Free academic articles and presentations in pdf for lazy students

Options by Damadaran

2008-05-23T10:10:00.001-07:00

http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/pdfiles/country/option.pdf
Chapter THE OPTIONS TO EXPAND AND ABANDON: VALUATION IMPLICATIONS by Damadaran
Damodaran online - free stuff on valuation, risk, investments, etc
Spreadsheets to check out about modeling options
Valuation of Patents presentation pdf
Valuing the Real Option of Abandoning Unprofitable Custorners When Calculating Customer Lifetime Value

Download Principles of Corporate Finance

2008-02-09T09:41:00.000-08:00

The main book for Financial
and Investment planning course:

* Hardcover: 704 pages
* Publisher: Prentice Hall; 7th Packag edition (July 15, 1998)
* Language: English
* ISBN-10: 0139059938
* ISBN-13: 978-0139059933
* Publisher: McGraw Hill/Irwin; 7th edition (2003)
* Language: English
* ISBN-10: 0070529078

FROM THE PUBLISHER Brealey/Myers’ Principles of Corporate Finance is the worldwide leading text that describes the theory and practice of corporate finance. Throughout the book the authors show how managers use financial theory to solve practical problems and as a way of learning how to respond to change by showing not just how but why companies and management act as they do. The text is comprehensive, authoritative, and modern and yet the material is presented at a common sense level. The discussions and illustrations are unique due to the depth of detail blended with a distinct sense of humor for which the book is well known and highly regarded. This text is a valued reference for thousands of practicing financial managers. Download book: http://w13.easy-share.com/1220323.html

Eight business technology trends to watch

2008-01-08T13:51:00.000-08:00

From the McKinsey Quarterly

Special to CNET News.com
December 26, 2007 4:00 AM PST McKinsey Quarterly podcast Eight business technology trends to watch. Download this podcast.

Technology alone is rarely the key to unlocking economic value: companies create real wealth when they combine technology with new ways of doing business.

Through our work and research, we have identified eight technology-enabled trends that will help shape businesses and the economy in coming years. These trends fall within three broad areas of business activity: managing relationships, managing capital and assets, and leveraging information in new ways.

Managing relationships
1. Distributing co-creation

The Internet and related technologies give companies radical new ways to harvest the talents of innovators working outside corporate boundaries. Today, in the high-technology, consumer product, and automotive sectors, among others, companies routinely involve customers, suppliers, small specialist businesses, and independent contractors in the creation of new products. Outsiders offer insights that help shape product development, but companies typically control the innovation process. Technology now allows companies to delegate substantial control to outsiders--co-creation--in essence by outsourcing innovation to business partners that work together in networks. By distributing innovation through the value chain, companies may reduce their costs and usher new products to market faster by eliminating the bottlenecks that come with total control.
Wikipedia could be viewed as a service or product created by its distributed customers.

Information goods such as software and editorial content are ripe for this kind of decentralized innovation; the Linux operating system, for example, was developed over the Internet by a network of specialists. But companies can also create physical goods in this way. Loncin, a leading Chinese motorcycle manufacturer, sets broad specifications for products and then lets its suppliers work with one another to design the components, make sure everything fits together, and reduce costs. In the past, Loncin didn't make extensive use of information technology to manage the supplier community--an approach reflecting business realities in China and in this specific industrial market. But recent advances in open-standards-based computing (for example, computer-aided-design programs that work well with other kinds of software) are making it easier to co-create physical goods for more complex value chains in competitive markets.

If this approach to innovation becomes broadly accepted, the impact on companies and industries could be substantial. We estimate, for instance, that in the U.S. economy alone roughly 12 percent of all labor activity could be transformed by more distributed and networked forms of innovation--from reducing the amount of legal and administrative activity that intellectual property involves to restructuring or eliminating some traditional R&D work.

