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IS306 – Usability Engineering
Course Design Document
Faculty: Richard C. DAVIS

Why is this course interesting, important and useful to students?

Information systems are highly structured, but human life is messy. When we try to fit human life into the structures expected by information systems, problems are inevitable. Usability engineering gives us the tools we need to tackle these problems.

SIS prepares its students to analyse and develop powerful and robust information systems, but today's systems need to do even more. They must earn customers' loyalty in a competitive marketplace. The goal of this class is to push students' skills to the next level, teaching them to design applications that are a pleasure to use

Students will undertake a user interface design project, progressing through three phases. In the requirements gathering phase, students will determine what users really need, even though users often have difficulty expressing those needs. In the design and prototyping phase, students will discover innovative designs and realise them in inexpensive ways. In the evaluation phase, students will use fast and inexpensive methods to determine whether or not a design is meeting the needs of its users.

It's very easy to build a user interface that is difficult or impossible to use. Building a usable system is surprisingly difficult. Usability engineering is an important skill for any information systems professional, because it enables us to build systems that truly make life better.

We live in an era of a data avalanche. Efficiently storing, processing and analyzing these data is essential for modern businesses to succeed. In IS410 course, we focus on data management issues arising in emerging scale-intensive applications. In the first half of the course, we cover database concepts and techniques arising in numerous real-world systems; namely, database indexing, file organization, and transaction management. In the second part of the course, we elaborate on cutting edge methods targeted at modern data-centric applications. Examples include location-based services, spatial databases, mobile computing/commerce, on-line and real-time decision making, etc.

In addition to interactive lectures, IS410 includes a hands-on component delivered through lab sections. In these sections, students use a commercial database (e.g. Oracle) to solve problems based on real-life scenarios. According to a strategy successfully followed previously in IS410, this year's run will also include invited talks by academic and industry contacts of the professor.

The course focuses equally on insights about database technology, as well as the practical value of this technology in enhancing existing systems and developing new ones. The knowledge and design skills imparted in this course are of paramount importance to any IT professional, since data management issues arise in almost any industry, including non-IT areas such as banking, entertainment, military systems, etc.

Be exposed to concepts extending further than common/standard application domains, with an emphasis on modern/emerging trends in database technology.
Hear academic and industry visitors speak on their field of expertise during invited talks.
Identify the trade-offs among alternative methods for a particular problem through analysis and hands-on experimentation.
Familiarise with commercial database tools that are widely used in the industry.

This course is exciting mostly because of its emphasis on recent database advancements, such as data-stream processing and location-based services. I am not aware of any other undergraduate curriculum covering topics as non-conventional and modern as preference-based queries and spatial monitoring. These new fields both extend the horizons of database research as well as carry a huge potential to change the way businesses operate. In an entrepreneurship-nurturing environment like SIS, student ideas triggered by this course may lead quickly to innovative applications.

I am personally enthusiastic to teach this course because most of the advanced topics covered are very closely related to my research interests and field of expertise. As such, I find IS410 an excellent opportunity to share my knowledge on these areas, cross-fertilise it with novel ideas from the students, and potentially engage them in research and industry projects outside the IS410 coursework.

IS411 – Global Software Project Management
Course Design Document
Faculty: GAN Kok Siew, Benjamin

The world seems smaller with advancing IT technologies such as the Internet, changing forces of globalisation and the realities of distributed projects in the work place. Students who understand the basics of global project management, teamwork and collaboration are likely to find themselves at a competitive advantage over those who do not.

This course will address practical and operational issues of Global Software Development (GSD) with emphasis on project management. Students will discuss GSD issues, write a research paper and experience global team project with students from other universities. Not only will you read, discuss and debate on ideas gathered from a collection of papers, including your research papers, but you will also be able to experiment with some of the techniques, methods, tools, etc.

Here are some quotes from SMU students.

“We ended on a high note with our own mini follow-the-sun scenario. After finishing our usual meeting at 2pm (Singapore), I tidied up my parts of the report and sent to CMU (3am EST). When it was morning at Pittsburgh, CMU edited their portion and sent out our final copy at 4pm EST. I was greeted by a complete report when I woke up for my morning class that day!”

