Courses & Areas of Focus

Digital Strategy and Leadership provides students an introduction to several critical concepts and lenses
through which they will explore technology management in the rest of the program. The course focuses
on four key themes:

• Understanding the impact of existing and developing technology on their organization and its strategic situation
• Developing digital transformation strategies for organizations and the use technology as the basis for competitive advantage and value for those organizations
• Effectively handling leadership roles in IT in order to motivate individuals and foster innovation and productive teamwork
• Articulating complex ideas to diverse audiences, including technology professionals, general business managers, corporate executives and potential investors

The course combines lectures, discussion, application of the concepts to their own organizations and a
business simulation that operates over several weeks.

An exploration of the central concepts of corporate finance for those who already have some basic knowledge of finance and accounting. This case-based course considers project valuation; cost of capital; capital structure; firm valuation; the interplay between financial decisions, strategic consideration, and economic analyses; and the provision and acquisition of funds. These concepts are analyzed in relation to agency problems: market domination, risk profile, and risk resolution; and market efficiency or the lack thereof. The validity of analytic tools is tested on issues such as highly leveraged transactions, hybrid securities, volatility in initial public offerings, mergers and acquisitions, divestitures, acquisition and control premiums, corporate restructurings, and sustainable and unsustainable market inefficiencies.

Students develop a proposal for a technology-based service or product which is realized and defended
over three consecutive terms through executive seminar sessions and the mentorship of a single
designated technology executive assigned to each student. The executive seminars focus on product
realization, business models, and operations management, reflecting the three “chapters” of the
project.

In this first executive seminar, students will prepare and defend a presentation, as well as write the first chapter, in which they explore how to define, design, and develop major new technology-based
products and services, whether for internal or external use, as part of a startup or an established
company. The course will take them from the inception of an idea to devising a solid plan to bring that
idea to life and to sustain it. The course will provide students with frameworks for understanding
customers, technology and strategy as well as the interrelationship between those three domains.

All students are required to attend and participate in a residency. The five-day residencies consist of seminars, oral defenses of students’ Master’s Projects and activities and discussions among students, guest speakers and select mentors. Through the exchange of diverse perspectives and ideas, students are challenged to assess their own views and develop new perspectives on their own leadership style. In addition, students hear senior technology executives’ insights on contemporary issues in the profession.

Strategic Advocacy focuses on the skills and knowledge that is necessary for initiating strategically
focused technology-related business conversations. The goal is to prepare students to become senior
leaders able to achieve a strategic vision. Attention is also given to the transitions in focus and mindsets
necessary for moving from a technical/functional to a business model orientation.

The course provides five perspectives that help students to understand strategic advocacy:

• Strategic leadership
• Political perspective, focused on understanding the political terrain
• Psychological perspective, focused on influencing the players
• Systems perspective, focused on the interconnections between players and processes
• Organizational perspective, focused on leading change throughout the organization

Students will apply the theory and concepts of the course to a career challenge of their own.

This course provides a broad overview of applied analytics frameworks and methods to help organizations turn data into informative insights. The chain of inferences leading from data collection to utilization for decision-making represents a comprehensive and coherent validation framework for the use of data to inform real-life problems. The course covers tools for addressing a set of claims about a problem based on data: exploratory data analysis, multivariate regression, causal inference, network analysis, and predictive analytics. It also introduces computational methods in natural language processing and machine learning and how these methods are integrated and deployed within modern database frameworks to turn organizations in data-savvy organizations.

AAM helps students to recognize which applied analytic frameworks and methods to use to make smarter and better decisions and producing better results for their organizations. Students learn how different analytic methods are used to address critical data issues facing an organization and how best to apply those methods. Students learn how to conduct in-depth strategic analytic analysis of business problems and communicate those results to all levels of an organization — both technical and non-technical audiences. Students will have the opportunity to apply these analytic methods to real problems in specific industries associated with their area of interest.

Students develop a proposal for a technology-based service or product which is realized and defended over three consecutive terms through executive seminar sessions and the mentorship of a single designated technology executive assigned to each student. The executive seminars focus on product realization, strategic planning and marketing, and operations management, reflecting the three “chapters” of the project.

The second seminar is an examination of how organizations invest in new technologies to gain a competitive edge. Students learn how to improve core business performance through strategic planning and market analysis. Students acquire first-hand experience with formulating and implementing strategic plans.

All students are required to attend and participate in a residency. The five-day residencies consist of seminars, oral defenses of students’ Master’s Projects and activities and discussions among students, guest speakers and select mentors. Through the exchange of diverse perspectives and ideas, students are challenged to assess their own views and develop new perspectives on their own leadership style. In addition, students hear senior technology executives’ insights on contemporary issues in the profession.

