Organisation and ICT

Course goals

The course has the following intended learning outcomes that the successful student should have achieved by the end of the course:

• Know and explain the main organizational theories that explain how organizations work
• Know and explain the fundamentals and the challenges of integrating ICT within an organization
• Know the key types of ICT systems, illustrate how they support an organization
• Critically analyze the ICT systems that are embedded within one organization
• Effectively use modeling techniques and frameworks to analyze an organization

Content

Organisation and ICT(OICT) is an English-taught course that introduces the students with the interplay between organizations and information & communication technology (ICT). The main thrust behind the course is to create awareness and deliver knowledge on the importance of considering ICT within the context of the organization(s) that make use of ICT systems. OICT is an essential component of the information science curriculum (informatiekunde), but it is also useful for students attending computer science (informatica). OICT is about understanding and analysing an organizational context where an ICT solution is to be devised, in order to identify the problem and the needs in that context. This is a preliminary and necessary step to the design and engineering of information systems--taught in the follow-up course Informatiesystemen--that fulfill the identified problems and needs.
In order to achieve these objectives, the course will be taught as an interplay of lectures, practical activities in the lab, and guest lectures on selected topic given by experts in the field. An integral part of the course will be a project, delivered by weekly or bi-weekly assignments, where groups of students will take an organization of their choice, and will use various modeling techniques and frameworks to represent and analyze the organizational structure, business processes, business strategies, security and risk, knowledge management, and strategic objectives.
The course will cover the following topics:

• introduction to modern information systems
• business processes
• organizations
• organizational theory
• information systems within organizations
• organizational design
• organizational structure
• organizational strategy
• security and risk in information systems
• knowledge management
• foundations of business intelligence
• enterprise architectures