Krystie Dickson

Over more than a decade of professional experience spanning oil and gas, banking, gaming, pharmaceuticals, and higher education, Krystie Dickson’s work has centered on data analytics, information systems, and the translation of analytical insight into organizational decision-making.

As a lecturer in Metropolitan College’s Applied Business Analytics graduate program and several undergraduate and graduate Administrative Sciences courses, Dickson is involved with course development spanning quantitative and qualitative decision-making, web analytics, business analytics foundations, ecommerce, market and economic research analysis, and international business. She has led the redevelopment of Web Analytics (MET AD 688), ensuring that the curriculum, assessments, and online infrastructure to align with current industry standards.

As a doctoral candidate in the Executive PhD in Business—Advanced Analytics program at Bentley University, Dickson has been examining the Chief Data Officer (CDO) role as an emerging executive function in US publicly traded firms. Her dissertation integrates institutional theory, the resource-based view, and legitimacy theory to investigate how organizations adopt data leadership structures and how those structures shape strategy, analytics governance, and decision-making in the age of AI.

Beyond her dissertation work, Dickson’s research extends into applied artificial intelligence and organizational behavior. Her ongoing AI-related research applies natural language processing and neural network methods to study how firms engage with artificial intelligence discourse and how that engagement relates to data leadership structures, drawing on large-scale corporate disclosure data and benchmark text classification datasets. She has also delivered doctoral-level instructional sessions on neural network architectures and reinforcement learning, and engages actively with contemporary research on mechanistic interpretability. In a complementary line of work, she has conducted an organizational climate study examining how Masculine Contest Culture shapes the Climate for Inclusion within a co-educational professional organization, with gender as a hypothesized moderator. The study triangulated multiple validated instruments—including Nishii’s Climate for Inclusion scale, the Masculine Contest Culture scale, and the Organizational Culture Assessment Instrument—and combined a reproducible Python analysis pipeline, that Dickson designed, with action research methodology and direct delivery of findings to organizational leadership.

Her published work includes peer-reviewed contributions in the Springer Lecture Notes series on analytics program competitiveness, employability frameworks, and pharmaceutical product serialization, with conference presentations at INFORMS, CSECS, and the BU MET Symposium on Entrepreneurship & Technology (SET). She is the recipient of the 2023 Patricia W. Chadwick Professional Development Fellowship Award and currently serves on the BU MET Executive Committee.