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The teaching case describes BMW’s ongoing journey to implement a digital twin at its plant in Spartanburg, SC with the help of NavVis, a reality capture solution provider. Plant Spartanburg has long been an innovation center for BMW’s automotive group, which, since its opening in 1994, has produced 1,500 vehicles each day. The case reflects on the different phases of becoming a virtually enabled plant, starting with point data that captures 3D images of factory halls and floors, to turning these 3D images into interactive digital environments, to thinking about use cases and simulations that can mirror the physical operations taking place at the plant in real-time. The case is written from the perspective of Knudt Flor, former President and CEO of Plant Spartanburg, and his aspirations in his new role as Senior Vice President for Innovation and Industry Engagement at the College of Charleston to utilize what he has observed during BMW’s digital twin journey for bringing higher education into the industry fold again.

One observer’s perspective on over fifty years in the information systems academy, with a focus on service.

The role of information systems in the creation and appropriation of economic value has a long tradition of research, within which falls the literature on the sustainability of IT-dependent competitive advantage. In this article, we formally define the notion of IT-dependent strategic initiative and use it to frame a review of the literature on the sustainability of competitive advantage rooted in information systems use. We offer a framework that articulates both the dynamic approach to IT-dependent strategic advantage currently receiving attention in the literature and the underlying drivers of sustainability. This framework models how and why the characteristics of the IT-dependent strategic initiative enable sustained competitive advantage, and how the determinants of sustainability are developed and strengthened over time. Such explanation facilitates the pre-implementation analysis of planned initiatives by innovators, as well as the post-implementation evaluation of existing initiatives so as to identify the basis of their sustainability. In carrying out this study, we examined the interdisciplinary literature on strategic information systems. Using a structured methodology, we reviewed the titles and abstracts of 648 articles drawn from information systems, strategic management, and marketing literature. We then examined and individually coded a relevant subset of 117 articles. The literature has identified four barriers to erosion of competitive advantage for IT-dependent strategic initiatives and has surfaced the structural determinants of their magnitude. Previous work has also begun to theorize about the process by which these barriers to erosion evolve over time. Our review reveals that significant exploratory research and theoretical development have occurred in this area, but there is a paucity of research providing rigorous tests of theoretical propositions. Our work makes three principal contributions. First, it formalizes the definition of IT-dependent strategic initiative. Second, it organizes the extant interdisciplinary research around an integrative framework that should prove useful to both research and practice. This framework offers an explanation of how and why IT-dependent strategic initiatives contribute to sustained competitive advantage, and explains the process by which they evolve over time. Finally, our review and analysis of the literature offers the basis for future research directions.

Virtual worlds have received considerable attention as platforms for entertainment, education, and commerce. But organizations are experiencing failures in their early attempts to lure customers, employees, or partners into these worlds. Among the more grievous problems is the inability to attract users back into a virtual environment. In this study, we propose and test a model to predict users' intentions to return to a virtual world. Our model is based on the idea that users intend to return to a virtual world having conceived of it as a \"place\" in which they have had meaningful experiences. We rely on the interactionist theory of place attachment to explain the links among the constructs of our model. Our model is tested via a lab experiment. We find that users' intentions to return to a virtual world is determined by a state of deep involvement (termed cognitive absorption) that users experience as they perform an activity and tend to lose track of time. In turn, cognitive absorption is determined by users' awareness of whom they interact with and how they interact within a virtual world, what they interact about, and where, in a virtual sense, such interaction occurs. Our work contributes to theory in the following ways: it identifies state predictors of cognitive absorption, it conceives of virtual worlds in such a way as to account for users' experiences through the notion of place, and it explains how the properties of a virtual world contribute to users' awareness.

Gnosis Freight employs low-code/no-code development tools to provide container visibility information for shippers. The context for this particular case includes the U.S. supply chains that are still reeling from the impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic. Shipping costs have sky-rocketed with shippers facing huge uncertainties as shipments are marooned on container ships or in container port yards. Accustomed to reliable pick-up and delivery forecasts at reasonable rates, supply chains find themselves burdened with unreliable delivery forecasts or the inability to track shipments. Gnosis Freight, by combining data from several sources, provides logistics and transportation managers with near real-time information on their shipments. Gnosis solutions engineers, armed with low-code and no-code development tools, are able to quickly install customer-tailored container visibility portals with little adverse effects on the customer’s existing work processes and data flows. The implementation speed of these edge development tools provides Gnosis Freight with a strategic advantage over competitive offerings that require major changes in a customer’s supply chain operations. But the company also faces issues with its own data supplier, giving students a specific \"make vs buy\" problem to analyze.