Companies pursuing this trend will have less control over innovation and the intellectual property that goes with it, however. They will also have to compete for the attention and time of the best and most capable contributors.
2. Using consumers as innovators

Consumers also co-create with companies; the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, for instance, could be viewed as a service or product created by its distributed customers. But the differences between the way companies co-create with partners, on the one hand, and with customers, on the other, are so marked that the consumer side is really a separate trend. These differences include the nature and range of the interactions, the economics of making them work, and the management challenges associated with them.

As the Internet has evolved--an evolution prompted in part by new Web 2.0 technologies--it has become a more widespread platform for interaction, communication, and activism. Consumers increasingly want to engage online with one another and with organizations of all kinds. Companies can tap this new mood of customer engagement for their economic benefit.

OhmyNews, for instance, is a popular South Korean online newspaper written by upwards of 60,000 contributing "citizen reporters." It has quickly become one of South Korea's most influential media outlets, with around 700,000 site visits a day. Another company that goes out of its way to engage customers, the online clothing store Threadless, asks people to submit new designs for T-shirts. Each week, hundreds of participants propose ideas and the community at large votes for its favorites. The top four to six designs are printed on shirts and sold in the store; the winners receive a combination of cash prizes and store credit. In September 2007 Threadless opened its first physical retail operation, in Chicago.

Companies that involve customers in design, testing, marketing (such as viral marketing), and the after-sales process get better insights into customer needs and behavior and may be able to cut the cost of acquiring customers, engender greater loyalty, and speed up development cycles. But a company open to allowing customers to help it innovate must ensure that it isn't unduly influenced by information gleaned from a vocal minority. It must also be wary of focusing on the immediate rather than longer-range needs of customers and be careful to avoid raising and then failing to meet their expectations.
3. Tapping into a world of talent

As more and more sophisticated work takes place interactively online and new collaboration and communications tools emerge, companies can outsource increasingly specialized aspects of their work and still maintain organizational coherence. Much as technology permits them to decentralize innovation through networks or customers, it also allows them to parcel out more work to specialists, free agents, and talent networks.

Top talent for a range of activities--from finance to marketing and IT to operations--can be found anywhere.

Top talent for a range of activities--from finance to marketing and IT to operations--can be found anywhere. The best person for a task may be a free agent in India or an employee of a small company in Italy rather than someone who works for a global business services provider. Software and Internet technologies are making it easier and less costly for companies to integrate and manage the work of an expanding number of outsiders, and this development opens up many contracting options for managers of corporate functions.

The implications of shifting more work to freelancers are interesting. For one thing, new talent-deployment models could emerge. TopCoder, a company that has created a network of software developers, may represent one such model. TopCoder gives organizations that want to have software developed for them access to its talent pool. Customers explain the kind of software they want and offer prizes to the developers who do the best job creating it--an approach that costs less than employing experienced engineers. Furthermore, changes in the nature of labor relationships could lead to new pricing models that would shift payment schemes from time and materials to compensation for results.

This trend should gather steam in sectors such as software, health care delivery, professional services, and real estate, where companies can easily segment work into discrete tasks for independent contractors and then reaggregate it. As companies move in this direction, they will need to understand the value of their human capital more fully and manage different classes of contributors accordingly. They will also have to build capabilities to engage talent globally or contract with talent aggregators that specialize in providing such services. Competitive advantage will shift to companies that can master the art of breaking down and recomposing tasks.
4. Extracting more value from interactions

Companies have been automating or offshoring an increasing proportion of their production and manufacturing (transformational) activities and their clerical or simple rule-based (transactional) activities. As a result, a growing proportion of the labor force in developed economies engages primarily in work that involves negotiations and conversations, knowledge, judgment, and ad hoc collaboration--tacit interactions, as we call them. By 2015 we expect employment in jobs primarily involving such interactions to account for about 44 percent of total U.S. employment, up from 40 percent today. Europe and Japan will experience similar changes in the composition of their workforces.
Web 2.0
Big app on campus
Educators see the lure of notoriety through Web 2.0-style social tools.

