Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, System Design and Management Program, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 72). / The open source model for software development has been established as a legitimate competitor to the largest closed source software firms in the world. The purpose of this thesis is to investigate the potential impact that the open source model can have with in the information storage industry. The existing literature regarding open source is reviewed and used as a framework for analysis of the storage industry. Additional analysis of the FreeNAS open source storage project is also conducted using the framework to provide context. The research concludes that the information storage industry meets many of the criteria that have been shown to drive adoption of open source software. Some speculation is made regarding the manner in which open source will continue to expand within the storage industry. / by Martin Glynn. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, System Design and Management Program, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 83-85). / In estimating a system-specific binomial probability of failure on demand in Probabilistic Risk Assessment (PRA), the corresponding number of observed failures may be not directly applicable due to design or procedure changes that have been implemented in the system as a result of past failures. A methodology has been developed by NASA to account for partial applicability of past failures in Bayesian analysis by discounting the failure records. A series of sensitivity analyses on a specific case study showed that failure record discounting may result in failure distributions that are both optimistic and narrow. An alternative approach, which builds upon NASA's method, is proposed. This method combines an optimistic interpretation of the data, obtained with failure record discounting, with a pessimistic one, obtained with standard Bayesian updating without discounting, in a linear pooling fashion. The interpretation of the results in the proposed approach is done in such way that it displays the epistemic uncertainties that are inherent in the data and provides a better basis for the decision maker to make a decision based on his / her risk attitude. A comparison of the two methods is made based on the case study. / by Spyridon-Damianos Lekkakos. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, System Design & Management Program, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 97-98). / by Muraleedharan Gopinathan. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, System Design & Management Program, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references (leaf 79). / by Sylvie N. Bokshorn. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, System Design & Management Program, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 106-107). / by Steven E. Frey. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, System Design and Management Program, 2009. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 70-71). / Rapid advancement in Electronic Communication gives rise to the popularity of Viral Marketing. Mobile Communication, in particular, offers greater potential in the utilization of this Word-of-Mouth phenomenon as a Marketing tool. Researchers have studied Viral Marketing from different perspectives, but little emphasis has been given to the unique characteristic of Mobile Communication as a platform for Viral Marketing. This thesis is therefore intended to explore this unique form of communication. Using the point of view of mobile devices, which are directly related to the users, an analysis on technological evolution in this domain was conducted to study the fit between current Mobile Viral Marketing practices and the technological parameters. To support this study, extensive literature research on Viral Marketing was conducted, along with industry analysis on Mobile Communication and sample cases of known Mobile Viral Marketing practice in the U.S. In general, the analysis found that existing Mobile Viral Marketing strategy mostly mimics the general practice of Word-of-Mouth Marketing and some aspects of this general practice are not suitable for the unique characteristic of Mobile Communication. The study on technological evolution also yielded several patterns on the key parameters of Mobile Device Technology that were used to model the future of this domain. Lastly, using the identified shortcomings of existing strategy and the future depiction of this technology domain, a strategic framework for Mobile Viral Marketing was constructed. This framework is intended to provide businesses with a forward-looking perspective in the utilization of Mobile Communication as a means to spread the words about their products or services. / by Yulia Surya. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, System Design & Management Program, February 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 69-72). / This is a study into the allocation of resources in the early stages of research in a small commercial entity that develops innovative technologies. The premise is that resource allocation must focus on the implementation of the technology from a broad, end-to-end, systems viewpoint rather than purely on the inventive or scientific research. Only by understanding and addressing issues early in a development process can technology be efficiently developed. This thesis examines in depth the approach to the development of technologies taken by eight small innovative research companies in the New England Area. These companies all received funding through the government's Small Business Innovative Research program. Half of the companies received additional funding from external entities and qualified for Fast Track funding from the Department of Defense. The study was conducted by means of a questionnaire and in person interviews to identify how companies identify, evaluate and allocate resources to challenges. The strategies that were followed, problems encountered, collaborations with other entities and the outcomes of their programs were examined. This process set up a natural experiment between companies that received Fast Track and thus external funding on the basis of augmented external communication. The main conclusions of the research are that the Fast Track program, for the small sample studied here, did not influence the processes followed by the companies. Rather the long-term strategies of the companies dictated how they dealt with adversity. Moreover, in contradiction to previous studies that examined these same companies immediately after the SBIR work was completed, the fast-track companies showed no greater commercialization / (cont.) success than the comparison companies. The diminished differentiator of the Fast Track program can be attributed to a) the great deal of uncertainty that is inherent with applications research and b) the short time and limited funding of the SBIR program, which in itself limits the probability of success independent of the Fast-Track mechanism. / by Jacob v.R. Pretorius. