Course details

MSc in Digital Transformation (Online)

Three start dates per year: January, May and September

Next course start date: 29 May 2023

Next welcome week: 22 May 2023

Application deadline: 8 May 2023 (We recommend applying as early as possible to secure your place)

Duration: two years (part-time)

Format: online, with optional face-to-face events

Total fees: £9,800 (payment by instalment and funding options available)

Additional costs: due to the nature of the subject, and copyright restrictions placed on institutional libraries by some publishers, students will need to purchase some core texts.

Support with your application: Contact our course adviser team today for helpful application advice.

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This MSc is part of the Hull University Business School, a leading UK business school with internationally recognised accreditations from the Association of MBAs (AMBA) and the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB).

Why this MSc?

Digital transformation is about harnessing technological potential for your organisation. Technologies such as 3D printing, blockchain, AI and quantum computing are set to reshape the business landscape, but there’s always something new on the horizon. With the constant pressure on organisations to adopt novel digital technologies as they emerge, how do you predict what’s around the corner?

With our MSc in Digital Transformation, you will understand that while a prediction is impossible, there are sensible things you can do to manage and harness technological potential. Learning to adapt to new technological shifts and interpret their business value requires a new mindset and new capabilities.

Rather than using technology to automate old ways of doing business, you will gain the confidence to evaluate technological potential and choose the right technology to transform how your organisation operates. You will be able to understand the deeper issues around each shift, analyse new technologies strategically and assess their organisational benefits and transformational potential.

Whatever industry you work in, you will get the know-how to help your organisation minimise its exposure to costly mistakes and safeguard its resilience. Whether it’s a global pandemic or a cyber-attack, you will develop the data analysis skills you need to address the digital challenges your organisation has to be ready for.

You will learn how to interpret and visualise data to support your organisation’s decision-making process. You will also get a critical understanding of the role of ethics in digital transformation and learn how to avoid the ethics violations that have tripped up corporations of many different sizes in recent years.

On completion of this MSc, you will be able to confidently manage the adoption, implementation and utilisation of current and future digital technologies. This will make you a valuable individual for any organisation looking to use data-driven insights to help it maintain a competitive advantage.

What you learn

Through looking at case studies, you will learn how introducing new technologies inside an organisation affects its structure, the working relationships between people, the power dynamics and the way data is exchanged. You will examine how new technologies can create resistance to change, disrupt business operations, and allow for the creation of unintended consequences. You will see how failed technological transformation projects have even led to bankruptcy for some businesses.

You will gain an understanding of the relationship between an organisational system and its environment, so that you can realise the potential of future technologies for an organisation. You will apply systems thinking to analyse problematic situations in different ways. These are skills you can continue to use throughout your career and as you move into more senior positions.

You will also learn how to

Identify the organisational challenges created by disruptive digital technologies, but also to realise the opportunities of harnessing such technologies and their transformative power for your organisation
Analyse, interpret and visualise data for decision-making in your organisation
Perform digital analyses on social media data for the classification of online customer behaviour
Set up cyber-awareness programmes within organisations and improve resilience in the face of cyber-security threats

How can an MSc help you respond to change and succeed in your career?

Watch our Q&A with Programme Director Dr Dionysios Demetis on how the course can help you adapt to the changing digital landscape:

Course modules

You study the following compulsory modules.

Disruptive Technologies in the Digital Economy (30 credits)

You will explore how digital technologies can lead to failures and unintended consequences for organisations, but also, how technology can enable organisations to achieve a meaningful digital transformation and compete in the context of the digital economy. You will review the latest technologies, such as 3D printing, blockchain, quantum computing and artificial intelligence, and their wider implications in business and society.

You will also start to think through technology in a systems theoretical manner and develops critical thinking around digital assets. This is essential as new technologies change frequently and managers need to approach them carefully.

More critically, as businesses rely more and more on technology and the protection of digital assets becomes critical for their uninterrupted operation, you will concentrate on the cybersecurity challenges that organisations face.

Information Management and Visualisation (30 credits)

You will explore information management principles in the context of business decisions, with an emphasis on information visualisation. This creates hands-on opportunities to reflect on data principles and the key distinction between data and information.

How can managers move from the different possibilities that data create in order to generate meaningful information in a business context? These explorations are done through specialised software like Tableau or Mathematica but no coding will be required.

You will take a management approach to information, so you can reflect critically on the value of data in business, understand the impact of data, and explore different forms of data manipulation and visualisation.

Customer Led Disruption in a Digital Era (30 credits)

Every single organisation is vulnerable to disruption caused by changes in the way that customers behave, what they demand and what they value. You will focus on the customer, how their behaviour is increasingly shaped by digital technology, and how to build deep unique insights to transform businesses and gain sustainable competitive advantage.

You will explore how innovative digital disruption is often led by customer demand and changing needs. Tools will be used to create sophisticated segmentation analysis using demographic, behavioural and psychological data, mapping customer journeys online and offline to define and develop transformative business opportunities.

You will explore the impact of online communities and key opinion leaders (including influencers) through analysis of social media, forums and dark social data. You will develop an understanding of how to analyse this data, some of which may be owned by different departments in an organisation. You will also examine some of the ethical challenges and legal frameworks which are essential in handling sensitive information.

Digital Strategy & Innovation (30 credits)

On this module, you will broaden your perspective on different types of innovation, to help you develop and evaluate digital transformation strategies. You'll examine the challenges of implementation process, including identifying stakeholders, beneficiaries and end-users of the implementation process in an organisation where complexity reigns. You will also review prominent perspectives (theories) on adoption and diffusion studies.

You will explore how organisational members make sense of digital innovation and how they can oversee the implementation and adoption of technology in a complex organisational environment. Organisations have many different stakeholders with different professional backgrounds, experiences, motivations, capabilities and underlying rationalities. How can we bring those together?

By exploring how human-machine interaction underpins the process of implementation, we can build a holistic view of a process which is absolutely vital to organisational success in the digital era.

Dissertation (60 credits)

You will undertake a research-oriented dissertation (8,000-10,000 words) on a topic of your choice, associated with the sub-themes of the taught modules. As part of your dissertation, you will review existing and appropriate literature, select and justify a research design as well as a theoretical framework/model, collect empirical data from a business, and analyse, discuss, and present your findings.

Want to help your organisation perform better in a digital world?

Programme Director Dr Dionysios Demetis explains how this MSc can help.

WATCH VIDEO Q&A