Information Systems Management

Overview

Information Technology continues to drive rapid productivity growth and structural changes in the economy. Companies win or lose everyday based on their ability to effectively manage Information Technology. Managers need to understand how IT can be deployed to improve business processes, increase productivity, improve customer service and gain strategic advantage over rivals. As the economy transitions from an industrial economy to an information-based economy, information technologies provide existing companies with new ways to compete, while also creating new entrepreneurial opportunities. Fortune magazine argues that "More than being helped by computers, companies will live by them, shaping strategy and structure to fit new information technology." The technical aspects of managing information systems are and will remain a perennial challenge for organizations, and the consequences of mismanagement will be increasingly serious. But these issues constitute only a part of the big picture of information technology in the organizations in the Twenty-First Century. As important as the technical issues are, the accompanying organizational and managerial issues are equally, if not more, challenging. Research and teaching in the area of information systems broadly deals with the impact of information technology on organizations, markets and societies, taking a joint technological and managerial perspective to understand or explain various phenomena of interest in today’s information economy.

Faculty

Quote

“This is an exciting time to be part of the Information Systems PhD community as new information technologies are creating new options for businesses, and transforming the way we work and live.”
VIJAY GURBAXANI
Professor, Information Systems

Research

Broadly, information systems area faculty focus on research dealing with the economic impacts of information technology on organizations, markets and societies. IS area faculty have been highly productive in research, and have consistently published in the top IS journals including Management Science, Information Systems Research and MIS Quarterly as well as in leading journals in computer science and other management disciplines. Since 1990, IS area faculty have secured more than $8 million in grant funding from prestigious sources such as the U.S. National Science Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and world class companies such as IBM, Microsoft, Intel and Boeing. As a measure of impact, the IS area has consistently been ranked in the top 15. In the 2008 Financial Times survey Merage School was ranked #3 in IT and #5 in e-Business internationally. The 2007 Wall Street Journal survey of b-schools ranked the information systems area seventh in the country. In a study of business school productivity in four leading INFORMS journals, the Merage School placed #8 in the ranking with the IS area being cited as a major contributor to the ranking. This survey also commended CRITO on being among the top centers around the country dedicated to research in information systems. A survey by UT Dallas also highlighted the high productivity of the information systems faculty. The IS faculty had the honor of hosting the 2005 Workshop on Information Systems and Economics (WISE), the premier research forum for research in this area.

Teaching

MBA Core Course

207 Information Technology for Management

Focuses on the links between business strategy and information technology, the organizational implications of the technology, and how to successfully incorporate information technology into organizations.

MBA Elective Courses

Critical IT Decisions for Business Executives

Focuses on developing frameworks for helping management make critical IT decisions. These issues include how much to invest in IT, how to align IT strategy and business strategy, understanding which management practices enable high return on IT investment, developing sourcing strategies for IT-enabled services including business process outsourcing and information systems services, coordinating with partners, suppliers and customers in value networks, and determining product and operational strategies in increasingly digital environments.

Database Management & Business Applications

Examines contemporary business applications of databases. Also covers the database design process with a focus on enabling business decision making and business intelligence. Business applications include Customer Relationship Managment (CRM), customer segmentation, data warehousing, and knowledge management. Database design topics include collecting and capturing data and the linkages among data to enable data mining, querying and manipulating of data, and data administration.

Business Intelligence for Analytical Decisions

This course introduces methods to mine large data repositories for business intelligence. The goal of business intelligence is to assist managers in recognizing patterns and making intelligent use of massive amounts of electronic data collected via the internet, e-commerce, electronic banking, point-of-sale devices, bar-code readers, and intelligent machines. Topics include clustering for market segmentation, association rules for collaborative filtering, tree-structured classification and regression, subset selection in regression, and neural network methods. Examples of successful applications in areas such as credit ratings, fraud detection, database marketing, customer relationship management, investments, and logistics are covered. The course is practically-oriented and includes many hands-on exercises in Excel.

Digital Strategies and Markets

This course broadly examines how Web 2.0 technologies and emerging social media are impacting organizations and markets. One of the most powerful forces unleashed by Web 2.0 technologies is collective intelligence, whereby individuals benefit from coordinated actions and collective opinions of vast populations of other individuals. Open source software development, prediction markets and wikipedia are examples that we will study in some detail. Other topics include the theory and applications of social networks, crowd sourcing, monetization of social media and the design and management of online consumer communities.

Edge

Edge is a course that explores how technology and globalization are transforming the business landscape--opening markets, redefining industries, and erasing boundaries. Edge prepares graduating MBA students to initiate innovation amidst emerging new forms of entrepreneurship, international competition, social networking, marketing, and organizing.