Andrew P. McAfee

6 Results

 

HBS Cases: How Wikipedia Works (or Doesn’t)

For HBS professor Andrew McAfee, Wikipedia is a surprisingly high-quality product. But when his concept of "Enterprise 2.0" turned up on the online encyclopedia one day—and was recommended for deletion—McAfee and colleague Karim R. Lakhani knew they had the makings of an insightful case study on collaboration and governance in the digital world. Read More

Electronic Hierarchies and Electronic Heterarchies: Relationship-Specific Assets and the Governance of Interfirm IT

Andrew McAfee, Marco Bettiol, and Maria Chiarvesio

Scholars have long been interested in the impact of information technology on the organization of work. As Andrew McAfee and colleagues argue in this study, the appropriate governance mechanism for an IT-facilitated collaboration depends on the type of IT being deployed: When an enterprise technology is required, so is an electronic hierarchy. The paper explores the issue of relationship specificity of IT assets, proposes a categorization of information technologies based on their levels of relationship specificity, and uses data from more than forty Italian industrial districts to test three hypotheses around governance of interfirm IT. These districts typically have close ties, both horizontal and vertical, and have historically worked in close collaboration with each other. Read More

Scale without Mass: Business Process Replication and Industry Dynamics

Erik Brynjolfsson, Andrew McAfee, Michael Sorell, and Feng Zhu

Over the past ten years there's been a clear link between IT investment and productivity growth in the U.S. economy. But what impact has IT had on competition? This paper identifies several recent changes in the competitive dynamics of U.S. industries and shows that they are associated with IT intensity; the more IT and industry has, the greater the changes. Using case studies, previous research, and a simple model, the authors offer a theory that explains these patterns in the data. They argue that IT allows the rapid spread of business process innovations, which in turn leads to more turbulent and concentrated industries. Read More

Confronting the Reality of Web Services

Andrew P. McAfee

Web services have made huge strides, but two hurdles remain, one technical, the other organizational, says HBS professor Andrew P. McAfee. "It is in fact getting easier to integrate applications, but it's never going to be easy." Read More

Wrapping Your Alliances In a World Wide Web

HBS professor Andrew McAfee researches how the Internet affects manufacturing and productivity and how business can team up to get the most out of technology. Read More

Whence IT Value?

Spending on information technology on the part of U.S. manufacturers is finally starting to pay off in increased productivity. Why now? Have IT investments, growing steadily since the 1970s, suddenly crossed a magic threshhold? HBS Professor Andrew McAfee believes the answer lies neither in magic nor in the growing power of computers themselves. Productivity gains, he writes in this article from the online journal Exec, may have more to do with the evolution of computing from PC "islands" to integrated networks that bridge distances and bring people together. Read More