Business Technology Management: A Case Study

This paper describes how we integrated two courses and two disciplines into a single, required “hands-on” course for undergraduates studying management science (MS) and management information systems (MIS). The motivation for what was initially an experiment (and is now a permanent part of the curriculum) was to exploit the synergy between the analytical approaches to modeling, decision-making and project management that are the mainstay of MS with the increasingly rigorous discipline of business technology management and that field's models, methods, tools and techniques. We describe the previous two courses, the re-designed course and several examples of how management science methods, tools and techniques were used to solve real business technology management problems selected by Villanova University's Chief Information Officer (CIO) and Chief Technology Officer (CTO).