The application of technology has reduced differences in productivity between transformational and transactional employees, but huge inconsistencies persist in the productivity of high-value tacit ones. Improving it is more about increasing their effectiveness--for instance, by focusing them on interactions that create value and ensuring that they have the right information and context--than about efficiency. Technology tools that promote tacit interactions, such as wikis, virtual team environments, and videoconferencing, may become no less ubiquitous than computers are now. As companies learn to use these tools, they will develop managerial innovations--smarter and faster ways for individuals and teams to create value through interactions--that will be difficult for their rivals to replicate. Companies in sectors such as health care and banking are already moving down this road.

As companies improve the productivity of these workers, it will be necessary to couple investments in technologies with the right combination of incentives and organizational values to drive their adoption and use by employees. There is still substantial room for automating transactional activities, and the payoff can typically be realized much more quickly and measured much more clearly than the payoff from investments to make tacit work more effective. Creating the business case for investing in interactions will be challenging--but critical--for managers.
Managing capital and assets
5. Expanding the frontiers of automation

Companies, governments, and other organizations have put in place systems to automate tasks and processes: forecasting and supply chain technologies; systems for enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management, and HR; product and customer databases; and Web sites. Now these systems are becoming interconnected through common standards for exchanging data and representing business processes in bits and bytes. What's more, this information can be combined in new ways to automate an increasing array of broader activities, from inventory management to customer service.

During the late 1990s FedEx and UPS linked data flowing through their internal tracking systems to the Internet--no trivial task at the time--to let customers track packages from their Web sites, with no human intervention required on the part of either company. By leveraging and linking systems to automate processes for answering inquiries from customers, both dramatically reduced the cost of serving them while increasing their satisfaction and loyalty. More recently, Carrefour, Metro, Wal-Mart Stores, and other large retailers have adopted (and asked suppliers to adopt) digital-tagging technologies, such as radio frequency identification (RFID), and integrated them with other supply chain systems in order to further automate their supply chain and inventory management. The rate of adoption to date disappoints the advocates of these technologies, but as the price of digital tags falls they could very well reduce the costs of managing distribution and increase revenues by helping companies to manage supply more effectively.

Companies still have substantial headroom to automate many repetitive tasks that aren't yet mediated by computers--particularly in sectors and regions where IT marches at a slower pace--and to interlink "islands of automation" and so give managers and customers the ability to do new things. Automation is a good investment if it not only lowers costs but also helps users to get what they want more quickly and easily, though it may not be a good idea if it gives them unpleasant experiences. The trick is to strike the right balance between raising margins and making customers happy.
6. Unbundling production from delivery

Technology helps companies to utilize fixed assets more efficiently by disaggregating monolithic systems into reusable components, measuring and metering the use of each, and billing for that use in ever smaller increments cost-effectively. Information and communications technologies handle the tracking and metering critical to the new models and make it possible to have effective allocation and capacity-planning systems.

Amazon.com, for example, has expanded its business model to let other retailers use its logistics and distribution services. It also gives independent software developers opportunities to buy processing power on its IT infrastructure so that they don't have to buy their own. Mobile virtual-network operators, another example of this trend, provide wireless services without investing in a network infrastructure. At the most basic level of unbundled production, 80 percent of all companies responding to a recent survey on Web trends say they are investing in Web services and related technologies. Although the applications vary, many are using these technologies to offer other companies--suppliers, customers, and other ecosystem participants--access to parts of their IT architectures through standard protocols.

Unbundling works in the physical world, too. Today you can buy fractional time on a jet, in a high-end sports car, or even for designer handbags. Unbundling is attractive from the supply side because it lets asset-intensive businesses--factories, warehouses, truck fleets, office buildings, data centers, networks, and so on--raise their utilization rates and therefore their returns on invested capital. On the demand side, unbundling offers access to resources and assets that might otherwise require a large fixed investment or significant scale to achieve competitive marginal costs. For companies and entrepreneurs seeking capacity (or variable additional capacity), unbundling makes it possible to gain access to assets quickly, to scale up businesses while keeping balance sheets asset-light, and to use attractive consumption and contracting models that are easier on their income statements.

