Posted: September 13th, 2017

A new Strategy for Old Technology

Paper, Order, or Assignment Requirements

Guidelines for Analytical Article Reviews

Article reviews provide students with an opportunity to think critically about short articles that appear in the business literature but are related to IT.  They are an element in the component of the course which we refer to as “Looking Deeper”

Each review should include the student’s name, a citation for the article being reviewed, and the date on which the piece is due. It should then consist of two parts: one clearly marked as Summary in which you summarize the contents of the article, and one clearly marked Critique in which you provide your analysis, critique and opinions. Any font is fine as long as it is large enough and clear enough to read. I don’t care about margins as long as they don’t impact readability. The entire piece should fit easily on one page and should not exceed 500 words. However, substance is more important than word count. If you just bang out 500 words and turn it in, it is unlikely that you will receive more than 1 point for the piece. A better approach would be to think about what you want to say, organize your thoughts in an outline, write a first draft of approximately 1000 words and then cut it back to less than 500 words with editing and revision. Strive for creativity and substance. Each review will be worth a maximum of 5 points but few will receive the maximum. Points will be assigned as follows: 1 point if the piece is turned in on time and follows the format rules. Late assignments will not be accepted. 2-3 points if the piece makes a unique, interesting, substantive or clever point. In order to achieve this you need to carefully read the piece, think about what it is saying, reflect on the contents, formula a substantive opinion of the content, and express it in a unique way. 4 -5 points will be assigned if you really impress me with your observations, distillations, or expressions.

The book we will be using is Harvard Business Review Aligning Technology with Strategy which consists of a series of articles that appeared in Harvard Business Review. There will also be a weekly quiz on each article. You may want to read the article and take quiz to see how well you understood the article. Then go back a re-read the article before writing your critique. I strongly encourage you to start early and go through several revisions as write-think-rewrite is the key to good writing. After you have finished your revision you can take the quiz a second time.