Course Number: 95-722

Digital Transformation

Units: 6

The objective of this core course is to serve as a capstone course integrating technological and managerial aspects of information technology. Information and communication technologies play multiple roles within an organizational context. From a technological perspective, they define the information and communication infrastructure and the associated architecture of applications deployed using the infrastructure and enable new ways to realize business process digitization. From a managerial perspective, they facilitate new coordination mechanisms within and across entities, enable new organizational forms, change the information environment within which work gets done, and permit the implementation of new incentive structures. Successful efforts at digitization thus have to keep both technological and managerial perspectives in mind. Using a collection of cases, this course will study both intra-organizational and inter-organizational deployment of information technology in a few important sectors (e.g., logistics, health care, information technology and services). Each case analysis will require students to engage in both technical and managerial problem solving. The technical component of the analysis will require students to propose IT architectures for the problems highlighted in the case. The managerial component of the analysis will require students to analyze the business value of the proposed solution (examples: Does the proposed solution confer competitive advantage? Do the monitoring costs of contracting with third party service providers outweigh the benefits?) and address the change management issues that arise in implementing any digital transformation initiative.

Faculty:
Ramayya Krishnan
Michael J. Smith