MKT 6009 Marketing Internship (0 semester credit hours) Student gains experience and improves skills through appropriate developmental work assignments in a real business environment. Student must identify and submit specific business learning objectives at the beginning of the semester. The student must demonstrate exposure to the managerial perspective via involvement or observation. At semester end, student prepares an oral or poster presentation, or a written paper reflecting on the work experience. Student performance is evaluated by the work supervisor. Pass/Fail only. Prerequisites: (MAS 6102 or MBA major) and department consent required. (0-0) S MKT 6244 Digital Marketing Strategy (2 semester credit hours) Executive Education Course. The course explores three distinct areas within marketing and sales namely, digital marketing, traditional sales prospecting, and executive sales organization and strategy. The continuing convergence of the digital marketing and sales funnels has created a strategic continuum from digital lead generation to digital sales. The course identifies the current composition of this digital continuum while providing opportunities to evaluate sales and marketing digital strategies. Prerequisites: MKT 6301 and instructor consent required. (2-0) Y MKT 6301 (SYSM 6318) Marketing Management (3 semester credit hours) Overview of marketing management methods, principles and concepts including product, pricing, promotion and distribution decisions as well as segmentation, targeting and positioning. (3-0) S MKT 6309 Marketing Data Analysis and Research (3 semester credit hours) Methods employed in market research and data analysis to understand consumer behavior, customer journeys, and markets so as to enable better decision-making. Topics include understanding different sources of data, survey design, experiments, and sampling plans. The course will cover the techniques used for market sizing estimation and forecasting. In addition, the course will cover the foundational concepts and techniques used in data visualization and \"story-telling\" for clients and management. Corequisites: MKT 6301 and OPRE 6301. (3-0) Y MKT 6310 Consumer Behavior (3 semester credit hours) An exposition of the theoretical perspectives of consumer behavior along with practical marketing implication. Study of psychological, sociological and behavioral findings and frameworks with reference to consumer decision-making. Topics will include the consumer decision-making model, individual determinants of consumer behavior and environmental influences on consumer behavior and their impact on marketing. Prerequisite: MKT 6301. (3-0) Y MKT 6321 Interactive and Digital Marketing (3 semester credit hours) Introduction to the theory and practice of interactive and digital marketing. Topics covered include: online-market research, consumer behavior, conversion metrics, and segmentation considerations; ecommerce, search and display advertising, audiences, search engine marketing, email, mobile, video, social networks, and the Internet of Things. (3-0) T MKT 6322 Internet Business Models (3 semester credit hours) Topics to be covered are: consumer behavior on the Internet, advertising on the Internet, competitive strategies, market research using the Internet, brand management, managing distribution and supply chains, pricing strategies, electronic payment systems, and developing virtual organizations. Further, students learn auction theory, web content design, and clickstream analysis. Prerequisite: MKT 6301. (3-0) Y MKT 6323 Database Marketing (3 semester credit hours) Techniques to analyze, interpret, and utilize marketing databases of customers to identify a firm's best customers, understanding their needs, and targeting communications and promotions to retain such customers. Topics

Marketing for management.

Electronic commerce adoption: an empirical study of small and medium US businesses

During the past two decades, both business managers and academic researchers have shown considerable interest in understanding how information technologies (IT) help to create competitive advantage for a firm. While recently the idea of competitive differentiation through IT has been challenged, this study contrasts the traditional thinking about competitive advantage with the resource-based view. Specifically, it is argued that by demarcating specific types of capabilities, we can contribute to better understanding of the sources of IT-based competitive advantage. Conceptually, we distinguish here between value, competitive, and dynamic capabilities as three distinct types of capabilities. Within each type, we identify specific capabilities, such as quality of the IT infrastructure, IT business experience, relationship infrastructure, and intensity of organizational learning, and present a model that describes relationships between these capabilities and competitive advantage. We then empirically test the model using data collected via a national mail survey from chief IT executives from 202 manufacturing firms. While the quality of the IT infrastructure is hypothesized as a value capability and expectedly did not have any significant effect on competitive advantage, the quality of IT business expertise and the relationship infrastructure (competitive capabilities) did. The results of the study also indicate that the intensity of organizational learning (dynamic capability) was significantly related to all of the capabilities. These results point to the importance of delineating capabilities such as relationship infrastructure that can facilitate differentiation in the marketplace, and dynamic capabilities such as organizational learning as an important antecedent to IT capability building.

Types of Information Technology Capabilities and Their Role in Competitive Advantage: An Empirical Study

Delivering quality customer service has emerged as a strategic imperative, one that is increasingly tied to a firm's information technology resources and capabilities. This paper presents an empirical study that examines the extent to which IT impacts customer service. More specifically, this study investigates the differential effects of various IT resources and capabilities on the performance of the customer service process across firms that compete in the North American life and health insurance industry. The paper builds on (1) information systems work that suggests that the effects of IT are best documented at the level of processes within a firm, (2) information systems work that suggests that the performance effects of IT are likely to be contingent in nature, and (3) developments in the resource-based view, which describes the kinds of IT resources and capabilities that are likely to enable a process in one firm to outperform the same process in competing firms. The findings suggest that tacit, socially complex, firm-specific resources explain variation in process performance across firms and that IT resources and capabilities without these attributes do not. Of particular interest to IS scholars, it is found that shared knowledge between IT and customer service units-an important driver of how IT is implemented and used in the customer service process-is a key IT capability that affects customer service process performance and moderates the impacts of explicit IT resources such as the generic information technologies used in the process and IT spending, which-consistent with resource-based predictions-were not found to be directly and positively associated with relative process performance. The implications of the findings for research and practice are discussed.

