Business Information Technology
Research
Data visualization class held in the Athenaeum classroom in Newman Library.
Security and Privacy
The BIT faculty actively engage in research on security and privacy issues facing businesses and society. Research in this area includes studying, how GDPR consent requirements affect business performance, how the way consent choices are presented affect privacy decisions, whether security fear appeals are effective if they interrupt tasks, how multilevel privacy decisions are made, and how to predict users’ susceptibility to phishing, among other topics.
Toy safety researchers with children, PhD student Rich Gruss with son Danny, 7. Researchers also include Business Information Technology student Matt Winkler and BIT associate professor Alan Abrahams. Photographed at Imaginations toy shop in Blacksburg.
Health Information Technology & Service Operations
The BIT faculty actively engage in research for social good in areas such as healthcare information technology and service operations. Research in this area includes how to use information technology to improve people’s health by understanding how different people respond to fitness technologies (e.g., Fitbit), how information technology can be used to improve women’s health in developing countries, how to best position assets in disaster situations, and how to partner people who are resource limited with medical legal assistance, among other topics.
Toy safety researchers with children, PhD student Rich Gruss with son Danny, 7. Researchers also include Business Information Technology student Matt Winkler and BIT associate professor Alan Abrahams. Photographed at Imaginations toy shop in Blacksburg.
Artificial Intelligence
The BIT faculty actively engage in research on the use and deployment of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and deep learning to solve problems of interest to business and society. Research in this area includes developing text analytic approaches to study how customer agility affects product performance, mining user generated content to find product defects, and text mining news articles to predict financial performance of firms, among other topics.
MEET SOME OF BIT’S NEWEST FACULTY
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BIT Offers Three Undergraduate Majors and Options
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Option: Computer-Based Decision Support Systems (DSS)Application of information technology, analytics, and artificial intelligence tools to develop solutions that support managerial decisions.
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Cybersecurity Management and Analytics (CMA)Application of information technology, analytics, and security management practices to manage a company’s cybersecurity function.
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Option: Operations and Supply Chain Management (OSM)Application of information technology, analytics, and mathematical models to maximize organizational efforts in sourcing, production and distribution of goods and services.
BIT Course Spotlight
Analytics in Action (BIT 4854)
The capstone course for the Data & Decisions minor. Students in this minor get a heavy dose of technology and number crunching in their other classes. What’s often missing is the context within which the number crunching occurs. This class attempts to fill that void by making student teams wrestle with the soft skills associated with solving messy problems. This includes things like formulating a clear problem definition, identifying, and communicating with stakeholders, disaggregating the problem into tasks, finding appropriate data, creating and executing a workplan, team dynamics, stress testing solutions, and crafting and delivering persuasive presentations. Deloitte is supporting this class with six modules developed and delivered by their employees and by providing coaching to each of the student teams. Dr. Cliff Ragsdale was awarded the Decision Sciences Institute Distinguished Educator Award in 2021.
BIT Undergraduate Spotlight
