To anyone taking (or thinking about taking) my GRA6821 (Technology Strategy, or whatever the name is) course this fall – here are a few things that, at least at this point, are going to happen:

• Since there will be many students at the course (about 70 so far) it has been split into two sessions. The course will be on Thursdays in classroom C2-040. The students will be split into two groups (more about that later, I am looking for a good mix of backgrounds), one of which will start at 0800, and one at 1100. The groups will alternate every week. Teaching will be case-based, meaning that you as a student have to show up, have a name card, and be in the same seat for every class.
• For some lectures, classes may be merged (for instance, if we have a guest lecturer, the first class may start an hour later, the second an hour earlier – and the guest lecturer will not have to do the same talk twice).
• We will have a couple of "special" classes, so far two are relatively confirmed:
  • One (tentatively scheduled for September 16th) will involve the iAD project, an advanced search technology research project hosted by FAST/Microsoft Enterprise Search. Our visitors will be a team of researchers from UCD/DCU Ireland, demonstrating video search on Apple iPads. As part of the program, students will participate as experimental users of the system.
  • The second, probably towards the end of September, will involve McKinsey, the consulting company, with discussions about consulting in a technology-rich environment. McKinsey has a global practice of "business technology" and will use expertise from that area in an excercise involving technology case analysis.
  • Possibly we will have other, similar events. And definitely some exciting guest lecturers.
• For those of you wishing to prepare early, take a look at the previous courses arranged (last year’s here). The two main books (Information Rules and The Innovator’s Solution) are available in paper and electronic form from many sources, and a good idea might be to get at them early and read them over the summer. The other literature will be either from web sources or made electronically available via BIs new learning platform, It’s Learning (more about this later) or another platform.
• Evaluation will, as usual, be a combination of classroom participation, smaller assignments during the course, and a final paper. New this year is the form of the final paper – this will be a case description of a Norwegian technology company, which the students can chose from a list (provided later) and written up in a specified format. These case descriptions will go in as research material for the project "A Knowledge-based Norway", preferably under the "information technology" part study. They will by students in pairs and delivered in a collaborative context, using some form of social software such as Ning, WordPress, Google Docs or Origo.

I am very much looking forward to an course that hope and think will be fun, interesting and useful both to take and teach. And until August 19th, I wish you all a very good summer!