GRA 8231 Developing and Managing Digital Organizations (2018/2019)

GRA 8231 Developing and Managing Digital Organizations (2018/2019)

Course code: 
GRA 8231
Department: 
Strategy and Entrepreneurship
Credits: 
29
Course coordinator: 
Øystein D. Fjeldstad
Course name in Norwegian: 
Developing and Managing Digital Organizations (2018/2019)
Product category: 
Executive
Portfolio: 
EMBA Digital - Programme courses
Semester: 
2018 Spring
Active status: 
Active
Teaching language: 
English
Course type: 
Three semesters
Introduction

Increasingly, organizations are assessing their opportunities, developing and delivering products and services, and interacting with customers and other stakeholders digitally. Mobile computing, social media, and big data are the drivers of the future workplace, and these and other digitally based technologies are having large economic and social impacts, including increased competition and collaboration, the disruption of many industries, and pressure being put on organizations to develop new capabilities and transform their cultures. the digital organization will require its members to have a demanding set of both hard and soft skills. Hard skills include computational thinking and trans-disciplinarity. Soft skills include social intelligence, cross-cultural competency, and the ability to collaborate. To capitalize on these skills, the digital organization must provide flexible workspaces and policies that motivate millennials and enable them to be productive. Such workspaces will include appropriate collaboration tools and be designed according to sound psychological theories and principles. Digital organizations need technologically aware and adept leaders who can set the digital agenda and create the context for the digitization of every relevant aspect of their organizations. Digitization is occurring at an accelerating pace; successful leaders need to synchronize their organizations to digital clock speed.

Learning outcomes - Knowledge

Participants will develop broad knowledge about how digital technology understanding is required to set and contribute to a company’s digital agenda and create the context for the digitization of every relevant aspect of their organizations.

Learning outcomes - Skills

Participants will be able to:
Manage and use automated machine learning to understand and address organizational problems and opportunities;
Design, develop, and manage “Digital Business Models” in different types of firms; 

Develop and manage “Digital Relationships” with customers, suppliers, partners, investors, and other stakeholders using social media, e-commerce, and eco-system platforms;

Develop and lead digital organization 
Apply  “Design Thinking” principles in the development of all aspects of “Digital Organizations”.

Learning Outcome - Reflection

Participants will reflect  upon how digital technologies affect various aspects of business and how digitization can be implemented. Participants will learn to use analytic technologies to support inductive thinking and test organizational assumptions. 

Course content

Machine Learning for Executive Decisions
Digitalization creates high speed, high volume digital activity traces – Big Data. Using recent advances in machine learning, organizations can use these data to automatically build models that predict specific events in real-time. Managers can use machine learning-based analytics to improve a wide variety of tasks ranging from targeted marketing to preventative maintenance to fraud detection. The course emphasizes processes for approaching and defining problems assessable through machine learning. Participants will engage in hands-on experience with cutting-edge analytics processes, tools, and techniques. Participants will gain insight into how big data analytics can improve business processes and decision-making.

Digital Marketing
Marketing is a key capability in developing a sustainable strategy in the digital age. The need for specialization in the various communication channels increases at the same time as the need for coordination and direction becomes even more important. With digitization of the customer journey and marketing communication, analytics and marketing intelligence becomes the hub

that coordinates and directs all marketing activities. In the program, we will discuss how companies will change how they manage growth and profitability of their portfolio of their customers.

Organizing and Leading Digitally
Participants will learn about the demands facing leadership roles in a digital work environment. Leadership will be presented as a cognitive process, outlining how digital technologies have and will blend into the traditional ways that leadership has been conceived. These developments will have consequences for internal processes such as the ways we organise, and the way leaders understand their roles. Participants will learn about how the traditional role of leadership needs to adapt to the changing nature of work in the digital age, how leadership relates to entrepreneurship and innovation, and how digital technologies, as a value-creating resource, may affect leadership.

Design Thinking for Digital Development
Digital development requires new design methods. This module, provided at a partner institution in Europe, provides participants with an intense introduction to Design Thinking and the experience of hands-on team-based solution development within short time-frames. Teams will run through the complete Design Thinking process, working on a real-life project and coming up with solutions to an actual problem – including user research and testing. Participants will also visit companies running cutting-edge digital Design Thinking initiatives. Upon completing this module, participants will be able to apply Design Thinking to digital development efforts as well as run dynamic strategy processes.

