In today’s networked and individualised world, businesses, consumers, citizens and governments interact in complex networks that span the globe and at the same time have huge local impact. Information technology (IT) is the means to make these innovations and their impact possible. IT allows organizations, people and devices to connect, to make these connections mobile and to analyse the huge amounts of data generated by these connections. This in turn makes intelligent services possible, by which business and non-profit organizations can offer innovative products and services. However, careful analysis of IT-based mechanisms of value generation in business networks and IT-based design of new organizational configurations are needed to make these innovations successful.
The Engineering Doctorate in Business and IT aims to raise the level of competence of professionals in IT to deal with the opportunities and challenges that IT-based innovations pose. The complexity of today’s IT-enabled world implies that IT professionals cannot restrict themselves to one discipline, such as Computer Science or Management Science. They need competences ranging from requirements engineering to system architecture, from design thinking to business analytics, and from e-business innovation to modernisation of legacy systems.
Technology is changing fast, and professionals need to keep themselves up-to-date. At the same time, some of the problems of business-IT misalignment, legacy software and global cooperation are persistent. Modern IT professionals need to work in multidisciplinary teams to manage these problems. The mission of the BIT EngD programme is to deliver professionals who are able to understand and design robust and economically sustainable IT-enabled networks, such as social networks, on-line markets, business networks and public service networks, which balance economic opportunities and online IT risks to attain business goals.
Post-Master programme
BIT Master graduates do have knowledge and skills to assess and redesign business-IT alignment, but do not have sufficient knowledge or experience to integrate IT networks, coordination processes, and business architecture into an integrated whole that balances economic sustainability with an acceptable level of IT-related vulnerabilities, such as vulnerability to online fraud or to attacks by threat agents. This requires familiarity and experience with the business itself, as well as a deep knowledge of business networks, business analytics, of techniques for fraud assessment and for IT security risk assessment. The multidisciplinary of these problems in practice is greater than what Master students have been trained to handle.
The EngD BIT organizes the curriculum in a three-step design cycle, in which the designer learns how to investigate existing networks of people and organizations, and designs and validates IT enabled improvements of these networks.
Programme Director: Luís Ferreira Pires
Email: l.ferreirapires@utwente.nl
Telephone: +31 53 489 3843
For more information:
https://www.utwente.nl/en/education/tgs/prospective-candidates/pdeng/programmes/business-and-it