COMM 336 - Introduction to Digital Business

The digital, exponential, and combinatorial factors of the second machine age are changing business environments. Companies must now be able to balance mind and machine, product and platform, and the core and the crowd. Technological advancements offer enormous benefits to various stakeholders, including firms, markets, and economies, as well as individuals and society. To ensure positive impact, companies are now becoming increasingly more aware of the consequences to their technology use, and thus they are now considering augmentation practices so that their human labour can be complemented with technology (and vice versa). Innovative firms are also exploring emerging technologies such as Blockchain to find new ways to do business.

Learning objectives

By the end of this course, students will have been able to understand:

• what the defining factors and trends of the second machine age are.
• how IT can be used strategically in digital organizations.
• how to use digitization and automation, data and analytics, platforms, and crowdsourcing in order to reach business objectives, mitigate threats, seize opportunities, and be competitive.
• how companies’ technology use affects firms, markets, economies, individuals, and society.
• how to create and manage business processes that allow humans to augment technology (or technology to augment human labour).
• how emerging technologies like Blockchain can be leveraged to create new ways of doing business.

Note: Prior to 2018W, COMM 336 was titled Introduction to e-Business.

Prerequisite: COMM 205