Material in this book is used at both the graduate and undergraduate levels. I think it’s a mistake to classify books as focused on just grad or undergrad students. After all, we’d expect our students at all levels to be able to leverage articles in the Wall Street Journal or BusinessWeek. Why can’t our textbooks be equally useful?
You’ll also find this work to be written in an unconventional style for a textbook, but hey, why be boring? Let’s face it, Fortune and Wired wouldn’t sell a single issue if forced to write with the dry-encyclopedic prose used by most textbooks. Many students and faculty have written with kind words for the tone and writing style used in this book, and it’s been incredibly rewarding to hear from students who claim they have actually looked forward to assigned readings and have even read ahead or explored unassigned chapters. I hope you find it to be equally engaging.
The mix of chapter and cases is also meant to provide a holistic view of how technology and business interrelate. Don’t look for an “international” chapter, an “ethics” chapter, a “mobile” chapter, or a “systems development and deployment” chapter. Instead, you’ll see these topics woven throughout many of our cases and within chapter examples. This is how professionals encounter these topics “in the wild,” so we ought to study them not in isolation but as integrated parts of real-world examples. Examples are consumer-focused and Internet-heavy for approachability, but the topics themselves are applicable far beyond the context presented.