Information Technology

Description: Focuses on effective organizational design in both traditional and innovative organizations, with special emphasis on innovative organizational forms that can provide strategic advantages. Topics include when to use functional, divisional, or matrix organizations; how IT creates new organizational possibilities; examples of innovative organizational possibilities, such as democratic decisions-making, crowd-based organizations, internal resource markets, and other forms of collective intelligence. Team projects include inventing new possibilities for real organizations. 

Professor(s) who recently taught this course:

• Thomas Malone

Description: Focuses on the key leadership capabilities needed in today's increasingly decentralized organizations: sense-making, relating, visioning, and inventing. Through conceptual discussions, small group exercises, and self-reflection, helps students understand leadership capabilities, evaluate their leadership strengths and weaknesses, articulate their values and aspirations, and practice developing leadership skills in interaction with class members. 

Professor(s) who recently taught this course:

• Thomas Malone
• Wanda Orlikowski

Description: Examines the evolution from Web 2.0, with its emphasis on interactivity through online collaboration and sharing among users (primarily through social networking sites, wikis and communication tools), to Web 3.0, which focuses on high proactivity, transforming the Web into a database, and the leveraging of artificial intelligence technologies, such as the Semantic Web. Introduces Management 3.0 and the range of new Web technologies, applications, and business opportunities and challenges that it supports. Addresses topics such as big data, cloud computing, and cybersecurity. Includes case studies, industry and academic speakers, discussion of basic principles, and a team project.

Professor(s) who recently taught this course:

• Stuart Madnick

Description: Analysis of the underlying economics of information with management implications. Studies effects of digitization and technology on business strategy and organizational structure. Examines pricing, bundling, and versioning of digital goods, including music, video, software, and communication services. Considers the managerial implications of data-driven decision-making, search, targeted advertising, personalization, privacy, network externalities, open source, and alliances. Readings on fundamental economic principles inform provide context for industry speakers and case discussions.

Professor(s) who recently taught this course:

• Erik Brynjolfsson

Description: Addresses key sustainability challenges faced by business and society. Explores alternative ways to view organizations that draw attention to cross-boundary interdependencies and help leaders at all levels develop their capacity to collaborate for systemic change. Develops skills to help students surface and reflect on mental models and practices that keep organizations stuck in unproductive system dynamics. Weaves together theory, experiential practices, guest speakers, and action learning projects that enable teams of students to work with organizations on systemic change initiatives.

Professor(s) who recently taught this course:

• Wanda Orlikowski
• Peter Senge

Description: Provides a detailed, applied perspective on the theory and practice of digital marketing and social media analytics in the age of big data. Covers concepts such as the difference between earned and paid media, predictive modeling for ad targeting and customer relationship management, measuring and managing product virality, viral product design, native advertising, and engaging the multichannel experience. Stresses the theory and practice of randomized experimentation, AB testing and the importance of causal inference for marketing strategy. Combines lectures, case studies, and guest speakers with relevant industry experience that speak directly to the topics at hand.

Professor(s) who recently taught this course:

• Sinan Aral

Description: Designed to help students understand how the digital economy forces companies to rethink their business strategies--and architect their processes, products, and information. Explores how firms use technology to simplify unnecessary complexity while capitalizing on the value-adding complexity inherent to more global, more integrated, more connected enterprises. Includes case studies about large enterprises using IT to transform how they do business, with guest executives from those enterprises responding to student discussions. Student teams work on consulting projects for major corporaitons.

Professor(s) who recently taught this course:

• Jeanne Ross

15.572 Analytics Lab: Action Learning Seminar on Analytics, Machine Learning, and the Digital Economy 
Description: Student teams design and deliver a project based on the use of analytics, machine learning, large data sets, or other digital innovations to create or transform a business or other organization. Teams may be paired up with an organization or propose their own ideas and sites for the project. Culminates with a presentation of results to an audience that includes IT experts, entrepreneurs, and executives.

Professor(s) who recently taught this course:

• Sinan Aral
• Erik Brynjolfsson

Description: Builds upon relevant economic theories and methodologies to analyze the changes in organizations and markets enabled by IT, especially the internet. Typical perspectives examined include industrial organization and competitive behavior, price theory, information economics, intangible asset valuation, consumer behavior, search and choice, auctions and mechanism design, transactions cost economics and incomplete contracts theory, and design of empirical studies. Extensive reading and discussion of research literature aimed at exploring the application of these theories to business issues and challenges raised by the internet and related technologies. Primarily for doctoral students.

Professor(s) who recently taught this course:

• Erik Brynjolfsson 

Description: Examines the assumptions, concepts, theories, and methodologies that inform research into the social aspects of technology. Extensive reading and discussion of research literature aimed at exploring the multiple social phenomena surrounding the development, implementation, use and implications of information technology in organizations. Primarily for doctoral students.

Professor(s) who recently taught this course:

• Wanda Orlikowski

Description: This course will examine the foundations of and recent advances in Network Theory, Network Science and Applied Network Analysis from sociological, economic, and statistical perspectives. The course is aimed at doctoral students conducting original research in applied network theory and analysis in a diverse set of fields including sociology, economics, statistics, computer science/machine learning, management and physics.

Professor(s) who recently taught this course:

• Sinan Aral

Description: This course examines the cybersecurity arena from a multidisciplinary perspective to consider the varieties of views, threats, definitions, and ambiguities, and to represent the sources, operational dynamics, and technological and political impacts. Addresses topics such as data issues, metrics, emergences of new markets and new businesses, diverse strategic playing fields, national and international responses, resilience vs. vulnerability of overall cyber-ecology, challenges, problems, and proposed solutions. 

Professor(s) who recently taught this course:

• Nazli Choucri
• Stuart Madnick

Information Technology does frontier research on the economic, business and organizational implications of digital technologies. PhD Program participants are expected to acquire a solid grasp of underlying information technologies and principles of information theory, along with their organizational and economic implications. Students and faculty address research questions raised by the emerging digital economy, the transformation of organizations and markets, and opportunities for new business models.

IT is inherently multi-disciplinary. Study in this area utilizes faculty with backgrounds in economics, management science, computer science, organizational behavior and psychology. The MIT Center for Digital Business, the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence and the MIT Center for Information Systems research are among the resources available to students to conduct innovative IT research in a wide variety of areas.

Learn more about the PhD program at MIT Sloan.