Competing With Information

In the e-business economy, managers are faced with too much data and too little meaningful information about markets, customers, products, company operations and finances. Their greatest challenge is to identify, manage and use the right information to compete. Information management is too important to a company's performance and growth to be delegated primarily to IT, information or financial specialists.

This book is based on the idea that information management is the responsibility of every manager. Managers may not be IT specialists, but they must create the conditions for effective information use that creates real business value.

Donald Marchand and his colleagues at IMD invite you to learn your information responsibilities, so your company can use information faster, better and smarter than the competition. By using the business framework of 'strategic information alignment,' this book shows how information can create business value through delighting customers, being more innovative, managing risks and being the low-cost leader in your markets and industries. Learn the why, what and how of better information use and management in your company.

At last, here is a book about managing information written specifically for business managers. Developed from the executive teaching, consulting and real world research of a team of faculty who work with the world's leading global companies every day, this book provides managers with the mindset and guidance to leverage the company's capabilities to use and manage information to create business value.

• Part One: Competing with Information — A Role for Every Manager
  
1. Why Information is the Responsibility of Every Manager
   Donald Marchand
2. Creating Business Value with Information
   Donald Marchand
   
• Part Two: Putting Information to Work
  
• Section A: Adding Value with Customers
  
3. Using Information to Bond with Customers
   Jacques Horovitz
4. Information as a Service to the Customer
   Jacques Horovitz
   
5. Releasing the Power of Market Sensing
   Sean Meehan
6. Decisions at the Speed of Light — The Impact of Information Technology
   John Walsh
   
• Section B: Creating New Reality
  
7. From Information to Knowledge — How Managers Learn
   Xavier Gilbert
8. From Information and Knowledge to Innovation
   Jean-Philippe Deschamps
   
• Section C: Reducing Costs
  
9. Co-configuration: Efficient Personalization through Information and IT
   Andrew Boynton and Bart Victor
10. Using Information for Strategic Cost Reduction
    Robert Howell
    
• Section D: Minimizing Risks
  
11. Information and the Management of Risk
    Stewart Hamilton
12. Controlling Risks
    Stewart Hamilton
    
• Part Three: How your Company can Compete with Information
  
13. Competing with Information — a Diagnostic for Managers
    Donald Marchand
14. Open Company Values: Transforming Information into Knowledge-Based Advantages
    Piero Morosini
15. The New Wave of Business Process Redesign and IT in Demand and Supply Chain Management
    Donald Marchand
16. The IT Advantage: Competing Globally with Business Flexibility and Standardization
    Donald Marchand
17. Building E-Commerce Capabilities: the Four-Net Challenge
    Donald Marchand
    

Structured as a set of small articles, it is easily digested, and so well written, that you constantly clamor for more.

A very well thought out book, that can be used inside KM as well as a general management book, as the concepts the authors bring up, has bearing on nearly all managers under the sun.

It is an excellent resource for the practitioner, a joy to read and a very strong recommendation! In short, not to be missed! The only caveat is that the reader needs to be educated to MBA-level before s/he can fully appreciate everything that the authors take for granted that everyone understands.