Course Overview

The course aims at presenting and discussing the evolution of Information Technology resources in order to support the company’s digital transformation and indicate strategic perspectives in the metaverse. It is located at the intersection of innovation and digital technology and addresses the issues of how organizations can adapt to digitalization through strategic transformation efforts aimed to ensure future survival and competitiveness.

Learning Outcomes

By the end of this course students should be able to:

• Comprehend and analyze the main issues of organization’s digital transformation processes.
• Understanding of the pros and cons of current digital technologies driving advancement.
• Explore, critique and deconstruct metaverse experiences for businesses adoption.
• Be able to explain what resources and skills are required to add value to business processes through the digital transformation and metaverse.

Course Content

Fundamentals of digital transformation

Areas of IT management and its challenges, IT services, IT organization

Enterprise Innovation and the Digital Transformation

Digitalization and Digital Transformation

Digital strategies and strategic agility

Emerging technologies and Digital Transformation

Fundamentals of Metaverse

Applications of the Metaverse

Advantages and Challenges of the Metaverse

Technologies and Metaverse (Virtual and Augmented Reality, Cryptocurrency, etc.)

Legal and Ethical issues on Metaverse

Metaverse and Business strategies

Instructional Method

The course will comprise lectures, students’ seminars and cases study, with special emphasis to meet on discussion and interaction with the students. This covers discussions concerning current challenges of Digital Transformation. The students’ seminars will cover both theory topics as well as hands on experiences on metaverse experiments.

Required Course Materials

Required readings

C. Matt, T. Hess, an A. Benlian, “Digital Transformation Strategies”. Bus Inf Syst Eng 57, 339–343, 2015. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12599-015-0401-5

S. -M. Park and Y. -G. Kim, "A Metaverse: Taxonomy, Components, Applications, and Open Challenges," in IEEE Access, vol. 10, pp. 4209-4251, 2022, doi: 10.1109/ACCESS.2021.3140175.

T. Y. Salutina, G. P. Platunina and I. A. Vasileva, "Transformation of Business Technologies into Digital Platforms and Evaluation of the Effectiveness of their Application," 2021 International Conference on Quality Management, Transport and Information Security, Information Technologies (IT&QM&IS), 2021, pp. 888-892, doi: 10.1109/ITQMIS53292.2021.9642870.

Y. Wang et al., "A Survey on Metaverse: Fundamentals, Security, and Privacy," in IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials, 2022, doi: 10.1109/COMST.2022.3202047.

Assessment

The assessment comprises:

• on classes activities: each lecture will have a simple task (questions about the delivered contents)
• online quizzes: the students will require to answer a quiz for a set of classes.
• groups seminar: at ending of the course the students will present a seminar of specific topics.

Evaluation Criteria

• on classes activities (30%)
• online quizzes (30%)
• group seminar (40%)