Das Seminar findet digital über ZOOM statt.

Die Veranstaltung entfällt.

Modern organizations are highly affected by the implementation and change of technologies. Especially in the context of the ongoing and ever intensifying macro trend of digitalization, organizations and the individuals working in them are confronted with technology-related changes on a near constant basis. These changes can be seemingly minute, such as in the case of the introduction of a new collaboration software or the replacement of an enterprise system (such as ERP or CRM systems). But closer inspection reveals that these projects, too, are often troubled by a lack of acceptance of new technologies among designated users (both internal and external to the organization) and, as a result, fail to achieve the benefits that their sponsors initially promised. Things are even more critical for genuine digital transformation projects, which shape up to fundamentally alter an organization’s business or operating model.

In all these instances, the outcome of a technology-enabled organizational change program is the product of the interaction between organizational structures, goals, and practices on one side and the design of a technology to meet them on the other. Development and implementation processes contain their own tacit and explicit practices, which must often be adapted to incorporate the specific internal and external context of the adopting organizations.

The objective of Managing Technological Change (MTC) is to provide you with an opportunity to examine the interaction between technology, organizations, and human actors. This will help you develop well-argued design and intervention proposals for technology implementation and use as well as the accompanying organizational change measures. Completing this course will support you in developing the following skills:
> Explain the interaction of organizations and technologies in organizational change
> Analyze how a particular technology can align or misalign with organizations
> Know new, technology-enabled modes of organizing and evaluate potential effects on strategies and work design
> Manage technology diffusion, adoption, acceptance, and resistance by applying relevant theoretical models
> Anticipate how people react to new technology and how their individual behavior shapes organizational success and benefits of technological change

During the course, we adopt a general perspective on technology-enabled organizational change but place an emphasis on the adoption, adaptation, and appropriation of information and communication technology (ICT) and the corresponding changes in organizations. Topics we will discuss during the course include:
> Organizations as socio-technical ensembles
> Technology implementation, adaptation, and appropriation processes
> Change and stakeholder management

Die Veranstaltung entfällt.

Are you planning to write a thesis on a topic involving digital technologies? Then this class could be of interest to you!

As digitalization transforms more and more industries, once clear distinctions between the various disciplines of business research are increasingly blurred. A case in point is the discipline of information systems. Once the definitive home of research that dealt with the impacts of computing in business, recent decades have seen computer-related topics—now referred to as digital—drift into adjacent disciplines such as finance, marketing, or organization studies.

On the one side, this development is additional evidence of the long-heralded “commoditization of IT” (Carr 2003, p. 44). As more and more domains of business practice become inextricably infused with IT, it seems fair to assume that any specific excitement about IT in these settings is beginning to fade (Parmiggiani et al. 2020). This development seems all the more pressing as we begin to see signs of post-digital thinking, which challenges our ability to build new theories that genuinely incorporate digital aspects without giving any special attention to them (Mueller et al. 2021).

On the other side, however, studies involving settings that contain digital aspects are often challenged because researchers need to make sure that they account for these aspects just as much as for aspects relating to, for instance, organizational structures, individual characteristics, or the nature of the task at hand.

Acknowledging this tension, the seminar Methods and Theories in Information Systems (ManTIS) is designed to provide you with an opportunity to build up basic theoretical and methodological skills needed to conceptualize, conduct, and communicate research in the context of information systems. In this, ManTIS discusses specificities of research topics that contain digital aspects and reflects on implications for methods and theories used to study these settings. While selecting an exciting topic is a fundamental anchor for your research’s relevance, your ability to provide rigorous results depends on a sound command of theories and methods.

Based on this interplay of topics, methods, and theories, ManTIS will help you prepare for your own research (e.g., as part of your thesis work). The seminar introduces some of the most common methods used in business research by looking at examples from the information systems discipline. This includes how to carry out a literature review as well as qualitative (e.g., case study research) and quantitative (e.g., survey-based research) methods of empirical research. Completing this course will advance your ability to:
> understand the basics of implementing empirical research designs and implement them
> understand and apply to methods and techniques of collecting and analyzing quantitative and qualitative empirical data
> understand the strengths, weaknesses, and differences between quantitative and qualitative research methods and assess their suitability for particular empirical research projects
> understand methods for developing prescriptive theory
> interpret empirical studies from the field of management information systems and evaluate their methodological quality

To help us achieve this goal, this seminar works through a series of foundational topics. These include:
> Introduction to theories and methodologies commonly used in research on management information systems
> Introduction to quantitative research designs and analysis methods
> Introduction to qualitative research designs and analysis methods
> Introduction to methods of design-oriented research
> Interpretation and critical evaluation of empirical studies in the field of management information systems