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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. The result?

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Develop Your Company’s Cross-Functional Capabilities

Harvard Business Review

You’ll often find customer relationship management within marketing, budgeting within finance, supply-chain management within operations, outsourcing within procurement, training within HR, and new product development within R&D. Business units come and go, but finance, HR, marketing, IT, legal, and R&D seem to last forever.

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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. ” What else needs to change? .