Course Summary

Google, Twitter, Microsoft, and Facebook are all popular companies on the cutting edge of technology, and their innovations and competitive battles make front page news. But even organisations that don’t seem very high tech—from a family-owned restaurant to the local gym—are going digital. Digital enterprise is fundamental to modern business life and will be a major part of your future career. Digital technologies are the backbone of every business and pervade almost every aspect of our lives. They are one of the major tools available to business managers for achieving operational excellence, developing new products and services, improving decision making, and achieving competitive advantage. A continuing stream of digital technologies and innovations is transforming the traditional business world, enabling entrepreneurs and innovative traditional firms to create new products and services, develop new business models, and transform the day-to-day conduct of business. This continuous change in technology, management and business processes is what makes digital technologies one of the most interesting and rapidly developing fields of management studies.

This course provides a non-technical introduction to the use of digital technologies as tools for the innovative manager who wants to redesign the organisation and business landscape. Digital technologies are treated in this course within the context of the social sciences, offering students a management and organisational perspective on the role of digital technologies in business enterprises and how they are managed. Overall, the aim of the unit is to equip students with sufficient knowledge and conceptual tools to understand and analyse organisational issues related to the usage and management of digital technologies within the business context. Emphasis is given to the innovative potentials of digital technologies and the impacts of these on business enterprises. A particular features of this course is the incorporation of masterclasses with speakers from Google, Salesforce, IBM, GlassWall and Cisco who will discuss and illustrate the importance of a variety of digital technologies in the digital enterprise.