Students develop a proposal for a technology based service or product which is realized and defended over three consecutive terms through executive seminar sessions and the mentorship of a single designated technology executive assigned to each student. The executive seminars focus on product realization, strategic planning and marketing, and operations management, reflecting the three “chapters” of the project.

The third seminar is a study of the policies and procedures germane to the internal operation of a technology-driven organization. Emphasis is placed on the principles of risk management and quality control, training and documentation requirements, standards design, and IT support systems.

All students are required to attend and participate in a residency. The five-day residencies consist of seminars, oral defenses of students’ Master’s Projects and activities and discussions among students, guest speakers and select mentors. Through the exchange of diverse perspectives and ideas, students are challenged to assess their own views and develop new perspectives on their own leadership style. In addition, students hear senior technology executives’ insights on contemporary issues in the profession.

An examination of the legal issues and challenges confronting today’s technology executives. The course covers copyright, patent infringement, outsourcing contracts, electronic commerce law, intellectual property, and methods of establishing and monitoring legal policies as they relate to the use and security of current and emerging technologies. Course content may be amended at any time in response to changes in legislation as well as developments in the industry.

This course provides an examination of the role the technology leader plays in the daily operations and performance management of an organization. The course focuses on how tech leaders can manage both up and down within their organizations through critical examination of current IT topics such as Outsourcing, Cloud Computing, Enterprise Architecture (as a strategy), Information Security, Risk Management, IT Governance, and determining/communicating the business value of IT. Students leave the course with a deep understanding of the dramatically different priorities, skills, and actions required to succeed as an IT leader.

All students are required to attend and participate in a residency. The five-day residencies consist of seminars, oral defenses of students’ Master’s Projects and activities and discussions among students, guest speakers and select mentors. Through the exchange of diverse perspectives and ideas, students are challenged to assess their own views and develop new perspectives on their own leadership style. In addition, students hear senior technology executives’ insights on contemporary issues in the profession.

This course explores key knowledge management and organizational learning concepts and techniques that are critical to business, individual, and organizational performance. As technology and the network economy drive businesses to compete under continuously accelerating rates of change in technology, business leaders must incorporate knowledge management and learning into their organization’s activities in ways that support and propel their business goals. They must also be proactive in recognizing and responding to the influence of technology on these goals and environment(s) in which they are accomplished. Class sessions encompass a set of topics including purpose, planning, success measurement, and implementation of knowledge management initiatives and organizational learning techniques. Through lectures and individual and collaborative work, students explore how they can use these techniques to improve business performance and strengthen their leadership and management capabilities.

The course examines the intricacies of managing technology personnel, and building relationships and influence with the business in an evolving global economy, the changes as a result of the Coronavirus pandemic, and also due to continuing advances in technology.

We will spend time focusing on the following challenges:

• Building personal effectiveness.
• Understanding the role of emotional intelligence (EI) in relationships.
• Learning how to manage, influence, and engage people to deliver IT services and solutions.
• Running diverse and global projects (skill-wise and culturally).
• Managing multiple priorities and influencing results.
• The importance of clear communication between technology management, developers, programmers, implementers, users in the business, and business management at all levels in the pursuit of creating and adding business value.

This course focuses on the duties, responsibilities, and challenges of managing IT project managers in complex organizations. It offers a holistic presentation of the key issues a program manager – and their respective project managers – will need to consider when planning, implementing, and reporting on a suite of projects (i.e., a program). It introduces executive students to the multifaceted realities that supervisors of project managers deal with in the context of technology systems. It pays especially close attention to crisis management in the context of programs, and provides students with best practices for addressing corollary concerns. The course will introduce students to multiple frameworks for managing programs – offering students perspectives from global project managers.

Some assignments in this class mimic the kinds of deliverables a program manager will be expected to produce throughout the course of managing a suite of projects. Students must therefore develop an approach to program management based on actual projects within their company or industry. Other assignments in this class will have to do with case studies, allowing students the ability to reflect on how they will respond in a number of common situations, such as interpersonal issues, calendaring failures, and legal risk.

This course provides coverage of modern database architecture and how organizations extract, transform, and load data to set the foundation for deep analytics within their organization. Students will develop a broad understanding of cloud-based computing environments such as Amazon’s AWS and Microsoft’s Azure, MapReduce and data parallel applications using Hadoop, noSQL databases such as MongoDB. Students will learn how to develop a strong working knowledge of relational and non-relational databases, structured and unstructured data, as well as scalability and performance issues as they relate to modern applied analytics. Students will cover different types and scales of data and how to apply the best database framework for their organization’s analytic needs. The course will provide case studies from industry and students will apply their knowledge to architect real business solutions, not only the optimal architectural framework but the total costs, including hardware, software and human costs, to implement such a solution.