Digital Business Models
Digitization changes the business models by which companies create value for their customers and their owners. Established companies use digital technologies to help them operate their businesses with greater speed and lower costs and, in many cases, offer their customers opportunities to co-design and co-produce products and services. Many start-up companies use digital technologies to develop new products, services, and business models that disrupt the present way of doing business. Examples include sharing services, crowd sourcing and crowd funding services. Other products and services that are fully or partially digital include news and entertainment, as well as advanced AI based diagnostic and problem-solving services. In this course, participants will learn how to use digital technologies to transform established businesses and how to understand, develop and strategically manage the recent types of businesses that arise from digital technologies.

Learning process and requirements to students

Computer-based tools: DataRobot.

Attendance to all sessions in the course is compulsory. If you have to miss part(s) of the course you must ask in advance for leave of absence. More than 25% absence in a course will require retaking the entire course. It's the student's own responsibility to obtain any information provided in class that is not included on the course homepage/ It's learning or other course materials.

This is a course with continuous assessment (several exam components) and one final exam code. Each exam component will be graded using points on a scale 0 -100. The components will be weighted together according to the information in the course description in order to calculate the final letter grade for the course. Students who fail to participate in one/some/all exam components will get a lower grade or may fail the course. Candidates may be called in for an oral hearing as a verification/control of written assignments.  

Specific information regarding the points system and the mapping scale beyond the information given in the course description will be provided in class. This information may be relevant for requirements for term papers or other hand-ins, and/or where class participation can be one of several elements of the overall evaluation.

Software tools
Software defined under the section "Teaching and learning activities".
Assessments
Assessments
Exam category: 
Submission
Form of assessment: 
Written submission
Weight: 
20
Grouping: 
Individual
Duration: 
4 Week(s)
Comment: 
Machine Learning for Executive Decisions - Individual written assignment, counts 20% of the final grade.
Exam code: 
GRA 82311
Grading scale: 
Point scale leading to ECTS letter grade
Resit: 
All components must, as a main rule, be retaken during next scheduled course
Exam category: 
Submission
Form of assessment: 
Written submission
Weight: 
20
Grouping: 
Group (2 - 8)
Duration: 
4 Week(s)
Comment: 
Digital Marketing - Written assignment in groups, counts 20% of the final grade.
Exam code: 
GRA 82311
Grading scale: 
Point scale leading to ECTS letter grade
Resit: 
All components must, as a main rule, be retaken during next scheduled course
Exam category: 
Submission
Form of assessment: 
Written submission
Weight: 
20
Grouping: 
Individual
Duration: 
4 Week(s)
Comment: 
Organizing and Leading Digitally - Individual written assignment, counts 20% of the final grade.
Exam code: 
GRA 82311
Grading scale: 
Point scale leading to ECTS letter grade
Resit: 
All components must, as a main rule, be retaken during next scheduled course
Exam category: 
Submission
Form of assessment: 
Written submission
Weight: 
20
Grouping: 
Group (2 - 8)
Duration: 
4 Week(s)
Comment: 
Design Thinking for Digital Development - Written assignment in groups, counts 20% of the final grade.
Exam code: 
GRA 82311
Grading scale: 
Point scale leading to ECTS letter grade
Resit: 
All components must, as a main rule, be retaken during next scheduled course
Exam category: 
Submission
Form of assessment: 
Written submission
Weight: 
20
Grouping: 
Individual
Duration: 
4 Week(s)
Comment: 
Digital Business Models - Individual written assignment, counts 20% of the final grade.
Exam code: 
GRA 82311
Grading scale: 
Point scale leading to ECTS letter grade
Resit: 
All components must, as a main rule, be retaken during next scheduled course
Exam organisation: 
Continuous assessment
Grading scale: 
ECTS
Total weight: 
100
Sum workload: 
0

A course of 1 ECTS credit corresponds to a workload of 26-30 hours. Therefore a course of 29 ECTS credit corresponds to a workload of at least 754 hours.