Espen Andersen - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Espen Andersen

Public IT policy can be divided into policies directed towards the industry, and policies directe... more Public IT policy can be divided into policies directed towards the industry, and policies directed towards the use of information technology in public administration and public service companies. That was then. What does it take to be an IT company today? Norwegian Air Shuttle: IT for competitive advantage Norwegian Air Shuttle, a successful low cost airline, is really an IT story-CEO and founder Bjørn Kjos was not a proponent of information technology, but changed his mind after his 2002 CIO hire, Hans Petter Aanby, managed to use IT to first lower cost, then grow the company's market, and then to start a new business. Cost: Norwegian originally sold tickets over the telephone or through agents, with per-ticket transaction costs of more than $35. In April 2003 the company moved most of its sales to the Internet, purposefully designing a very simple web site. It was one of the first airlines in Europe to have customers print out their own (bar-coded) boarding passes, which simplified check-in and saved boarding time. Eventually, 85% of orders would come over the web, and only 1% through the call center. Growth: Airline prices vary, but it can be very hard for customers to see when it is cheap to fly. Many airlines make it hard for customers to find the cheap flights, but Norwegian went the other way, giving the customers a calendar-based view of flights-with prices. This made it easy for customers to pick the cheapest flights-and drove more customers to book with Norwegian. Eventually the system was sold back to the Amadeus reservation system-and is now used by most airlines in the Nordics. New business: As Norwegian expanded (eventually flying more passengers outside Norway than inside,) the next step was to establish a new business out of their customer base and transaction platform: Bank Norwegian, an Internet bank that went into operation in the Fall of 2007. Drawing on a satisfied customer set, an experienced IT capability and a sophisticated, yet lean architecture, Norwegian figures it can take the transaction growth and reliability demands a banking application requires.

Ubiquity, Jun 18, 2002

ABSTRACT An abstract is not available.

Ubiquity, Feb 1, 2008

Time to end personal technology serfdom! I hate company-specific technology standards, at least t... more Time to end personal technology serfdom! I hate company-specific technology standards, at least those that specify technology in terms other than file formats, access protocols and application programming interfaces. In most companies I am in touch with, employees get a laptop and a cell phone and are required to use a set of standard capabilities of some sort. More often than not these are unnecessarily complicated, old-fashioned, expensive and singularly uninspiring. This is often for good reasons: The IT department wants to make things manageable for themselves and for the organization, and employees need to have a standard frame of reference and a compatible set of tools for work. The helpdesk can figure out which keys to press and the employees can see the same screens. Well and good, but the users are beginning to rebel at the lack of options especially those they have on their own or former computers.

With due respect to IFIP and it's name, from a pragmatic user industry point of view, it is only ... more With due respect to IFIP and it's name, from a pragmatic user industry point of view, it is only the last five to ten years that the computers have evolved into "information machines". The advent and proliferation of the PC, and the merging with the gradually deregulated communication world, has really given new meaning to the concept and realisation of "information systems". In numbers, the networked PCs are racing to catch up with that other info-machine, the telephone, of which there are about 1000 millions worldwide. Just as the telephone had significant organisational effects, so will the PC/IT-networks, with information machines that are potentially 10-100 times as powerful. As we all know, the telephones (or most of them) are very easy to operate and use. Gradually, over several decades, the telephone services have become better and cheaper, and available to practically everyone working in organisations with information or communication needs. Managers and workers of practically all categories understand the potential function and role of the telephone, in day to day operation, in new approaches to e.g. marketing, and as an obvious resource when organising activities, whether locally, nationally or across the world. Not so with the PC/networked info-machines. They have been thrust upon individuals and organisations at an unprecedented pace during half a decade, often by vendors and other pushers who don't understand the vital processes they are influencing. The hype is scoring even at the highest offices, and investments in individual HW and SW tools are passing all previous records. While the present hype is vast, so are the potential benefits of the wired organisation and society. We who pretend to understand at least part of the larger picture should ask ourselves:

