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Preface
Falcon Security is considering strengthening its competitive advantage by 3D printing
its own drones. Buying fleets of drones is expensive, and the drones become outdated quickly.
However, were the company to do so, it would be changing its fundamental business model, or at
least adding to it. Making drones would require Falcon Security to hire new employees, develop
new business processes, and potentially develop a new IS to support the custom-built drones. All
of this is good fodder for Chapter 3 and for underlining the importance of the ways that IS needs
to support evolving business strategy.
Ultimately, Falcon Security determines that it does not want to become a drone manufac-
turer. It could print some drone parts, but not enough to make it cost effective. The company
would still have to buy a lot of expensive component parts to assemble an airworthy drone,
something it’s not sure it can do consistently. Falcon decides to focus on its core strength of
providing integrated security services.
Students may object that, in studying Falcon Security, they devoted considerable time to an
opportunity that ultimately didn’t make business sense and was rejected. But this outcome is at
least as informative as a successful outcome. The example uses knowledge of processes as well as
application of business intelligence to avoid making a serious blunder and wasting substantial
money. Falcon Security didn’t have to open a factory and 3D-print a fleet of custom-built drones
just to find out it would be a mistake. It could make a prototype, analyze the costs and benefits,
and then avoid making the mistake in the first place. The very best way to solve a problem is not
to have it!

PRIDE Systems

The Performance Recording, Integration, Delivery, and Evaluation (PRIDE) system was first developed
for the sixth edition. In that version, it was an embryonic, entrepreneurial opportunity that used mobile
devices, data-gathering exercise equipment, and the cloud to share integrated data among healthcare
providers, heart surgery patients, health clubs, health insurance companies, and employers.
PRIDE is a real-world prototype developed for the owner of a health club who wanted to con-
nect the workout data of his club members to their workout data at home and to their employers,
insurance companies, and healthcare professionals. PRIDE is written in C#, and the code runs
against an Azure database in the cloud. The PRIDE system uses the Windows Phone emulator
that is part of Visual Studio. PRIDE was going to be ported to iOS and Android devices after dem-
onstrating feasibility and after the club owner obtained financing.
As reflected in the PRIDE case, the developers realized it was unlikely to succeed because, as
Zev says in Chapter 7, “Doctors don’t care about exercise.” Dr. Flores was too busy as a cardiac
surgeon to make his startup a success. Therefore, he sold it to a successful businessman who
changed the staff and the strategy and repurposed the software. All of this is described at the
start of Chapter 7.

Use of the Categorical Imperative and

Utilitarianism in Ethics Guides

Since the introduction of the Ethics Guides into the first edition of this text, we believe there
has been a shift in students’ attitudes about ethics. Students seem, at least many of them, to be
more cynical and callous about ethical issues. As a result, in the seventh edition, we began to use
Kant’s categorical imperative and Bentham and Mill’s utilitarianism to ask students, whose ethi-
cal standards are often immature, to adopt the categorical imperative and utilitarian perspectives
rather than their own perspectives and, in some cases, in addition to their own perspectives. By
doing so, the students are asked to “try on” those criteria, and we hope in the process they think
more deeply about ethical principles than they do when we allow them simply to apply their
personal biases.