Information technology and the performance of the customer service process: a resource-based analysis

Strategic information technology alignment remains a top priority for business and IT executives. Yet with a recent rise in environmental volatility, firms are asking how to be more agile in identifying and responding to market-based threats and opportunities. Whether alignment helps or hurts agility is an unresolved issue. This paper presents a variety of arguments from the literature that alternately predict a positive or negative relationship between alignment and agility. This relationship is then tested using a model in which agility mediates the link between alignment and firm performance under varying conditions of IT infrastructure flexibility and environmental volatility. Using data from a matched survey of IT and business executives in 241 firms, we uncover a positive and significant link between alignment and agility and between agility and firm performance. We also show that the effect of alignment on performance is fully mediated by agility, that environmental volatility positively moderates the link between agility and firm performance, and that agility has a greater impact on firm performance in more volatile markets. While IT infrastructure flexibility does not moderate the link between alignment and agility, except in a volatile environment, we reveal that IT infrastructure flexibility has a positive and significant main effect on agility. In fact, the effect of IT infrastructure flexibility on agility is as strong as the effect of alignment on agility. This research extends and integrates the literature on strategic IT alignment and organizational agility at a time when both alignment and agility are recognized as critical and concurrent organizational goals.

Competing perspectives on the link between strategic information technology alignment and organizational agility: insights from a mediation model

Researchers and practitioners alike have taken note of the potential value of an organization's IT infrastructure. IT infrastructure expenditures account for over 58 percent of an organization's IT budget and the percentage is growing at 11 percent a year. Some even have called IT infrastructure the new competitive weapon and see it as being crucial in developing a sustained competitive advantage. Unique characteristics of an IT infrastructure determine the value of that infrastructure to an organization. One characteristic, IT infrastructure flexibility, has captured the attention of researchers and practitioners. In fact, in most recent surveys featuring issues of most importance to IT executives, the development of a flexible and responsive IT infrastructure and related topics are always at or near the top of the responses. Although the importance of IT infrastructure flexibility has been established, the development of a valid, reliable instrument to measure this construct has not been reported in the literature. The purpose of this paper is to better define the IT infrastructure flexibility construct and to develop a valid, reliable measurement instrument for this construct. In addition to the definition and operationalization of the IT infrastructure flexibility construct, this study explores the instrument's predictive validity with possible antecedent and consequent variables.

Measuring the Flexibility of Information Technology Infrastructure: Exploratory Analysis of a Construct

The purpose of this paper is to develop and test a research model that investigates the effects of user experience with information technology (IT) on user satisfaction with and continual usage intention of the technology. The research model uses the concept of cognitive absorption (CA) to conceptualize the optimal holistic experience that users feel when using IT. A set of hypotheses are proposed regarding the direct and indirect effects of CA on user satisfaction through the perceived utilitarian and hedonic performance and expectation disconfirmation of IT. An online survey was conducted to test the model and its associated hypotheses. The results provided support for the hypothesized effects of CA and indicated its importance for the formation of post-adoption satisfaction and continuance intention with IT.

https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1057%2Fejis.2009.50.pdf

User experience, satisfaction, and continual usage intention of IT

Determining and assessing the requisite skills of information technology (IT) personnel have become critical as the value of IT has risen in modern organizations. In addition to technical skills traditionally expected of IT personnel, softer skills like managerial, business, and interpersonal skills have been increasingly cited in previous studies as mandatory for these employees. This paper uses a typology of IT personnel skills—technology management skills, business functional skills, interpersonal skills, and technical skills—and investigates their relationships to two information systems (IS) success variables, IS infrastructure flexibility and the competitive advantage provided by IS. The study investigates these relationships using the perceptions of chief information officers (CIOs) from mostly Fortune 2000 companies. The contributions of this study are: IT personnel skills do affect IS success, technical skills are viewed as the most important skill set in affecting IS infrastructure flexibility and competitive advantage, and modularity is viewed as more valuable to competitive advantage than integration. Several explanations are offered for the lack of positive relationships between the softer IT personnel skills and the dimensions of IS success used in this study.

An Exploratory Analysis of the Value of the Skills of IT Personnel: Their Relationship to IS Infrastructure and Competitive Advantage

An exploratory examination of the relationship between flexible IT infrastructure and competitive advantage

The knowledge and skills of information technology IT personnel have become of critical importance as the strategic value of IT in modern organizations has become apparent. In addition to technical skills traditionally expected of IT personnel, organizational, functional, and managerial skills have been increasingly cited as mandatory for these employees. This paper used a well-accepted typology of IT personnel knowledge and skills, and investigated its relationship to desirable technological traits in organizations and to technological variables that have been closely aligned to competitive advantage in organizations. This exploratory examination used the statistical technique of canonical correlation analysis to investigate the relationship between IT personnel knowledge and skills and the flexibility of information systems IS infrastructure. Additionally, the same technique was used to test the relationship between the knowledge and skills of these personnel and measures of IT contribution to competitive advantage. In both cases, the relationships were significant and positive. Implications of these findings and a call for further research into the strategic value of IT personnel knowledge and skills are discussed.

Douglas E. Turner

Papers

Measuring the Flexibility of Information Technology Infrastructure: Exploratory Analysis of a Construct

User experience, satisfaction, and continual usage intention of IT

An Exploratory Analysis of the Value of the Skills of IT Personnel: Their Relationship to IS Infrastructure and Competitive Advantage

An exploratory examination of the relationship between flexible IT infrastructure and competitive advantage

The Impact of IT Personnel Skills on IS Infrastructure and Competitive IS