This paper discusses the interfirm relations in an economy with strong demand side economies of s... more This paper discusses the interfirm relations in an economy with strong demand side economies of scale (network externalities) and scope (service complementarities). In the ICT business, the behavior of other, complementary suppliers in the hardware, software and service software market have significant effect on the revenues and technological innovation rate and pace of each firm. Moreover, there is a convergence of technology and business models, in which the IT industry's technology is adopted by the telecommunications firms while the business models of telecommunications companies are adopted by IT firms, that further motivates and complicates inter-firm relations The Norwegian and Nordic ICT industry, with special focus on the rapidly emerging market for mobile phone services is used to illustrate the unique nature of co-opetive context in this industry. This region, a leader in mobile technology development and use, includes internationally competitive equipment manufacturing firms, operators and service providers, as well as consulting firms. These firms differ in business logic with potential implications for both within group and between group implications for inter-firm relationships. A conceptual model of the mobile phone marketplace is developed, with reference to the Norwegian market, to analyze and discuss roles, motives and dominant inter-firm relation between the various actors.

Ubiquity, Mar 1, 2006

A recurring problem in most rich societies is that students in general do not take enough math-de... more A recurring problem in most rich societies is that students in general do not take enough math-despite high availability of relatively well-paid jobs in fields that demand math, such as engineering, statistics, teaching and technology. Students see math as hard, boring and irrelevant, and do not respond (at least not sufficiently) to motivational factors such as easier admission to higher education or interesting and important work. It seems to me we need to be much more direct in our attempts to get students to learn hard sciences in general and math in particular. Hence, addressed to current and future high school students, here are 12 reasons to choose lots of math in high school:

Ubiquity, May 1, 2006

The mobile phone has caused us to plan less and communicate more. The Internet causes us to categ... more The mobile phone has caused us to plan less and communicate more. The Internet causes us to categorize less and search more - and media's increasing Internet nervousness is driven not just by fear of diminishing revenues but from the fear of a loss of importance of categorization. When everybody can find everything and networked computers determine what is relevant, media companies lose their ability to create agendas. To maintain their influence, they will need to let the Internet shape their main products, not desperately try to keep the world as it is.

This paper discusses the processes for innovation adopted by companies in the face of electronica... more This paper discusses the processes for innovation adopted by companies in the face of electronically based competition. It is argued that because of the gains in IT performance, information processing and communications are now free resources, forcing companies to adopt processes for strategic reexamination on a continuous basis. These processes will be of two kinds: "Strategy out" processes, which reexamine the role of existing assets and try to increase their utilization through redeploying them in new economic contexts; and "strategy in" processes which deal with changes to the existing business environment, primarily in the form of new technology, and how these new elements can be identified, fitted into the current organizational set of activities, and exploited.

Industrial Marketing Management, Jul 1, 2003

... 1. Porter's business value system [Porter, 1985]. ... the value depends on the number of... more ... 1. Porter's business value system [Porter, 1985]. ... the value depends on the number of other users that are in the same network. For example, the value of having a phone is tied to whom the customer can call and be called by, and therefore, firms compete to obtain network size. ...

Ubiquity, Feb 1, 2003

The future belongs to small, connected devices that will wirelessly allow the user -- and the tec... more The future belongs to small, connected devices that will wirelessly allow the user -- and the technology -- to self-organize, creating something smart out of many small and simple nodes and connections.

Harvard Business School Pub. eBooks, 2014

Ubiquity, Aug 1, 2002

Companies will need to make themselves components of their customers' lives rather than tryin... more Companies will need to make themselves components of their customers' lives rather than trying to make customers a component of their organizations. To do this, they need to stop kidding themselves when it comes to electronic integration.

Ubiquity, Apr 1, 2002

ABSTRACT John P. Hayes on the next killer app, entangled states, and the end of Moore's Law.

Ubiquity, Dec 16, 2014

Recruiting writers for a symposium consists of writing a document laying out the question to be d... more Recruiting writers for a symposium consists of writing a document laying out the question to be discussed, sending it to a number of invitees with experience and opinions on the matter, going back and forth a bit about the contributions, arranging them in a thematically useful order, and writing the final statement-summing up what one has learned. All straightforward and logical. So what have I learned from this question: Can computers become smarter than people?

Ubiquity, Apr 1, 2008

Of all the sayings I dislike, the most vapid is one I have heard as long as I have been working w... more Of all the sayings I dislike, the most vapid is one I have heard as long as I have been working with IT: We will have the paperless toilet before we have a paperless office. Normally uttered with a dry cackle and a finger pointed towards my office, which does not lack for paper.