Companies that make their assets available for internal and external use will need to manage conflicts if demand exceeds supply. A competitive advantage through scale may be hard to maintain when many players, large and small, have equal access to resources at low marginal costs.
Leveraging information in new ways
7. Putting more science into management

Just as the Internet and productivity tools extend the reach of and provide leverage to desk-based workers, technology is helping managers exploit ever-greater amounts of data to make smarter decisions and develop the insights that create competitive advantages and new business models. From "ideagoras" (eBay-like marketplaces for ideas) to predictive markets to performance-management approaches, ubiquitous standards-based technologies promote aggregation, processing, and decision making based on the use of growing pools of rich data.

Leading players are exploiting this information explosion with a diverse set of management techniques. Google fosters innovation through an internal market: employees submit ideas, and other employees decide if an idea is worth pursuing or if they would be willing to work on it full-time. Intel integrates a "prediction market" with regular short-term forecasting processes to build more accurate and less volatile estimates of demand. The cement manufacturer Cemex optimizes loads and routes by combining complex analytics with a wireless tracking and communications network for its trucks.
Environments that celebrate making choices on a factual basis must beware of analysis paralysis.

The amount of information and a manager's ability to use it have increased explosively not only for internal processes but also for the engagement of customers. The more a company knows about them, the better able it is to create offerings they want, to target them with messages that get a response, and to extract the value that an offering gives them. The holy grail of deep customer insight--more granular segmentation, low-cost experimentation, and mass customization--becomes increasingly accessible through technological innovations in data collection and processing and in manufacturing.

Examples are emerging across a wide range of industries. Amazon.com stands at the forefront of advanced customer segmentation. Its recommendation engine correlates the purchase histories of each individual customer with those of others who made similar purchases to come up with suggestions for things that he or she might buy. Although the jury is still out on the true value of recommendation engines, the techniques seem to be paying off: CleverSet, a pure-play recommendation-engine provider, claims that the 75 online retailers using the engine are averaging a 22 percent increase in revenue per visitor. Meanwhile, toll road operators are beginning to segment drivers and charge them differential prices based on static conditions (such as time of day) and dynamic ones (traffic). Technology is also dramatically bringing down the costs of experimentation and giving creative leaders opportunities to think like scientists by constructing and analyzing alternatives. The financial-services concern Capital One conducts hundreds of experiments daily to determine the appropriate mix of products it should direct to specific customer profiles. Similarly, Harrah's casinos mine customer data to target promotions and drive exemplary customer service.

Given the vast resources going into storing and processing information today, it's hard to believe that we are only at an early stage in this trend. Yet we are. The quality and quantity of information available to any business will continue to grow explosively as the costs of monitoring and managing processes fall.

Leaders should get out ahead of this trend to ensure that information makes organizations more effective, rather than less. Information is often power; broadening access and increasing transparency will inevitably influence organizational politics and power structures. Environments that celebrate making choices on a factual basis must beware of analysis paralysis.
8. Making businesses from information

Accumulated pools of data captured in a number of systems within large organizations or pulled together from many points of origin on the Web are the raw material for new information-based business opportunities.
A retailer using digital cameras to prevent shoplifting could also analyze the shopping patterns and traffic flows of customers through its stores.

