Market Driven Organizations:

In this project a research team from the Kellogg School of Management led by Professor Ranjay Gulati (Michael Nemmers Distinguished Professor of Strategy and Organizations) is writing a set of business cases about leading firms that are in the midst of transforming themselves to be more customer focused. We are in the midst of completing our first round of cases. The firms participating thus far include: Jones Lang LaSalle, Target Corporation, Tribune Corporation, GE Medical Systems, Cisco Systems, Pfizer, Starbucks, Guidant Corporation, Harley Davidson, Tufts Healthcare, Avon Corporation, and Eli Lilly. With each firm, the team is carefully assessing the steps each firm has gone through to make their transformation successful and writing it up as a business case.

This project is focused on uncovering some of the best practices firms have implemented to make them able to respond effectively to the growing challenges they face in engaging their customers. Through the series of cases about firms that have successfully embarked on some of these changes, we expect to develop a comprehensive blueprint for the customer driven organization. The output from this study will be a series of business cases about individual firms and also a comprehensive report on the patterns of successful change that run across the different organizations.

Leveraging Customer Information:

For the last two years I have been researching how companies are winning through customer focused strategies. As part of this larger initiative, I have begun a project sponsored by Teradata, a leader in enterprise decision support, to assess some of the critical success factors that influence the return on investment from efforts to leverage relevant and timely customer information across the enterprise. In this project we will evaluate how companies are developing strategies, structures, and processes to intensify their use of enterprise data.
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Specifically, we are focusing on four areas: the role of organizational processes, the use of information, the redefinition of technology architecture, and the use of metrics and milestones. People and organizations play a critical role in the success or failure of data initiatives, and we want to understand some of the key processes that enable firms to successfully leverage information. In addition, we will examine some of the critical stages through which the organization and the IT infrastructure evolves as firms embrace new ways to leverage enterprise information. Finally, we are interested in assessing the effectiveness of key metrics and milestones that companies use to quantify and measure their success with such initiatives.

Click here to view abstracts of Ranjay's current working papers»