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New research on information from Harvard Business School faculty on issues including IT management, knowledge management, data mining, and analytics.
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How To Ask Better Questions

by Kristen Senz

To make the best decisions, managers must ask the right questions. This collection of past studies by Harvard Business School researchers will help you gather the critical information needed to prepare for action. Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.

On Target: Rethinking the Retail Website

by Dina Gerdeman

Target is one big-brand retailer that seems to have survived and even thrived in the apocalyptic retail landscape. What's its secret? Srikant Datar discusses the company's relentless focus on online data. Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.

Complex Disclosure

by Ginger Zhe Jin, Michael Luca, and Daniel Martin

This study shows that companies looking to hide unfavorable information might strategically be making contract terms unnecessarily complex, harming consumers and undermining the effectiveness of disclosure. These results highlight a role for regulation that would encourage simpler forms of disclosure.

What Should Mark Zuckerberg Do?

by James Heskett

SUMMING UP: Facebook doesn't necessarily need a better data-privacy policy, James Heskett's readers suggest. Instead, Mark Zuckerberg needs a new business model. Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.

Trade Creditors' Information Advantage

by Victoria Ivashina and Benjamin Iverson

Trade credit represents about a quarter of the liabilities of US firms. There are several theories explaining this fact. This study reexamines whether suppliers hold private information about their trade partners, by analyzing their behavior in bankruptcy.

Brokers and Order Flow Leakage: Evidence from Fire Sales

by Andrea Barbon, Marco Di Maggio, Francesco Franzoni, and Augustin Landier

This study finds that brokers tend to reveal the occurrence of a fire sale to their best clients, allowing them to generate significant profits by predating on the liquidating fund. Such information leakage comes at the expense of higher price impact, and leads to a more costly liquidation for the fire sale originator.

Ideological Segregation among Online Collaborators: Evidence from Wikipedians

by Shane Greenstein, Yuan Gu, and Feng Zhu

This study analyzes the dynamics supporting or undermining segregated conversations. Among the findings: In spite of their great differences, contributors on Wikipedia tend to move toward less segregated conversations. Contributors’ positions become more neutral over time, not more extreme. In addition, the conflict resolution mechanisms and the mix of informal and formal norms at Wikipedia play an important role in encouraging a community that works toward a neutral point of view.

Consumer-centered Health Care Depends on Accessible Medical Records

by Dina Gerdeman

There is a problem with medical records—they are scattered everywhere. John Quelch discusses approaches to integrate patient data so that medical professionals and patients can make better decisions. Open for comment; 13 Comment(s) posted.

Is Wikipedia More Biased Than Encyclopædia Britannica?

by Michael Blanding

By identifying politically biased language in Encyclopædia Britannica and Wikipedia, Feng Zhu hopes to learn whether professional editors or open-sourced experts provide the most objective entries. Open for comment; 16 Comment(s) posted.

How Electronic Patient Records Can Slow Doctor Productivity

by Dina Gerdeman

Electronic health records are sweeping through the medical field, but some doctors report a disturbing side effect. Instead of becoming more efficient, some practices are becoming less so. Robert Huckman's research explains why. Open for comment; 12 Comment(s) posted.

How Numbers Talk to People

In their new book Keeping Up with the Quants, Thomas H. Davenport and Jinho Kim offer tools to sharpen quantitative analysis and make better decisions. Read our excerpt. Open for comment; 3 Comment(s) posted.

Why We Blab Our Intimate Secrets on Facebook

by Carmen Nobel

Leslie K. John and colleagues set out to discover the reason behind a common discrepancy: While many of us purport to be concerned about Internet privacy, we seem to have no worries about sharing our most intimate details on Facebook. Closed for comment; 15 Comment(s) posted.

The Rich Get Richer: Enabling Conditions for Knowledge Use in Organizational Work Teams

