THINKING FORWARD – Ideas for your work from MIT Sloan School of Management

THINKING+++ FORWARD

Ideas for your work from MIT Sloan School of Management | Office of Communications

+ THREE INSIGHTS FOR THE WEEK

1. Companies that succeed at digital transformation make effective use of dashboards. According to a new brief from the MIT Center for Information Systems Research, dashboard use is associated with higher profit margins and revenue growth, as well as more mature digital transformation efforts and collaborative leadership.

Dashboards should be used to monitor what value is created — tracked over time — and howvalue is created, measured by organizational and individual capabilities that support digital transformation, according to the research brief.

CISR researchers offer advice for aligning dashboards with digital transformation initiatives, including:

  • Use dashboarding to manage the company. To give the organization a common language, performance reviews for managers should be based on the same metrics tracked in a dashboard.
  • Stay persistent. As with any cultural shift, introducing dashboards will face resistance. Position the dashboard as a way for business units to see how their performance connects to that of other groups.
  • Communicate the dashboard’s value. Wide-ranging and consistent communication drives effective dashboard use, both to increase adoption and to improve company performance on key dashboard metrics.

2. As the Russian war in Ukraine escalates, companies should take heed of the conflict’s online front, according to Stuart Madnick, professor emeritus of information technology at MIT Sloan.

Writing last week in Harvard Business Review, Madnick urged firms to prepare for the eventuality that the cyber conflict will spill over Ukraine’s borders. There is evidence, he writes, that Russian hackers have used Ukraine as a testing ground for cyber warfare in the past.

Preparing for a cyberattack means doing everything possible to minimize potential damage if the attacker does get in, wrote Madnick. Steps include:

  • Making sure software is up-to-date throughout your organization, and that known vulnerabilities in earlier versions have been patched.
  • Having effective antivirus and malware detection software —  malware may already lay dormant on an employee’s computer, awaiting orders.
  • Frequently backing up your firm’s important data, such as documents only stored in one place, in case it is destroyed.
  • Looking for possible vulnerabilities in your cyber supply chain, and pushing vendors of third-party software to prioritize cybersecurity.
  • Testing your incident response plan to be sure the plan is sound and everyone knows what they’re supposed to do in a crisis.

3. Long before French explorers arrived to claim the Saint John River watershed, the Maliseet tribe of Indigenous people lived, hunted, and fished along the Wolastoq between what would later be Maine and the Canadian province of New Brunswick.

Today, the Maliseet people are the conservators of that watershed land, and they call on their legends, oral histories, and lived experiences to shape their work with present-day partners.

This approach is called ‘two-eyed seeing,’ explained Patricia Saulis, an affiliate researcher with the MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing program, in a recent Q&A. Saulis is a member of the Maliseet tribe and executive director of the Maliseet National Conservation Council.

“Two-eyed seeing involves the balancing of perspectives so that we can gain a better understanding of the work that we are doing,” Saulis said. “Tapping into a diversity of knowledge systems will help us innovate and imagine solutions that we may not be able to create without such a process.”

Finding those solutions is critical. Indigenous people make up about 5% of the world’s population, but they are responsible for protecting more than 80% of the globe’s biodiversity.

Content from the: MIT Sloan Office of Communications

Questions and Comments: thinkingforward@mit.edu

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By MIT Sloan CDO
MIT Sloan CDO