Di­git­al Trans­formation Man­age­ment

Course content

Digital transformation is an ongoing change process that affects people, organizations, and societies over the decades to come and holds excellent opportunities for companies and individuals. Drivers of digital transformation are smart, mobile, analytics, cloud, IoT, and other digital technologies and their underlying information technology (IT) infrastructures. IT and digital technology can disrupt existing value chains and enable new business models, leading to value-generation potential across all major industries.  

While many courses at CBS address digital transformation purely from strategy or business angles, this course addresses the technology management side of digital transformation. First, we build on the premise that digital transformation is the logical continuation of a trend over 20 years ago. IT and digital technology turned from a commodity, often considered a cost factor, to a strategic asset. If we understand this past, we can understand the future:  

Digital transformation is not a one-off endeavor. Companies transform continuously through major and minor digital initiatives affecting their front-end applications and back-end infrastructures. IT functions, headed by the CIO (the Chief Information Officer), have become the experts for driving business process change in the organization and maturing the digital enterprise architecture. The IT function acts as the linking pin between business units, corporate management, and external service providers to make sure that adequate IT service delivery is in place that can let digital initiatives thrive. At the same time, companies have appointed CDOs (Chief Digital Officers) and other roles to push their digital transformation forward on the demand side.  

Today's CIOs must effectively align their IT strategy with the business and push their organization's digital strategy forward to avoid being marginalized. This also implies new forms of organizing and governing IT, new IT service models, and new IT sourcing strategies. Therefore, future business and IT leaders require broad interdisciplinary skills, methods, and tools to manage digital transformation and maximize the contribution of digital technology to the bottom line.    

This course, which is taught as a blend of pre-recorded online lectures with case-based exercise workshops (see section teaching methods) aims to educate future digital transformation managers and their consultants. The course uses online lectures to introduce participants to the basic concepts, practical tools, and the state of the art in strategic IT management, enterprise architecture, and IT governance. Based on these foundations, we then discuss in class, based on concrete company cases, the key management areas every business and IT leader needs to be on top of to make the digital transformation a success. 

The eight content areas of the course correspond with the critical areas of digital transformation management. They address, but are not limited to, the following topics:  

1. Strategic alignment: Does the IT strategy fit the business strategy?  

2. IT portfolio and program management: Prioritizing digital initiatives and managing large transformation programs.  

3. Enterprise architecture (EA) management: Pushing EA maturity towards modular services and digital platforms.  

4. Business process management: Modelling, analyzing, and digitalizing business process demands.  

5. IT governance and organization: Bimodal organization structures and governance mechanisms for the digital IT function.  

6. IT service management: Leveraging good practices for the agile and efficient delivery of digital services.  

7. IT sourcing: Making IT supply and multi-sourcing work in the era of cloud computing.  

8. Organizational adoption and communication: Digital Transformation will bring enormous changes for the entire organization. To succeed, you will need to communicate the "WHY".  

Due to the specific course contents, the MSc in Business Administration and E-business (EBUS) program students can take this course as a T- (technology) course elective. Beyond dealing with the management of digital technology, the course will, amongst others, provide students with design methodologies for enterprise architecture (see learning objective #3), provide them with hands-on tools for process modeling (see learning objective #4), and introduce state-of-the-art technologies such as cloud computing (see learning objective #7) next to other emerging technologies.