Management: A Multi-level Approach for Teaching the MBA Core Information Systems Course

Core MBA IT courses have tended to be survey courses that cover important topics but often do not sufficiently engage students. The result is that many top-ranked MBA programs have not found such courses useful enough to include in their core MBA requirements. In this paper, we present a design of an MBA course emphasizing information technology and intending to be a valuable part of a core MBA program. The primary audience for this course is the general MBA student, and the primary teaching objec-tives of the course are for students to (1) recognize that IT plays a vital role in the functioning of most modern organizations, (2) recognize that the effective application of IT requires the active engagement of non-IT as well as IT management, and (3) acquire the tools and concepts neces-sary for non-IT managers to participate in the effective management of an enterprise’s IT re-sources. The basic framework by which we accomplish these objectives conceptualizes IT management into three domains of activity: executive-level IT governance, enterprise-level IT govern-ance/management, and functional-level IT governance/management. Executive-level IT govern-ance issues reside at the board and executive level and include parameters involving the strategi