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Develop Your Company’s Cross-Functional Capabilities

Harvard Business Review

Instead, our interviews found a willingness to let organizational forms and structures evolve naturally, developing in line with the identity of the enterprise. Then came sales forces, finance departments, and R&D labs—including the original labs of Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell.

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Shadow IT Is Out of the Closet

Harvard Business Review

An impatient marketing or finance manager would, on the sly, secure some extra budget money and hire a contractor to build a little database that tracked mailing addresses or top-line financials. Slowly but surely, as the little database grew bigger and bigger, the manager would wedge the cost into her operating budget.

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How Cloud Computing Is Changing Management

Harvard Business Review

Likely outcomes of the move to cloud include changing how products are designed; closer collaboration between the corporate IT department and other business units, including sales, finance and forecasting; and more customer interaction, even to a point of jointly developing products with their consumers.