This course provides education at the executive level on the technology and design of Blockchains and their business implications. Technology executives need to understand the disruption and opportunities that decentralized ledgers (i.e., Blockchains) will create in the coming years. Indeed, the business impact of Blockchain technologies will likely be much larger than that which the internet itself has had because Blockchain will fundamentally change the power dynamic of data ownership. Blockchain is already impacting a variety of industries, and in this class we will look specifically at its analytical implications.

This course examines how to develop realistic market plans, forecast schedules, and build effective sales teams for new and ongoing business operations, covering the basic rules of pricing, the positioning of technology products and services for market, how to determine life cycles of new products, and the sales management of complex technology-based teams.

An in-depth understanding of how to market a business plan and raise capital to launch new ventures. Topics include capital alternatives, confidentiality, meeting analysis, finalizing agreements, and shareholder alternatives. The course requires the design of a venture that contains multiple approaches for investment. Workshop exercises cover methods of negotiating initial investment, management control, and forecasted return-on-investment.

With high profile cybersecurity breaches and incidents occurring on an almost daily basis, cybersecurity strategy is a board-level topic. From Target Corporation to Sony Corporation, Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) and other c-suite executives are being held accountable for breaches of data, which has in turn driven interest at the board level in cybersecurity strategy, incident response, and technology risk management. Under the working assumption that a corporation’s risk appetite, of which cybersecurity is one pillar, must drive its cybersecurity strategy and associated incident response, this course seeks to provide students with the tools needed to build, deliver and implement a cybersecurity strategy, obtain executive and board-level consensus around the proposed strategy, and develop an associated “cyber playbook” to respond to security incidents.

Competition, espionage, theft, sabotage, and warfare, traditionally carried out “in the field” have erupted online. State-sponsored cyber-attacks target critical infrastructure, financial systems, government agencies, political adversaries, retail, and consumer databases, and the intellectual property of technology firms.   As new technologies, such as Generative AI (Artificial Intelligence), and Quantum Computing, arise, malicious actors quickly adopt new tactics and attack chains.

This course covers the defensive techniques that address perimeter, end point, network and data security. Business model relationships to security architecture are examined, in particular managing vulnerability introduced through mergers and acquisitions, and integrations. Service and Administrative account management and other aspects of network design will be reviewed. Students will investigate recent newsworthy cases and devise countermeasures aimed at both incident prevention and effective CIRT (Cyber Incident Response) management.

This course provides students with the knowledge and techniques needed to lead major re-engineering projects, including reassessment of legacy systems and changing existing business processes. Understanding the differences between reengineering and continuous improvements and benchmarking is covered up-front together with common obstacles to business reengineering success (e.g., resistance to change, etc.) in an effort to drive towards a specific reengineering model. Legacy architectures from de-composable to non-decomposable are covered, and the role of gateways as well. The principles of distributed computing, i.e., object orientation, standards and the enterprise information architecture are covered as well as distributed systems designs and the level of performance testing needed to support them. Case studies are used to reinforce topics.

This course enables students to understand the impact of IT on an organization’s transformative objectives. Students learn how to integrate IT as the key driver for business process change and for continuous improvement in incremental gains and for selective reengineering to effectuate substantial breakthroughs in process performance. Students will develop an in-depth understanding of how technology can have a push-effect on an organization’s processes and of the factors that must be in-synch to facilitate such an effect, e.g., organizational desire for change, corporate culture, and the strategic role that IT leaders must play in working together with the lines of business to effectuate this change.

The idea of a “multiverse” is derived from Big Bang and Black Hole cosmology. It posits an infinite set of alternative universes in the space/time continuum — in other words, what we identify as reality. Scientific theory aside, this is precisely what has occurred in the entertainment sphere as a result of advances in entertainment technology. We see how technology has obfuscated the demarcation and delineation lines between entertainment media. Rather than perceiving this as a problem or challenge, this course approaches such an evolution from the point-of-view of infinite possibilities. The content covered in this course encompasses various interactive entertainment development technology platforms used to create games, virtual worlds, the proposed metaverse, social media platforms, and cross-disciplinary initiatives as diverse as online gaming, media, branding, enterprise, government, military, and educational solutions.

One of the most fundamental changes wrought by the advent of interactive digital media has been creation of a partnership between the entertainment provider and the consumer. This evolution is marked by the democratization of creativity, acting, and the capturing and conveyance of human experience by the consumer. All of this is driven by the need and desire of the consumer to evoke and capture meaningful experiences. The merging of “work” and “play,” where every business is viewed as a theatrical experience, transcends the long-held belief that high-quality goods at competitive prices alone is the mark of success. Customization of service leads to transformative experiences, the kind we capture, convey, remember, and talk about long after they have occurred. Such is the aspiration of businesses seeking to reach the 21st century digital citizen marketplace. This course looks at myriad examples of successful – and unsuccessful – applications of these principles