Frequent contributors to what economists call market imperfections include information asymmetries and the frequent inability of decision makers to get all the relevant data about new market opportunities, potential acquisitions, pricing differences among suppliers, and other business situations. These imperfections often allow middlemen and players with more and better information to extract higher rents by aggregating and creating businesses around it. The Internet has brought greater transparency to many markets, from airline tickets to stocks, but many other sectors need similar illumination. Real estate is one of them. In a sector where agencies have thrived by keeping buyers and sellers partly in the dark, new sites have popped up to shine "a light up into the dark reaches of the supply curve," as Rich Barton, the founder of Zillow (a portal for real-estate information), puts it. Barton, the former leader of the e-travel site Expedia, has been down this road before.

Moreover, the aggregation of data through the digitization of processes and activities may create by-products, or "exhaust data," that companies can exploit for profit. A retailer using digital cameras to prevent shoplifting could also analyze the shopping patterns and traffic flows of customers through its stores, and could also use these insights to improve its layout or placement of promotional displays. It might also sell the data to its vendors so that they could use real observations of consumer behavior to reshape their merchandising approaches.

Another kind of information business plays a pure aggregation and visualization role, scouring the Web to assemble data on particular topics. Many business-to-consumer shopping sites and business-to-business product directories operate in this fashion. But that sword can cut both ways; today's aggregators, for instance, may themselves be aggregated tomorrow. Companies relying on information-based market imperfections need to assess the impact of the new transparency levels that are continually opening up in today's information economy.

Shaping the outcome

Creative leaders can use a broad spectrum of new, technology-enabled options to craft their strategies. These trends are best seen as emerging patterns that can be applied in a wide variety of businesses. Executives should reflect on which patterns may start to reshape their markets and industries next--and on whether they have opportunities to catalyze change and shape the outcome rather than merely react to it.

Information Technology Essentials

2007-12-12T12:18:00.000-08:00

IT Essentials Lecture Notes in pdf from Sloan School of Management
Lec # TOPICS
1 Introduction: Fundamentals of Computing I (PDF)
The Technology
2 Fundamentals of Computing II (PDF)
3 Networks I (PDF)
4 Networks II (PDF)
5 Programming Languages (PDF)
6 Relational Databases (PDF)
7 Introduction to Microsoft® Access (PDF)
8 Web Technologies Fundamentals (PDF - 2.7 MB)
9 Computer Security I: Encryption and Digital Signatures (PDF)
10 Computer Security II: Network Security
Applications of Technology
11 "Under the Hood" of a Commercial Website (PDF)
12 Managing Software Development (PDF)
13 Enterprise Systems (PDF 2.1 MB)
14 Systems that Span Multiple Enterprises (PDF)
15 Business Intelligence: Data Mining and Data Warehousing (PDF)
16 Emerging Technologies; Course Wrap-up (PDF)

E-commerce notes

2007-12-08T13:52:00.000-08:00

Take the notes doc

Business value of blogging (Whitepaper)

2007-12-08T12:05:00.000-08:00

Read or Download

Lectures Overview on Business Support Systems

2007-12-03T14:41:00.000-08:00

LECTURES ON
Business Support Systems
Enterprise and Global Management of Information Technology
Electronic Commerce Systems
Enterprise e-Business Systems

The best presentations on E-commerce and Information Systems

2007-11-24T08:06:00.000-08:00

Today you can download the BEST PRESENTATIONS that I picked up on e-commerce and Information Systems topics.
A robust presentation (ppt) on E-commerce (in fact is a whole course more than 300 slides) GET IT
An academic presentation in ppt (65 slides) on Electronic and Mobile commerce,their business models and transaction types etc GET IT
A presentation in ppt (40 slides):Introduction to IS,functional areas,transactional processing systems and ERP (Supply Chain and others)GET IT
A Short presentation in pdf (30 pages) on Management Information Systems in an organization
GET IT

Encyclopedia of business and finance 2006

2007-11-19T14:14:00.000-08:00

I've decided to put the Encyclopedia of Business and Finance instead of financial articles so everybody can pick up what she/he is looking for. This is actually a thick book of Two Volumes of a total of 800 pages ufff nevertheless just find only what you need:)
Download
P.S.in case the link does not work, tell me and I'll put mine.

