The Fox School’s Institute for Business and Information Technology (IBIT) regularly publishes The IBIT Report for its members. IBIT reports are based on rigorous vendor neutral academic research and are written to provide actionable knowledge to industry. Each report focuses on an important cutting edge topic that is of interest to our members. Please click on a title below to obtain a report.

Current Reports

Business in the Blogosphere: Corporate Blogging
David Schuff, Joseph A. DeLuca, Brian W. Hamilton
November 2009

Blogging is an increasingly popular tool for organizations to communicate with their employees, customers, and the general public. It is unique in its support for two-way communication and the creation of reader-generated content. This report presents the “state of the art” in corporate blogging through a multi-industry study analyzing the message, audience, and content of 25 organizations’ blogs. We found company-created blogs enable organizations to create self-sustaining communities of customers that both consume and contribute content. Best practices for creating these communities are discussed and illustrated. We also present guidelines for creating internally-focused blogs, such as those intended to foster communication with employees.

Evaluating web development frameworks: Django, Ruby on Rails and CakePHP
Julia Plekhanova
September 2009

Web frameworks provide a golden mean between building an application from scratch and using an out-of-the-box content management system (CMS). This report focuses on three leading open source web development frameworks: Django, Ruby on Rails and CakePHP. All three frameworks have similar architectures and claim to have similar characteristics, such as greatly enhanced productivity and code re-use. This report provides a methodology to evaluate each framework. The methodology, criteria, and weights provided in this report are generic and comprehensive. Each organization should adapt the methodology of this report to its own unique context.

Does the Internet matter?
A study of the 2008 presidential primaries
Sunil Wattal, David Schuff, Munir Mandviwalla
November 2008

Will the Internet change the landscape of presidential politics? In this report, we show that Blogs had a significant impact on Gallup polls in the 2008 presidential campaign. YouTube and MySpace were beneficial to less known candidates. We discuss how the Internet can change the nature of competition in politics and replace or complement traditional media.

Wireless 1.0
Munir Mandviwalla, Abhijit Jain, and Paul Weinberg
August 2008

Why was Google, an internet search provider, so interested in the results of the FCC 700 MHz spectrum auction? The Wireless 1.0 report provides a model that organizations can use to understand the importance of wireless and develop new capabilities and innovative new products and services. This report is a first attempt to treat the current set of wireless technologies as an integrated concept. We refer to this state of wireless development as Wireless 1.0 and present an integrated managerial model that includes Wi-Fi, WiMAX, RFID, and Bluetooth. A new perspective is needed for managers because wireless has the potential to disrupt existing business operations and models and also to create new forms of business opportunities and industries.

Social Computing and Networking: Is Your Organization Ready?
Munir Mandviwalla, Pradeep Racherla, Sunil Wattal
July 2008

The technologies related to social computing and networking such as MySpace, Face-book, Digg, collaborative wikis, interactive blogs, and even Second Life are now an established part of the consumer consciousness. Many observers have linked social networking to concepts such as flatness, openness, peer recommendation, and innovation enablement. Yet, the business role and impact of these concepts and associated technologies is unclear. The goal of this report is to provide a snapshot of the organizational adoption, usage, benefits, and risks associated with social computing. The report is based on interviews with business leaders; evaluation of specific tools; a symposium and focus group, and a survey on adoption.

Forthcoming Reports

Mobile Banking
This IBIT Report Mobile Banking analyzes the banking and financial needs of people in the 14-25 age range. This group is the vanguard for demand for future financial services and has shown the desire to access these services via their mobile phones. Are today’s technological capabilities and financial functions able to support their needs or are there gaps that provide new opportunities for technology and service providers?

How and What to Open: A Framework for Managing Open Innovation Strategy
The recent spread of open innovation is based on the insight that, with the help of information technology, distributed individuals can contribute to complex innovations. At its best, open innovation promises creative, robust solutions to complex problems. At its worst, open innovation threatens managerial and ownership headaches as firms try to reconcile openness with control. This report proposes guidelines to help managers think through the trade-offs involved in designing open innovation strategies. In particular, we offer principles for open innovation; a checklist for determining readiness for open innovation; and a menu of ways to manage open innovation from which managers can draw when designing their own open innovation strategies.

Browsing through information overload....is there an easier way?
Search engines make vast amounts of information available to Internet users. However, users are often faced with information overload when viewing results. Some search engines have incorporated visualization techniques such as cues to reduce information overload. But does it work? In this study, we have developed a visualization prototype with animation as a cue to identify whether this tool helps users find information faster.