd. and Jesus Mantas, Partner at IBM Global Services. Karen spoke about Investing in Enabling Technologies; Phaneesh spoke about Alternate Models for Strategic Enterprise Architecture; and Jesus spoke about Combining Business and IT Architecture. Their thoughts provoked lively discussion among the attendees.

Next we featured research presentations from CRITO faculty associates. CRITO faculty emphasize a range of themes in their research. These included:

• Cristina Gibson: The Science & Art of Global Collaborations
• Ronald Ramirez: IT and Innovation: Does IT Complement the Research & Development Efforts of Firms?
• Imran Currim: Why Do Firms Vary on the Effect of IT Expenditures on Firm Performance?
• Gloria Mark: A Cost-Benefit Analysis of Communications Technology
• Walt Scacchi: Enabling Exponential Innovation via Open Source Software Development

We concluded the evening with a reception and dinner. To access the presentations, papers and managerial summaries from the May meeting, visit the CRITO Consortium IAB page at http://www.crito.uci.edu/consortium/iab2007-05.asp.