James Ireland Cash, Junior. is an American businessman who is a member of the board of directors of several corporations, including General Electric, Microsoft, The Chubb Corporation, Phase Forward, Incorporated., Wal-Mart, and Veracode.
Education
He joined the Harvard Business School faculty in 1976, and has taught in all the major Harvard Business School programs - Master of Business Administration, Program for Management Development (Program for Management Development ), Program for Global Leadership (PGL), and Advanced Management Program (Accredited Mortgage Professional). Among his administrative assignments he has served as Chairman of the Master of Business Administration Program (1992 to 1995), during the school"s project to redesign the Master of Business Administration Program - Master of Business Administration: Leadership and Learning, and as Senior Associate Dean and Chairman of Harvard Business School Publishing.
Career
He also serves as a trustee of the Bert King Foundation, Massachusetts General Hospital, and Partners Healthcare and the National Association of Basketball Coaches Foundation. Specifically, he is studying the implications of the ubiquity of information technology at three levels in service-providing organizations. (In the United States today, service firms account for fully 70 percent of information technology sales) At the level of the individual, the portability of communicating technologies has led to their increasing deployment among front-line service providers.
How effective is such deployment for customers and employees, and do they perceive the effectiveness? At the level of the organization, applications of information technology are transforming traditional approaches to communi-cation and coordination and control of business activities and work processes.
Is the orientation of these applications empowerment or control? If empowerment, of whom: customers, employees, or both? At the interorganizational and industry levels, perhaps the most prominent effect of information technology is the blurring of traditional company and industry boundaries, which is facilitating disintermediation and new forms of market access, as illustrated by the growing use of the Internet for business-to-consumer, business-to-business, and intrabusiness communication. What does the shift from face-to-face to screen-to-face delivery of information-based services mean for the average person? To what extent is individually customized service delivery enabled? The continually growing database implicit in such systems promises to be an important source of competitive advantage in service businesses.
Membership
American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
