The case method is based on the belief that students in management education can significantly improve their analytical ability through studying, analyzing, and discussing actual business scenarios. Cases develop the skills of logical thinking, searching for relevant information, analyzing and evaluating facts, and drawing conclusions needed for business decision-making. Making a point in front of your peers improves your ability to communicate clearly, evaluate the opinions of others, react wisely, and reach conclusions that gain collective support.
By definition, a case is a description using words and numbers of an actual management situation. The case paints a picture of the setting of a business decision and takes the student to the brink of the decision without revealing what happened. A case study is a written story that serves as the basis for a group discussion. It can foster a classroom program of role-playing, simulation, question answering, and discussion. The actual case is a description of a company within a particular context in time. A written case attempts to provide a synopsis of past events in the life of an organization. It sets the stage to make a decision by describing the context from a number of different perspectives. These include financial data about the assets of the organization, statistical information about the employees and markets that the company addresses, organizational information about reporting structure and decision-making, technological information about the decisions to implement technology, and managerial information about competitors, internal operations, and the personalities of the individuals involved.
A good case will place you in the position of facing a managerial challenge and preparing an action plan. It will force you to determine what decisions need to be made, justify them, and make recommendations to the class. The financial aspects of a case will enable you to develop skills in analyzing and making financial decisions. Cases with marketing or production information will lead to decisions made by marketing or production managers. Cases that combine all of these issues result in the development of skills in strategic analysis.
Case-based teaching is unique because it facilitates a dynamic interchange between the professor, student, and the material. Rather than merely conveying facts or even ideas, the professor becomes an actor who uses descriptions to set the stage for the analysis of a company or its competition. Case-based teaching can be more effective than lecture teaching since it combines cognitive with motivational aims in the classroom. The study of cases will provide you with hands-on practice in how to think inductively within the context of an actual situation. It combines theoretical concepts with real-life experience to provide practical decision-making experience. The cases in this book combine real-life experiences with those of companies to enhance your practical understanding of the real life situation. By studying these cases, you will be able develop rules that you can subsequently apply to actual business situations you currently face or will soon face in the future.
These Management Information Systems cases have been written to merge substantive and procedural aspects of technology. Setting a technology decision within a case context helps to convey the complex aspects of these decisions. The successful application of technology to business involves not only the understanding of the substantive concepts, but also the ability to understand the procedures that often must be followed for technology to be implemented successfully.
A case class differs from a lecture situation since you, as the student, must shoulder more of the responsibility. In a lecture situation, you are primarily responsible for mastering the material that is presented to you. Cases present what is often the most difficult part of the learning process, the decision about what material on which to concentrate. As such, these decisions are more like real life.
In your class preparation, study your cases as a business practitioner, not a student. By addressing case questions as a team before class, you can use the synergy of the group to develop better solutions than you could working alone. In doing so, you can use collective problem solving and multiple role playing to confront ineffective strategies and misconceptions.
Studying cases will assist you in your efforts to develop approaches or rules that you plan to apply to achieve success in business. Cases provide an easy, low cost way to experiment with ideas and proposals. They give you experience in debugging incorrect hypotheses and making reasonable predictions in new situations. Your case preparation provides the opportunity to experiment with the best questions to ask, the best way to test a theory, and the best way to verbalize and defend rules or theories. Once these rules have been derived from the specific cases that you are studying, they can be extrapolated forward to other cases that you will study or situations in which you find yourself. You can use the progression of cases to refine and confirm the ideas that you are developing.
Cases are best addressed systematically, through a standard approach. Applying this standard framework will enable you to make sure that you have thoroughly researched the subject, examined the material, and are not missing any important issues. The standard framework frequently used in business cases is:
I. Issue
The issue is the essential question of the case. It is the single reason why the case was written. The answer to the issue is the main idea with which you should walk away from the case and the classroom discussion.
II. Environmental Analysis
The Environmental Analysis presents the events leading to the development of the issue. This includes the financial/stock/portfolio analysis as well as the governmental and other constraints in which the decision-makers must operate. The environmental analysis includes the variables that the individual company cannot control.
III. Problems and Opportunities
The Problems and Opportunities section lists the strengths and weaknesses within which the business leaders must operate. While these factors are often perceived by the business managers, they are also the ones over which the manager has the most control to change.
IV. Alternatives
The Alternatives are the three to four most likely next steps that the managers can take in their attempt to address the original business issue. These must be succinct and clearly thought out recommendations. They must be the best comprehensive steps that the managers can take, given the environment in which they are working and the problems and opportunities that they are facing.
V. Recommendation
The recommendation is the choice of the best alternative and the decision to follow this path in future efforts. The Competitor Analysis should be different and should incorporate the Case Analysis with a particular focus on the identified competitor/s.
Competitor Company Name
I. Description of the Competitor Company
II. Financial Analysis/Portfolio Issue
III. Stock/Investment Outlook
IV. Potential/Prospective for Growth
V. Competitive Structure
VI. Role of Research and Development
VII. Technological Investment and Analysis
VIII. Recommendation for the Future
Similarly, the Student Industry Analysis/Outline focuses upon the industry in which the company is operating and competing. You should keep in mind that the key to this analysis is not to allow yourself to fill in the blanks by writing down everything that is available. You must constantly keep in mind that the goal is to collect and present only information that will lead to the successful evaluation of the case.
Remember that extensive and complex material such as this should be collected and analyzed in small steps. This will enable you to more easily decide which information is important. Collecting the information in small steps will also enable you to more thoroughly organize it.
