programs and fields of teaching @ Sharif University of Technology
Program structures:
Academic programs leading to postgraduate and undergraduate degrees (e.g. MBA) at the university’s main campus in Tehran and International campus at kish island.
Certificate programs (EMBA and short courses) tailored to the needs of senior executives and functional managers of service industries such as telecommunication, (chambers of) commerce, health, banking and transportation sectors, as well as manufacturing industries, e.g. pharmaceutical, steel, petrochemical, energy.
Audiences: open-enrolment with participants from various organizations; industry specific programs with selected participants from a single organization.
Teaching languages: Persian and English, depending on the needs and program design.
Educational Method: blended learning, flipped classroom, face to face teaching.
Courses taught:
- Managerial Decision Making, since 2003
- E-commerce, since 2004
- Knowledge Management
- Simulation
- Advising master and PhD students in the fields of interst
This course deals with organizational decision making covering three aspects: human, context and data. First, a descriptive behavioral approach is adopted to shed light on “how decisions are actually made in the real world” and pros and cons of systems of thinking; this uncovers roots of common mistakes of self and others and it proposes solutions for overcoming drawbacks of human decisions for the wellbeing of decision makers as well as the organization and society influenced. To answer “how decisions should be made”, the second part elaborates organizational contexts and shows how crucial challenges and leadership requirements for effective decision making vary with context. Then it deals with the requirements of the decision process to assure the quality of choice. The third part, finally, focuses on data driven decision making to solve organizational problems: in addition to few quantitative techniques, introductory discussions will be made on contemporary trends such as IoT, Big data and AI which influence decision making in modern organizational contexts.
A bit on History and evolution of this course:
The 1st generation, delivered since Fall 2003, addressed prescriptive quantitative techniques partly due to the instructor’s academic and executive experiences in the fields of Artificial Intelligence, computer simulation and operations research. To elaborate boundaries of managerial decision making in real world using behavioral science, the course restructured and the 2nd generation commenced to deliver in Fall 2007. This extended version provided descriptive insights on the cognitive and emotional aspects of human judgement and decision making; it was to address the needs of policy makers, C level and operational managers and also to support conceptually the significance of data-driven decision making. The 3rd generation started to develop in 2013 to include organizational needs and challenges of decision making. The latest course structure delivered since Fall 2018 provides a balance between context, data and human as the three fundamental elements of decision making.
The multi-aspect nature of this course perpare participants for a balanced analysis of decision issues in the real world and prvides ground for further study and research on the aspect of interest, e.g. behavioral approaches to marketing, policy making, operations management, pricing, etc., organizational processes to ensure quality, speed and effectiveness of decisions, data anaytics and business intelligence to satisfy the needs of contemporary business environments dominated by a variety of eBusiness models.