However, GSD is not always smooth sailing.

"We have learnt that on paper, globally distributed project management sounds easier than it is in reality. As with most project management methodologies, we believe it would take us a bit more time and many more experiences to fully be able to attain the maximum output from working in a globally distributed team."

Most students find the global project experience a unique part of this course.

“I feel being able to work globally is an essential part of our learning experience.”

Today, IT departments must support rapid change and innovation of enterprise business processes. This capability can be achieved through Enterprise Service Oriented Architecture (ESOA). ESOA extends the paradigm of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) through the use of enterprise services. Enterprise services are highly integrated web services that expose a pre-built functionality within an enterprise system such as SAP ERP. These enterprise services can be combined with business logic and other external web services to enable end-to-end enterprise business processes.

Enterprise Business Solutions Course presents the concepts and technology required to develop an Enterprise Service Oriented Architecture (ESOA) solution by leveraging an enterprise system such as SAP ERP and SAP BPM toolsets. This course builds on the business process foundation gained in the Process Modelling and Solutions Blueprinting (PMSB) course and the enterprise integration technology foundation gained in the Enterprise Integration (EI) course. However, before embarking on ESOA, students must have a good understanding of how enterprise processes are implemented in a system such as SAP ERP. Therefore, the first half of the course (around 7 weeks) is intended to provide hands-on opportunity for the students to explore some of the detailed business processes in an enterprise system. The second half of the course will focus on the power of ESOA and how processes can be composed from predefined services to deliver business solutions. Throughout the course students will get hands-on opportunity to work with SAP ERP and SAP BPM toolsets.

The course will cover topics such as enterprise systems, enterprise business processes and enterprise service oriented architecture. This course will prepare students for a career as an IT solution consultant working in the area of enterprise systems such as SAP ERP.

Course lectures, assignments and projects will be based on real-world enterprise business processes. The course will have a series of hands-on labs on SAP ERP and SAP SOA toolsets (e.g. SAP Netweaver). Through these, students will have an understanding of how technology supports the enterprise business processes such as procurement and fulfillment. In particular, the students will be exposed to the emerging trend of business process composition through ESOA.

In order to get a feel for what students actually do in this course, following are extracts from student work submitted during the course. The following diagram shows the organisation structure designed by students to model their chosen company in SAP ERP.

The following diagram shows an example process designed by the students that has been implemented using SAP ERP and SAP Netweaver Tools.

This course is exciting as it targets important real-world skills which are seldom taught in an academic setting. The course will include lots of hands-on work in labs using SAP ERP and SAP Netweaver BPM.

Why is this course interesting, important and useful to students?

Are you interested to design “cutting-edge” geospatial web applications like these below:

Understand the basic concepts and theories of GIScience and trends of GIS technologies.
Create and manage spatially-enabled business data.
Use appropriate Geovisualisation techniques to present and gain insight from business-related data.
Use appropriate GIS analysis functions to perform site selection, territory planning, geo-profiling, marketing segmentation, and routing.
Model business processes using GIS' advanced analytical methods.
Design and implement map-centric “killer applications” or “cool web services” for businesses.

Comments from faculty

I am very encouraged by the fact that this course has successfully infused spatial thinking skill to our students which make them very unique as compared to other business IT profession. Besides knowing how to design and develop applications using conventional computing technology, our students also acquire the skill of designing and developing map-centric applications to meet the growing market of location intelligence.

Why is this course interesting, useful and important to students?

Data warehousing has recently gained a considerable momentum as a paradigm for driving daily business analytics operations. This course provides an introduction to fundamental issues and novel technology concepts of data warehouse. Issues covered include data warehouse planning; business modelling, design, and implementation. There will be a special emphasis on the role of data warehouse in supporting business intelligence and analysis, including effective decision making.

The course provides a good balance between concepts and practice. The participants will explore applications and have great opportunity for hands-on exposure with applications for data warehousing using the advanced software packages from leading industrial partners.