Industry Name
I. Description of the Industry
II. Financial Analysis
III. Stock/Investment Outlook
IV. Potential/Prospective for Growth
V. Competitive Structure
VI. Role of Research and Development
VII. Technological Investment and Analysis
VIII. Recommendation for the Future
The following steps would be helpful to complete the industry analysis:
Whenever lists of items to identify, research, and present are made, the temptation always exists to focus on the lists, not on addressing the issue at hand. The cases in this book were included to enable you to "put yourself in the shoes" of the manager and make decisions as they would. Taking this approach will make case teaching intrinsically motivating, including the elements of challenge, fantasy, and fun. Satisfaction can come from applying a standard process of analysis to the case and then succinctly presenting the results to the classroom. The goal, of course, is to recognize a unique point that no one else has identified.
The cases include personal descriptions of the major players in the cases so that you can make decisions from the framework they bring to the case. Remember, if the manager or company is extremely conservative financially, they will be less likely to adopt and implement a cutting edge management information system. Although nuances that are removed from the thorough financial and quantitative analysis discussed previously, it is often these nuances and perspectives that lead to the difference between the successful and less-than-successful implementation of technology.
While putting yourself in the manager’s shoes and making decisions from this perspective, it is also important to bring your own unique perspective to the decision-making process. One danger in business, of course, is the temptation to become myopic and focus only on those things that make sense from your perspective. Managers and companies that have adhered strictly to this approach often get into trouble since they miss new market segments, changing environments, or ways in which they can further mine their current customer lists for new sales and product opportunities.
As a result, after you have thoroughly analyzed the information, it is extremely important to bring your perspective to the final mix of business recommendations. Perhaps you have worked in the industry, can identify with a particular untapped market segment or group, or just have a tangential interest in the subject. All of these perspectives give you a unique viewpoint to include in your analysis. Breadth of exposure to the conventions, points of view, and practices of many industries is important to provide the depth required to understand the complexities involved in conducting business within each case setting. Particularly in technology, simple formulas for success are not readily available for easy application. Cases provide contextual understanding from which to make business judgments in a protected environment. Even the most quantitatively-oriented manager will agree that emotion, attitudes, aspirations, and values he/she brings to the task will play an important role in managerial decision-making.
Examining cases within the context of an industry helps to guard against grasping for the first opportunity that exists and attempting to force fit it to the next business problem. The memorization of rules, even the correct ones, are of minimal worth unless they can be applied at the right time and in the proper situation. Breadth of exposure to the conventions, points of view, and practices of many industries provides the wisdom necessary to identify subtleties in the organization and respond accordingly. Knowledge of the business environment, economies, or the problems of specific industries or companies may never be explicitly used. However, they will provide the perspective or influence the imagination to discover a new innovation or apply an old one to a new situation.
Several approaches can be important keys to developing this perspective. Your final analysis should incorporate aspects of all three.
The generalist approach advocates breadth of perspective rather than specialization. Focus is placed upon addressing the issue from a broad business perspective. Often the most difficult part of the problem is to identify in which discipline the problem lies. Thus, it is important to rise above your individual perspective or discipline to first determine in which area the problem resides.
The practitioner approach focuses on the importance and willingness to act. Decisions must be made and courses of action chosen even when there is incomplete information or the risk is high that subsequent information will prove the decision-maker wrong.
The professional approach insures that the role of the manager includes and goes beyond the entrepreneurial function. Quality and clarity of the final purpose are important. The goal is long-term return-on-investment, not just short-term profit.
The innovative approach stresses the implementation of new ideas rather than the maintenance of the status quo. Focusing policy upon changing circumstances is as important as developing innovation through new inventions and advancing technology. Profits can be maximized through the application of the company's long-established strengths to unexplored segments of the market through price, service, distribution, or advertising innovations.
The communication approach involves the effective communication of the decision to the rest of the organization.
Cases focus on the problems of strategy formulation, building the organization, and accomplishing assigned tasks. Utilized effectively, this will maximize the benefit you will receive in the development of additional knowledge and skills. The increasing complexity, both financially and conceptually, of the cases in this book should lead to a deeper understanding and perspective of the business issues involved in management information systems.
Concentration on these cases will enable you to learn about the functions, roles, and skills of senior management from the perspective of the general manager. They help you develop techniques in setting goals, outlining the functions and activities that must be performed to achieve the goals, and determining the strategies needed to accomplish these objectives. They clearly demonstrate the role that risk plays in management. Cases will help you identify and deal successfully with uncertainty and rapidly learn to make decisions from limited information. Cases will provide experience in dividing the organization into logical, understandable assignments with limitations on authority and provisions for individual decision-making. They provide practice with setting performance standards. These standards will assist you in the application of your skills to making leadership decisions through insight, self-confidence, and imagination. Finally, the cases will assist you with the anticipation and acceptance of responsibility for your actions and those of the organization as you some day relate to the organization’s stakeholders, investors, employees, suppliers, communities, countries, and environment.
Learning from cases will also change the way you interact with your professor. By emphasizing student involvement and self-teaching, the use of case-studies requires a substantial shift in the traditional roles played by you and your professor. . Teaching with cases gives fundamental opportunities but also dilemmas and risks. For some professors, case teaching can be an uncomfortable assignment since it introduces an element of the unknown into the classroom equation. Many variables can be controlled in a well-written and delivered lecture. Well-prepared students and the professor can direct a case in many different directions, some of which were neither planned for nor foreseen. The crafting of questions, careful listening, and constructive response are the key skill requirements for effective case interactions.
As a student, you can use cases to gain expertise in responding quickly to new situations and environments. The best decisions are made with perfect information. Unfortunately, few decisions have the luxury of being made with this background. Cases provide practice in "landing on one's feet" and responding quickly to a problem or opportunity given a limited amount of information and the time constraints under which you must operate.