Management Information Systems

Full course description

Too often IT is viewed as the province of technocrats, a domain inhabited by technical experts with little relevance to real-world business problems. And yet, the economic importance of information, information systems, and thus information management in business has been growing constantly over the last decades, thanks to the relentless increase in computer performance. IT is no longer a tool to simply automate back-office transactions, but has become a strategic tool in most businesses. Therefore, future managers simply cannot ignore information systems because of the critical role they play in contemporary organisations.
Business managers often complain that IT isn’t meeting their performance expectations. This gap between expected and actual performance is mainly caused by the insufficient involvement of business units in IT projects, the weak oversight and management of these projects, and by IT’s inadequate understanding of their business requirements. This course has been designed as a response to this lack of knowledge about managerial IT issues. The course combines academic readings with a guest lecture, company cases and a group presentation about recent IT trends.