Neat things students will do in the course

Our objectives are to provide you with broad coverage and examples about data warehouse techniques, trends underlying current and future development, and basic strategies for the use of DW/BI systems. Specifically, through this course, you will:

Gain an understanding of basic data warehousing applications and techniques, how data warehousing enables business intelligence capabilities that are used across different industries
Learn how to combine and consolidate data from the various databases scattered throughout a company into a data warehouse
Learn how data inside a data warehouse is organised into a “data cube”, which is extensively used in large scale business information analysis and mining
Explore how to use the “data cube” to do business analytics and reporting. This includes how to “slice and dice” the data to get different views of the information; how to aggregate and disaggregate the data to see the information with varying degrees of resolution; and how to do important types of business analytics and related reports
Acquire hands-on experience with key components of an integrated data warehousing and business intelligence system using a leading industry commercial application package
Use DW/BI applications to create enterprise business intelligence and analytics applications for solving real world problems
Study best practices and case studies for using data warehousing applications, data warehousing enterprise platforms, and integrated DW/BI applications
Gain highly desired IT and business analytic skills for using data warehousing to create business intelligence solutions to meet real world needs

Business is all about competition: competing for limited resources, competing for talents, competing to innovate, and most important of all, competing for survival! No wonder people have been relating running businesses to raging wars. In business, as in warfare, the more you calculate beforehand, the more likely you will survive in the end. As famously said by the legendary strategist, Sun Tzu, “… do many calculations lead to victory, and few calculations to defeat …”.

In this course, we teach students how to calculate in a changing environment filled with collaborative friends or competitive foes. Besides a suite of tools that enable students to tackle practical challenges in calculating, we will introduce serious business games (SBGs) as the ultimate virtual environment that allows decisions/policies to be evaluated. SBGs can simulate highly volatile and uncertain business environments, and most importantly, SBGs allow us to observe the interaction of different strategies or business entities in a virtual and repeatable environment. Evaluating polices or strategies in such environments will be much more reliable and trust-worthy. In short, SBG is like the digital sand table in the business world.

Real-world examples from financial markets, supply chain management (SCM), brand competition (in marketing), and resources bundling and selling will be introduced. Students will be able to see how SBGs can be created and used for these important domains. Students will also be able to practice creating strategies for these domains, and they will witness their strategies competing with each other in all these introduced SBGs.

You can find more info on the course outline website here.

Be exposed to some of the most dynamic and interesting domains, e.g., financial markets, supply chain management, and brand competition.
Learned about competition directly from senior industry professionals in finance, operations, and marketing.
Learn to harness the power of Serious Business Games (SBGs) in simulating business environments.
Use SBGs in evaluating important business decisions (or even government policies).

Making business decisions is hard, so hard that many claim it's more art than science. I believe otherwise. Take financial trading as example: it was once similarly considered as an art; however, in the US market today, it is estimated that computer programs already account for more than 40% of the trading volume, and it could soon take over human to become the market majority.

The advances in computer technology make every individual a potential “digital strategist ”, and we now have the power to model and react to an increasingly automated world. I have conducted numerous research projects on incorporating SBGs in financial trading, operations, marketing, and transportation; and I have experienced how excited people are when they learned the potential and capability of the SBGs. For example, I will share with you how SBGs can be built to model complicated financial markets and allow policy makers to test their proposed regulatory policies (or for traders to test their trading strategies).

This class will help you build such capabilities. You will walk out of the course knowing a powerful new tool you cannot find elsewhere.

Also, as senior industry professionals are invited to give keynotes in three case studies in finance, operations, and marketing, you will have the rare chance to learn directly from these outstanding individuals about how competition works in their respective industries.

Why is this course interesting, useful and important to students?

Now you have heard about viral social media marketing, but how does that happen? If I give you $1000 to market a new cool product on Facebook and it costs $10 to market to each person, how do you target the best 100 persons so that the marketing power is maximised? Ever wonder how Amazon is able to find out that “80% of customers who bought this cool game you have chosen also bought that interesting one”?

