Issues and Opinions - Information Technologies in Business: A Blueprint for Education and Research

H are business schools thinking about developing leaders for the emerging digital economy? Is there a set of core principles we can apply to thinking about the enabling potential of information technologies and their consequences for business and society? We present a business-centric framework and a technologycentric framework that together form a blueprint for answering these questions. The business-centric framework articulates three compelling reasons why information technology (IT) matters in business: (1) IT continually transform industry and society, (2) executive decisions about IT investments, governance, and strategy are critical to organizational success, and (3) deriving value from increasingly available data trails defines effective decision making in the digital economy. However, our conversations with the leadership of 45 business schools and our subsequent data indicate that business schools are challenged by effectively training future executives to think about these reasons and act on them as part of a forward-looking program of business education that is grounded in stable concepts. In response, the technology-centric framework provides a set of grounding concepts and stable principles about IT that have emerged over the last four decades, and leads to a natural set of consequences that can inform thinking about IT in business. We illustrate how these complementary frameworks—business and technology—can be combined to frame an educational program by outlining a set of key questions, by placing these questions in the context suggested by our frameworks, and by providing guidelines toward answering them. These questions also define a natural path for future research about IT in business and society that will lead to stronger intellectual foundations for the field and define future education that is better grounded in concepts and theories that emerge from academic research.