by Melissa A. Valentine, Bradley R. Staats & Amy C. Edmondson

Individuals on the periphery of organizational knowledge-sharing networks, due to inexperience, location, or lack of social capital, may struggle to access useful knowledge at work. An electronic knowledge repository (KR) offers a practical solution to the challenges of making knowledge available to people who might otherwise lack access to relevant expertise. Such a system may function as a knowledge-access equalizer. However, the presence of a knowledge repository will not solve the problem of access to knowledge for those at the periphery of the organization unless it is used. In this paper, the authors begin to theorize the social and structural conditions that support KR use by exploring whether individuals on the organizational periphery take advantage of KRs, or whether KRs function more to enrich individuals whose experience and position already provide them better access to other knowledge sources. Using extensive data on KR use at a global, outsourced provider of software services, the authors' results show that despite the seeming promise of a KR to integrate or equalize peripheral players, it instead enriches knowledge access for people who are already well positioned. Findings thus suggest that KR use is not simply an individual activity based on need, but is instead enabled by certain social conditions (such as familiarity and experience) and inhibited by others (such as status disparities and remote location). An organizational KR thus fails to serve as an equalizer absent intervention. Key concepts include: There is a cautionary note for managers: In this study, KRs supported team performance by enriching the knowledge access of central players in the organization. KRs were less effective at ensuring much-needed access for those on the periphery. If individuals cannot get the knowledge that they need, then both their performance and their careers may suffer. Although some individuals are deployed into positions seen as organizationally necessary - such as remote offices or onto teams where they all may not know each other - in these positions they are less likely to make use of available organizational resources. There is a pattern of greater use of a KR and success for teams working in more supportive conditions. Individual and team characteristics enable people to support each other, make use of available resources, and perform effectively. Closed for comment; 0 Comment(s) posted.

India’s Ambitious National Identification Program

by Dina Gerdeman

The Unique Identification Authority of India has been charged with implementing a nationwide program to register and assign a unique 12-digit ID to every Indian resident—some 1.2 billion people—by 2020. In a new case, Professor Tarun Khanna and HBS India Research Center Executive Director Anjali Raina discuss the complexities of this massive data management project. Closed for comment; 30 Comment(s) posted.

How Will the “Age of Big Data” Affect Management?

Re: James L. Heskett

Summing up: How do we avoid losing useful knowledge in a seemingly endless flood of data? Jim Heskett's readers offer some wise suggestions. What do you think? Closed for comment; 33 Comment(s) posted.

How Should Management Deal With “Anonymous”?

by James L. Heskett

Summing Up When it comes to the leaky Web, Jim Heskett's readers say assume the worst and act accordingly. (New forum on February 3.) Closed for comment; 33 Comment(s) posted.

Using What We Know: Turning Organizational Knowledge into Team Performance

by Bradley R. Staats, Melissa A. Valentine & Amy C. Edmondson

An organization's captured (and codified) knowledge--white papers, case studies, documented processes--should help project teams perform better, but does it? Existing research has not answered the question, even as U.S. companies alone spend billions annually on knowledge management programs. Looking at large-scale, objective data from Indian software developer Wipro, researchers Bradley R. Staats, Melissa A. Valentine, and Amy C. Edmondson found that team use of an organization's captured knowledge enhanced productivity, especially for teams that were geographically diverse, relatively low in experience, or performing complex work. The study did not find effects of knowledge use on the quality of the team's work, except for dispersed teams. Key concepts include: Using captured knowledge had a positive effect on the team's project efficiency (delivering on budget) but not on project quality (number of defects in the code). When use of knowledge was concentrated in a small number of team members, efficiency improved but quality declined. Knowledge use improved project efficiency but not quality for teams with less experience. For more dispersed teams, knowledge use was related to improved quality but not efficiency. Team knowledge use was related to improved efficiency and quality for teams completing more complex work. Closed for comment; 0 Comment(s) posted.

Turning Employees Into Problem Solvers

by Julia Hanna

To improve patient safety, hospitals hope their staff will use error-reporting systems. Question is, how can managers encourage employees to take the next step and ensure their constructive use? New research by Julia Adler-Milstein, Sara J. Singer, and HBS professor Michael W. Toffel. Key concepts include: Patient-safety information campaigns can help hospital staff do more than just report problems when they occur. Thanks to information campaigns, frontline workers increased the rate of suggesting constructive solutions to problems by 74 percent. The frequency increased even more when unit managers joined in problem solving. By serving as role models, managers who actively engage in problem solving can lead their frontline workers to create and share solutions. Closed for comment; 0 Comment(s) posted.

Confronting the Reality of Web Services

by Sara Grant

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." Closed for comment; 0 Comment(s) posted.

Can an Organization’s “Deep Smarts” Be Preserved?

by James Heskett

When employees leave, they take more than their coat and hat. How can companies better preserve the accumulated knowledge of individuals? Isn’t that what separates average companies from truly great ones? Closed for comment; 24 Comment(s) posted.