Welcome to Managing the Digital Enterprise®

Managing the Digital Enterprise® is an open educational resource that surveys the opportunities and challenges managers face in an increasingly
digital world.

About the Course

Welcome to Managing the Digital Enterprise, an educational website that I have created to explore the various opportunities and challenges that managers encounter in today's digital world. I'm Michael Rappa, and I'm excited to share my insights with you on how to navigate the constantly evolving landscape of digital business.
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Introduction: Being Digital

The world has become increasingly digital over the years, transforming industries such as music, photography, publishing, banking, finance, manufacturing, health care, education, and entertainment. The internet has played a significant role in this transformation, serving as the circulatory system for the torrent of bits flowing through cyberspace. In this course, students explore the transformation from atoms to bits and examine various business, technical, legal, and ethical issues, identifying opportunities and challenges managers face in the incessant movement toward being digital. The course also looks at digital enterprises such as Amazon, eBay, iTunes, Yahoo!, and Google, and less widely known enterprises that are making a mark on the digital frontier.
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Digital Design

Whether or not you are a web designer by training, if you expect to guide the development of a digital enterprise, you need to have a basic understanding of site design and architecture.
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Web Analytics

Digital technologies open the door to new kinds of data collection for the analysis of business processes. As you travel the Web, everywhere you go and everything you do leaves a trail of bits — a virtual calling card that can illuminate your online activities.
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Business Models

Business models are perhaps the most discussed and least understood aspect of the web. There is so much talk about how the web changes traditional business models. But there is little clear-cut evidence of exactly what this means.
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Digital Automata

Computer automation takes many shapes. It can be as basic as a program that spares us from the tediousness of deleting spam from our email, or as evolved as one that simulates human interaction to answer customer service questions.
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Auctions And Dynamic Pricing

Auctions use the market mechanism to solve a difficult business problem: pricing. Setting prices can be tricky, as product managers well know, especially when it comes to new product releases.
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Trust in Cyberspace

Trust is the grease in the wheels of commerce. Without it everything would grind to a halt. Fortunately, most people — buyers and sellers — are both trusting and trustworthy. But it is the few who spoil it for everyone else.
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Security

Everyone has a stake in the security of transactions on the web. Customers must have confidence in the transmission of sensitive financial and personal information to web merchants.
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Data Privacy

In a world where literally everything you do can leave a digital fingerprint, nothing strikes a visceral chord among web users more than the issue of privacy. There is very little that one can do in complete anonymity when it comes to surfing the web.
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