The Department of Management and Business Information Systems (UBIS) contributes to the university’s mission of providing a broad-based education to professionals with interdisciplinary skills. It was established on September 25, 2019, by a decision of the Academic Council of the Technical University of Sofia. The UBIS Department is thematically organized around the program of the same name, which is in growing demand among students and draws on the specific IT expertise of many faculty members from the former Department III. Consequently, the new department includes faculty members from the existing Department of Economics, Industrial Engineering, and Management. This marks the formation of the Faculty of Economics’ third structural unit. The “UBIS” Department is an innovative and fresh addition to the Faculty of Economics, meeting the business sector’s growing need for highly qualified professionals in the fields of IT management, business information, heterogeneous intelligent systems, and others. In this way, at just the right moment, it has succeeded in filling a huge market niche for specialized training of high-quality interdisciplinary professionals who possess both the necessary management skills and the ability to quickly adopt emerging technological innovations for the flexible digital transformation of business. The department is one of the most dynamically developing ones, with a young, enthusiastic academic staff offering fresh ideas for integrating the latest advances in the fields of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and smart devices into these diverse intelligent business applications for extracting knowledge from large datasets, multimedia simulation tools, augmented reality, and more.

Prof. Svetoslav Velev, Ph.D., served as head of the newly established department from October 1, 2019, to August 22, 2020. Subsequently, the leadership of the “MBIIS” Department was assumed by Assoc. Prof. Dr. Rumyana Ilieva, who is one of the founders (2016) and has been in charge of the specialization of the same name since 2017. 

The faculty members have completed their specializations at leading European universities. They maintain close collaboration with the business community, conducting a range of research projects and publishing articles in world-renowned indexed and peer-reviewed journals. 

Activities in the “MBIIS” department are focused on the following key areas:

• improving the training of faculty members in disciplines related to IT management and business information to the highest global standards, with a view to the professional development of technical university graduates and the cultivation of technical leadership potential;

• fostering values, attitudes, and personal strategies for continuous self-improvement and the development of students’ creative abilities, which are appropriate for the dynamic conditions of professional realization;

• Ensuring the effectiveness of research activities and full participation in the country’s scientific life, thereby establishing the Technical University as a leading educational and cultural institution in Bulgaria.

The establishment of the “MBIS” Department was a natural extension of the new bachelor’s program of the same name, which proved to be an exceptionally successful program, filling a market niche that had no parallel in Bulgaria up to that point.

 The MBIS bachelor’s program was established as a result of extensive research into international best practices during the 2015–2016 academic year by a small team under the auspices of the then-dean of the Faculty of Informatics, Prof. M. Velev. The key members of the team were the only faculty members teaching IT disciplines at the Faculty of Software Engineering—Assoc. Prof. R. Ilieva and Assoc. Prof. O. Marinov, both of whom were with the IIIM Department at the time. The need for this major arose from the necessity to find a sufficiently successful new program to fill the gap created by the temporary suspension of the Public Administration major. Assoc. Prof. R. Ilieva, thanks to her international network of contacts, secured access to relevant, thematically similar curricula and programs from leading universities worldwide and developed a logical sequence of academic disciplines into six main thematic disciplines, with the program offering and applying the content of some of the major upper-level IT management disciplines in courses and specializations—that is, in the advanced second part of the curriculum. Assoc. Prof. O. Marinov, for his part, developed several core business IT programs for the first part—the introductory courses—and has been conducting a series of debates and advocacy efforts to study and improve the program’s offerings at the university, in addition to leveraging his contacts at the Faculty of Telecommunications and Informatics (FTK), which has enabled him to secure instructors for relevant core ICT disciplines across the curriculum. Associate Professor R. Ilieva was appointed head of the program. 

Since its inception, the program has generated unprecedented interest, which has grown with each passing year since the first graduating class in 2017, maintaining very high admission standards. The department’s high-quality training and extensive network of business contacts secure internships and jobs for students as early as their second year at leading ICT companies.

Thus, at the end of 2019, in response to the need to establish a third department at the Faculty of Informatics—to manage the program and accommodate its growing number of students—the MBIS Department was created by faculty members from the IIIM Department with distinguished IT expertise. Prof. S. Dimkov was appointed head of the department based on seniority; following his retirement in mid-2020, Assoc. Prof. R. Ilieva was elected head of the department and continues to lead it to this day, having been elected to a second term.

In 2020, as the first graduating class was nearing completion, Prof. K. Angelov, Ph.D., then dean of the Faculty of Finance, Economics, and Business Administration, initiated the creation of a master’s program in the same field in response to requests from students who wished to continue their development in this area. The master’s program was developed by the department’s faculty members: Prof. K. Angelov, Assoc. Prof. R. Ilieva, and Assoc. Prof. O. Marinov, each of whom took charge of one of the three specialization tracks. It was developed for both full-time and part-time study, as well as in English, and there are already a significant number of graduates from both full-time and part-time programs, including international students who completed the program in English. Once again, this program has sparked unprecedented interest, which has grown with each passing year since the first graduating class in 2020. It attracts students who have completed their bachelor’s degrees primarily from the Faculty of Physical Education and Sports (FKST) and the Faculty of Tourism and Culture (FTK), those working in the ICT sector, as well as students from other universities and across the country.

To complete the full range of academic degrees, Prof. K. Angelov initiated the creation of a doctoral program bearing the same name in 2021; this program is now a reality, accredited by the National Agency for Academic Accreditation and Evaluation (NAAAE), and will begin admitting doctoral students next year.

The faculty is small in number but consists of internationally recognized scholars with extensive publication and research activity. Since 2016, Prof. K. Angelov has served as Dean of the Faculty of Physics, Optics, and Electronics (FFOE), and prior to that, from 2010, he served as Associate Dean. Since 2020, Assoc. Prof. O. Marinov has served as Associate Dean for Research and Applied Activities at the Faculty of Science (SF), now in his second term.