Over the past decade information systems have significantly transformed our personal lives (e.g., smartphones) as well as various industries (e.g., media). In your future career – independent if you work in IT-management or on the business side – you will need to make important decisions about such information systems. These might include challenges such as: Should we buy an existing software or develop a new one on our own? Which vendor matches our requirements most closely? How should we proceed in developing the new system? The purpose of this course is to provide you with the necessary skill set for making reasonable decisions when being posed with such questions along the whole lifecycle of an information system.

Information technologies allow organizations to optimize and redesign their business processes and to develop completely new business models. To manage these changes, they are looking for employees with a solid understanding of information technology and its business implications, which you will learn throughout your academic studies and practical experiences. The purpose of this course is to provide you an overview on technological foundations of information systems, business implications from applying information systems, and central tasks of jobs related to information systems.

The increasing diffusion of digital technologies enables various new digital business models in nearly every industry, i.e., they lead to a digital transformation. On the one hand, these new business models often unfold disruptive potential to existing firms; on the other hand, digital technologies provide various new opportunities for firms to innovate and grow. Therefore, today’s managers must understand the new digital logics in order to properly navigate through the digital world. The purpose of this course is to provide you with an understanding of fundamental concepts underlying digital transformation as well as the ability to apply tools and strategies for successfully mastering digital transformation.

Organizations that extensively leverage data driven decisions have a competitive advantage. Examples include Internet firms such as Amazon, Google, or Netflix as well as firms from more traditional industries such as Rolls Royce, Southwest Airlines, or Harrah’s. As the availability of data is constantly increasing across all industries, every organization must learn how to systematically leverage its existing data and how to systematically acquire new data.

Throughout this course you will learn how data can be used for making better business decisions. You will understand the major technological concepts for data storage (e.g., data warehouses and big data), be able to select prober analytical algorithms for a given business problem (e.g., clustering of customers), and be able to implement some of these algorithms by yourself (e.g., linear regression).

IT-management is composed of more strategic tasks (e.g., IT-strategy, IT-organization, IT-personnel) as well es more operational tasks (e.g., software development, project management, IT service management, business process management). This course focuses the strategic IT tasks whereas other courses (e.g., “Lebenszyklus von IT-Systemen”, “IT-gestütztes Monitoring und Auditing”) focus more operational tasks.

The traditional view on IT strategy has been that the IT strategy should be optimally aligned with business strategy in order to use IT efficiently. With the rise of the Internet it has become evident that IT can also enable new processes and business models, making the relationship to business strategy bi-directional: alignment and enablement. In the recent past, the importance of IT has further increased as nowadays digital technologies are an inseparable part of nearly every organization’s business strategy. This has led to a fusion of business strategy and IT strategy, which is referred to as digital business strategy.

Thus, strategic IT management is affected in several ways. First, financial and human resources must still be orchestrated, but often in different ways than before (e.g., alternatives to the traditional plan, build, run-organization). Second, with business conditions changing faster than ever, an efficient, flexible, and secure IT architecture has become essential for survival (e.g., need for enterprise architecture management). Third, in areas that require high technical expertise and/or corporate integration, the IT department should take a more active role in driving change (e.g., automation of business processes with RPA and AI). The purpose of this course is to provide you with a basic understanding of these strategic IT management tasks in the age of digital transformation.

As basically every industry is undergoing a digital transformation, routine tasks are increasingly being automated by machines taking over human processing steps and decision making. In parallel, non-routine tasks ­– characterized as temporary endeavors to create unique results – are becoming even more important. These non-routine tasks can also be defined as projects. Thus, project management is one of the most important skills for building a successful and satisfying career in the 21st century. Wherever you want to change the status quo to the better, you will need project management skills to make it happen.

Already in the past project management has been very challenging, which can be seen by a significant amount of business and IT projects not being completed on time, on budget, and on scope (the numbers vary, but some studies estimate that the more than 2 out of 3 projects fail to meet their objectives). The particular reasons are many, but they can be grouped in two broad groups. First, fundamental project management skills such as a proper project approach, project planning, and risk controlling. Second, soft skills to manage the various stakeholders, which include team motivation, client communication, and change management.

The purpose of this course is to provide you with a foundation in both: basic project management skills as well as soft skills for successfully working on and leading projects in your studies as well as your career.