The adoption of information systems (IS) is often explained in terms of usefulness and ease of use. Lately, researchers have begun to recognize that a hedonic streak in human beings provides a further contributing factor in the adoption and acceptance of information systems. Embedded in this streak is a broader social aspect that incorporates not only the solitary individual pleasure one gets from using the system, but also the pleasure that one gets from interacting and socializing with others through the system. This becomes particularly evident in virtual environments that support high levels of interaction with others and with artifacts embedded in an immersive context. By drawing on IS theories of technology acceptance and IS success, and on theories of social interaction from evolutionary psychology, activity theory, situated action, and distributed cognition, researchers test the construction of sociability and its antecedents in Second Life -- a popular virtual environment. The results support that, a social component contributes to IS usage.

This article reports the findings of a longitudinal study of temporary virtual teams and explores the role of behavior control on trust decline. We conducted an experiment involving 51 temporary virtual teams. Half of the teams were required to comply with behavior control mechanisms traditionally used in colocated teams. Their counterparts were allowed to self-direct. Our analysis shows that the behavior control mechanisms typically used in traditional teams have a significant negative effect on trust in virtual teams. In-depth analysis of the communication logs of selected teams reveals that trust decline in virtual teams is rooted in instances of reneging and incongruence. Behavior control mechanisms increase vigilance and make instances when individuals perceive team members to have failed to uphold their obligations (i.e., reneging and incongruence) salient. Heightened vigilance and salience increase the likelihood that team members' failure to fulfill their obligations will be detected, thus contributing to trust decline.

Information technology is providing the infrastructure necessary to support the development of new organizational forms. Virtual teams represent one such organizational form, one that could revolutionize the workplace and provide organizations with unprecedented levels of flexibility and responsiveness. As the technological infrastructure necessary to support virtual teams is now readily available, further research on the range of issues surrounding virtual teams is required if we are to learn how to manage them effectively. While the findings of team research in the traditional environment may provide useful pointers, the idiosyncratic structural and contextual issues surrounding virtual teams call for specific research attention.This article provides a review of previously published work and reports on the findings from early virtual team research in an effort to take stock of the current state of the art. The review is organized around the input - process - output model and categorizes the literature into issues pertaining to inputs, socio-emotional processes, task processes, and outputs. Building on this review we critically evaluate virtual team research and develop research questions that can guide future inquiry in this fertile are of inquiry.

CVPCorp, a provider of container visibility and life-cycle management services, had always relied heavily on information technology and access to near real-time data from worldwide supply chain sources, such as ports and shipping companies, to drive its business. In 2023, they began experimenting with Generative AI (GenAI) and Large Language Models (LLM). The case first describes CVPCorp’s business and products. It then explores how the company embarked on a bottom-up approach for weaving AI quickly into the fabric of its products, operations, and management while leaving us to question how these technologies, as they evolve, will continue to transform CVPCorp and the customers it serves. The case ends with a need to respond to a challenge from an investor—to look at AI from a top-down and strategic perspective.

Internet technologies are having a significant impact on the learning industry. For-profit organizations and traditional institutions of higher education have developed and are using web-based courses, but little is known about their effectiveness compared to traditional classroom education. Our work focuses on the effectiveness of a web-based virtual learning environment (VLE) in the context of basic information technology skills training. This article provides three main contributions. First, it introduces and defines the concept of VLE, discussing how a VLE differs from the traditional classroom and differentiating it from the related, but narrower, concept of computer aided instruction (CAI). Second, it presents a framework of VLE effectiveness, grounded in the technology-mediated learning literature, which frames the VLE research domain, and addresses the relationship between the main constructs. Finally, it focuses on one essential VLE design variable, learner control, and compares a web-based VLE to a traditional classroom through a longitudinal experimental design. Our results indicate that, in the context of IT basic skills training in undergraduate education, there are no significant differences in performance between students enrolled in the two environments. However, the VLE leads to higher reported computer self-efficacy, while participants report being less satisfied with the learning process.