This report examines how digital platform characteristics can either support or limit the success of modern business models. The analysis finds that strong network effects, connected networks, reduced multi-homing, and network bridging can help platforms attract users, collect valuable data, and expand into services such as e-commerce, subscriptions, advertising, and online marketplaces. However, platform growth can be weakened when customers use competing services, bypass the platform, or become dissatisfied with excessive restrictions. Apple’s closed ecosystem demonstrates this balance: its high switching costs and connected services strengthen customer loyalty and revenue, but its control over developers and transactions has also created regulatory and competitive concerns. These findings support the main reading’s argument that gaining scale is easier than sustaining a healthy and defensible platform network.

Healthcare organizations and other businesses use customer data to better understand buying habits, improve services, and provide more personalized information. However, collecting and using customer data can create privacy concerns when people do not fully understand what information is being collected or how it will be used. Customers are more likely to share their information when a company is honest about its data practices, gives them some control, and provides something useful in return.

Healthcare organizations depend on information systems to collect data from daily operations and turn it into useful information for managers and executives.

This report looks at how a healthcare organization can use data and artificial intelligence in a way that improves decision-making while still protecting privacy, security, and data quality. The readings for this week show that an effective data strategy must balance data defense, which focuses on protecting and governing information, with data offense, which focuses on using data through analysis, reporting, and visualization to improve performance.