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, System Design & Management Program, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references. / This thesis studies some aspects of the business performance collapse of Xerox Corporation towards the end of the 1990s and the beginning of the 21" century. Utilizing the field of system dynamics as the primary modeling and analysis tool, the thesis specifically looks at three interrelated factors that an extensive public literature search, and the author's own personal experience as a Xerox employee, showed were of central importance in Xerox' decline. These factors, and their effects, were the following. First, Xerox reorganized and consolidated its U.S. customer administration centers (CACs) from approximately three-dozen geographically distributed locations to a small handful of centralized locations. This left customers with new and unfamiliar administrative staff who were more prone to making billing errors and were less efficient in fixing them once they were discovered, thereby beginning the process of alienating customers and also forcing the sales staff to spend less time selling as they tried to fix the billing errors. Secondly, Xerox realigned and reorganized its direct sales force from a geographic structure to one based on specific industries. This broke tremendous numbers of customer/sales representative relationships, thereby further alienating customers, since many sales reps either left Xerox (due primarily to the turmoil within Xerox) or, if they stayed, they had their territories changed. This also resulted in sales reps spending less time selling, both in the short term (due to increased new hire training, industry realignment training, and "FUD factor" chum) and in the long term (due to increased travel time). Thirdly, especially relative to its competition, Xerox' product line began to lose appeal in the marketplace. Ultimately, however, my analysis shows that the almost simultaneous confluence of these three factors had a nonlinear effect on Xerox' business - an effect that was worse than the sum of the three individual factors had they each occurred alone. And, since the time constants involved in these dynamics and in the overall system that is the document processing market are in many cases on the order of years, the effects on Xerox' business were significantly longer than the duration of the causal factors themselves. / by Richard L. Howe. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, System Design & Management Program, 2000. / Includes bibliographical references (leaf 75). / Adding to the increasing complexity and ambiguity in products and customer values, the sudden rise in the clockspeed of business operations is forcing existing companies towards a new organizational model, which autonomously integrates knowledge across technologies, functions, and clockspeeds to find optimal solutions. This thesis first analyzes clockspeed characteristics in terms of four dimensions (customer value, product, process, and organization) and clarifies them by means of presentations. Based on this analysis, it develops a conceptual framework and an organizational model for the mixed clockspeed organization: that is, a company whose products individually involve components or elements with different clockspeeds, and where the four dimensions of clockspeed are not necessarily highly correlated. Finally, the thesis proposes an original model for organizing such a mixed clockspeed organization, focused on building an intermediate layer of organization to mediate between the formal business unit structures and the informal human networks that have long been recognized as crucially important for technical organizations. / by Eiichi Tanabe. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, System Design and Management Program, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 203-212). / In an attempt to improve their Product Development Processes (PDPs), many companies make considerable investments to have available cutting-edge technology such as virtual tools. While some companies have increased their productivity and time to market with them, some others have not. There seem to be fundamental factors above and beyond the use of these tools that can obstruct the PDP and one of them appears to be the misalignment between the product architecture and the organizational interactions of the actors working on it. While there has been significant work addressing the technical and social concerns of a PDP independently, the nature of the misalignment requires an integrated analysis of the product architecture and the organization. The present work studies them in an integrated approach by making use of network analyses. The research for this thesis was conducted in a Global Product Development (GPD) project of an automotive manufacturer. By first using as a reference the Multidisciplinary System Design Optimization (MSDO) to decompose the architecture of a product and then, using a specific type of Design Structure Matrix (DSM) [43] called N2 Diagram to identify the interfaces of the architecture, a network called theoretical sociogram was created. In addition, the relative sensitivity of some objectives describing the functioning of the product's systems was calculated to classify the strength of the ties in two levels: strong for those above an absolute relative sensitivity of 0.5, and weak for those with an absolute relative sensitivity lower or equal than 0.5. / (cont.) Furthermore, through surveys and interviews, the organizational interactions for two different phases of the project were mapped to construct a new set of networks called actual sociograms. By comparing the sociograms and utilizing metrics that deal with the centrality of the actors in the network, the misalignments were identified. The misalignments provided guidance to identify the enablers and obstacles influencing the PDP. It was observed that, in some cases, when the sensitivity among variables was weak, engineering teams tend to use intermediaries to share information. In some other circumstances the direct interaction doesn't occur, due to reasons including cultural aspects, complexity of the information, the way the information is structured and organizational fuzziness, among others. Based on these findings, some recommendations based on literature review, lessons learned from other industries and conversations with Product Development (PD) actors, are provided. / by J. Adrian Diaz Garcia. / S.M.