Today's real-life applications in business, financial and commercial world are characterised by huge amount of data. Any smart and competitive business would have to make full use of these data for analysis and knowledge discovery. Retail business could classify and cluster customer behavior for targeted marketing. Banking and financial institutions could detect money laundering and other suspicious financial transactions by outlier analysis and anomaly mining. Social network services like Facebook could find user communities and their evolutionary patterns to provide better applications and achieve viral marketing. Data Mining and Business Analytics would provide students with concepts and principles to better understand the challenges and foundations of today's business intelligence.

Neat things students will do in the course

Students would have the opportunity to use SAS Enterprise Miner to play with real-world data for some of the most essential data analysis tasks including sampling, visualisation, modeling, cluster analysis and association analysis. Successful completion of the assignments and labs would provide the coverage of major techniques widely employed in practice.

Introduced to real-world applications and business settings where data-mining provides value-adding solutions.
Understand fundamental concepts and principles of data mining and business analytics.
Gain insights into essential data mining topics including sampling, visualisation, modeling, cluster analysis and association analysis embedded in real business cases.
Explore some of the most useful and powerful algorithms underlying all business intelligence engines.
Hands-on experience with SAS Enterprise Miner to play with real-world data sets to uncover interesting results.

The part of the course that I am most excited about is to help the students explore the young and ever-growing field of data mining, and together brainstorm on interesting ideas for some of today's most amazing applications.

Today, the term cloud computing is continually mentioned when discussing modern information systems. Regardless of how “The Cloud” eventually ends up being defined, it is inevitable that information systems professionals will end up working with cloud-related technology and concepts in the coming years. After taking this course, students will have a better understanding of how they can apply cloud-related technology within an organisation to better analyse and “flow” data as well as how to apply cloud-related technology to more quickly prototype new products and services. In addition to covering the applications of cloud computing, this course will also analyse the security and privacy issues that often constrain the application of cloud computing and how these issues can be systematically addressed in order to deliver increased business value to internal and external customers.

Course lectures, assignments and projects will be based on real-world business problems and processes. The course will have a series of hands-on labs where small applications are built and executed on public cloud services. Through these labs, students will gain a better understanding of how cloud technology can be applied to meet business needs. Students will also have an opportunity to hear from local Singapore-based cloud providers and how their platforms are delivering value to local businesses.

Singapore is on track to be one of the most cloud-enabled cites in the world with 1 st tier providers such as Amazon, Microsoft, Salesforce.com, Google, and others all establishing their presence here. This large concentration of cloud providers is likely to result in most local companies hearing and understanding the potential of both public and private clouds. This course should enable students to have very relevant cloud-related discussions with employers during internships, final year projects, and future job interviews.

Payment, both small and large value transactions, is marked by a rapid shift from paper-based to electronic. It is a big part of our personal and business lives. “Under the hood” of payment transactions are the products, the companies, the legal framework, the processes and technology. We rely on them to facilitate the timely and uninterrupted exchange of value from one entity to another. In times of crisis, robust domestic/national and global payment systems allow resources to flow to the critical areas smoothly and efficiently.

This course “e-Payment: Processes and Technology” takes a unique, integrated look at the payment/e-payment landscape, viewing consumer, business and wholesale payments as a continuum. It presents a description of the changing environment and delineates the dynamic e-payment scene, helping us understand the possibilities as well as the limits to change. It covers payments for individuals, organisations and banks, and their possible permutations.

Group learning activities, invited speakers, visit to production site(s) are highlights of the course. Students will also have the opportunity to leverage on third party API (Application Programming Interfaces) to create new solutions through labs. Project will be based on real-world payment industry drivers and needs. Through these, students will gain an appreciation and understand the payment transaction flows, solution design, standards, the infrastructure and implementation.

The course is aimed at students who are interested in knowing more on both ‘domestic' and international payment systems. Students who aspire to be T&O (technology and operations) staff and managers will find it particularly useful as it offers a system view to payments with emphasis on end-to-end payment process.

If you have completed IS480 and hungry for more, IS481 is the right course for you. You can do another IS480, if you meet the criteria set here (http://blue.smu.edu.sg/IS481/). You must have completed IS480 with at least an A- and submitted a new proposal with at least an A-. The criteria applies to individual (you do not have to do IS481 with your IS480 team members). Each individual can do a maximum of one IS481 course and a total of 15 students are permitted to take IS481 per academic year. Please refer to the website for current enrollment to IS481. IS481 will satisfy a technology depth elective.