Trust and privacy in E-commerce, most trusted web brands

2007-11-19T13:21:00.000-08:00

Here the results of annual Most Trusted Companies of 2005 for Privacy Study. The purpose of the study is to have consumers assign a rating to companies according to how much they trust these organizations to protect the privacy of their personal information. >Download
GEOTRUST white paper gives recommendations on how on-line companies can create trusted brands so their site visitors feel confident enough to stay and pay.
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E-Policy Best Practices: A Business Guide to Compliant & Secure Internet, Instant Messaging (IM),Peer-to-Peer (P2P) and Email Communications : provide best-practices guidelines for developing and implementing effective workplace e-policies and in the process, create clean and compliant, safe and secure electronic communications that are less likely to trigger a workplace lawsuit, regulatory investigation, security breach, or other electronic disaster.
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An Ontology for developing e-Business Models

2007-11-18T07:18:00.000-08:00

An Ontology for developing e-Business Models
Abstract. In this paper we demonstrate why executives and academics should consider thinking about e-business models. We show that the business model concept is an interesting tool for understanding, designing, sharing, measuring, changing and even simulating businesses. Based on an extensive review of e-business and business model literature we develop an e-business model ontology or framework. This ontology defines the concepts in e-business models and the relationships between them and shall be the foundation for a variety of management tools that facilitate business decisions. Our e-business model ontology outlines what value a company offers to which customer segments. It describes the architecture of the firm and its network of partners for creating, marketing and delivering value and relationship capital, in order to generate profitable and sustainable revenue streams.
Keywords: e-business, e-business model, e-business model design, ontology
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Presentation on Creativity idea...

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How to link executive pay with performance

2007-11-18T06:56:00.000-08:00

Famous Rappaport article from 1999 but still advised to students.
Key words: Shareholders value adding, compensation schemes,CEO, indexed options.

Rappaport.pdf

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Today's articles on Mobile Commerce, its business models and so on

2007-11-18T05:56:00.000-08:00

ABSTRACT
Considering the recent convergence of computing and telecommunications technologies with the tremendous success of the Internet, the World Wide Web, and Mobile Communications, the next step is expected to be the Mobile Web. The main promise of the Mobile Web is to satisfy user needs for anywhere, anytime access to information and services, including Location Based Services (LBS). This paper presents an innovative LBS service applicable to the Mobile Marketing industry sector. We describe the architecture of the information system supporting the proposed service and a software prototype we implemented using a simulation environment for providing location information. The technologies adopted for this design are based on open standards and have successfully met the requirements of scalability and autonomy. Then, we propose and describe a business model for this service. Emphasis is given on the participating entities, their roles and the interactions among them.

Keywords: Mobile Advertising, Location Based Services, Business Model, System Implementation
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Nokia's paper on core points about Mobile Commerce (commerce on mobile phone devices)
Key words: drivers of mobile commerce, mobile payments, transaction environment, platform services.
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Information technology outsourcing

2007-11-18T05:01:00.001-08:00

The information technology outsourcing risk: a transaction cost and agency theory-based perspective
ABSTRACT: Many firms have adopted outsourcing in recent years as a means of governing their information technology (IT) operations. While outsourcing is associated with significant benefits, it can also be a risky endeavour. This paper proposes a scenario-based conceptualization of the IT outsourcing risk, wherein risk is defined as a quadruplet comprising a scenario, the likelihood of that scenario, its consequences and the risk mitigation mechanisms that can attenuate or help avoid the occurrence of a scenario. This definition draws on and extends a risk assessment framework that is widely used in engineering. The proposed conceptualization of risk is then applied to the specific context of IT outsourcing using previous research on IT outsourcing as well as transaction cost and agency theory as a point of departure.
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Surveying the risks and benefits of outsourcing
Key words: survey of senior IT managers on top risk concerns and benefits of IT outsoursing, offsoring, ratings
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