There are many different types of IS480 projects. Teams have done projects for MNC in various domains (finance, health care, manufacturing, supply chain, etc), projects for community social enterprise (web donation, community IT services, churches, social networking, etc) and even technopreneur projects (proof of concepts, start ups, new technologies, supporting IT services, etc). They are very similar in terms of building an IT system with sufficient planning and testing for a real client (sponsor or end users). However, the type of projects (MNC, community/social enterprise or own projects) involves different learning skills and motivation. Students who are doing this a second time, realise the value of the learning experience and want to do something productive (value add).

The neat thing about this course, is that IS480 is a required core course that every IS students must complete. IS481 is for students who love the flexibility of the various projects they can do (implementing a system) and are planning to do this for the love of it (not for a grade). If you are interested in doing research, please look at IS470.

You are required to follow all the standard deliverables for IS480. However, we will be more flexible on the course requirements in exchange for a more ambitious goal, such as getting your mobile app into the app store/market place.

IS406 – Supply Chain Processes & Technology
Course Design Document
Faculty: LEE Wee Leong

Why is this course interesting, important and useful to students?

This course is designed to help students gain a deep understanding of the key processes and enabling technologies employed in supply chain management and how it should be implemented, to achieve an integrated supply chains which will lead to increase profitability for companies.

Students get to experience using advanced SCM planning and execution solutions (hosted by a third-party logistics solutions provider) to perform supply chain planning and execution exercises using real-time information. Case studies of real world applications will be used in class to help students understand and identify the critical success factor in effective supply chain management.

I spent several years in the SCM industry managing, designing and implementing supply chain solutions. In the process I accumulated valuable experience through resolving issues not commonly addressed in textbooks which I am eager to share with students. As a SCM practitioner and educator, I would like to present students with a different perspective of SCM to bridge the gap between theory and practice.

IS425 – Advanced Seminar on IS management
Course Design Document
Faculty: WONG Yuet Nan

Why is this course interesting, important and useful to students?

We will work on key IT management issues faced by CIOs and IT leaders.
We will also work on how to become effective change agent – effecting changes in organisation, processes and people.
We will discuss latest IT trends, e.g. Cloud computing, Mobile computing etc. and then apply these in the term project.

Quotes from past IS425 students:

“I enjoy the real case studies that have been covered during the course.”

In depth case analysis and potentially meeting the key player in the case.
Learn and apply a methodology on effective organisational change management.
Learn from IT leaders how to be successful in your IT career.
Field visits to observe firsthand the latest applications on Cloud computing and mobile computing. There is a possible visit to Supreme Court to observe the most technological advanced court in the world and how it came about (People, Process and Systems)?

I am thrilled with the opportunity to interact with the upper year SIS students. Through the use of case studies, assignments and project, I intend to help you synthesise what you have learned in the past 3 years in solving business IT problems more holistically.

We will work on key IT management issues faced by CIOs and IT leaders. We will also work on how to become effective organisational change agent. We will be inviting key IT leaders in Singapore to share their views on specific IT management issue, and also how to have a successful IT career.

The instructor WONG Yuet Nan has been a practicing IT professional for >30 years, of which 18 years as a CIO or regional CIO. He is on the SIS Board of Advisors since 2006. He is currently an Executive Partner with Gartner and works as an advisor to the CIOs.

As Prof Wong might need to travel overseas at times due to business reasons, do expect couple of make up classes on Saturday or even week 8 during the semester. I will try to avoid them as much as possible but be prepared for it. Please note that field visits are outside class hours. One will take place on Friday afternoon and another on week 8. While they are optional, students are strongly encouraged to attend as they are an important part of learning. If you have constraints in this regards, then this class is not for you.

IS426 – Technopreneurship
Course Design Document
Faculty: NARASIMHALU Arcot Desai

Why is this course interesting, important and useful to students?

This course is for those entrepreneurially-inclined students who would like to build technology based start up companies that offer an innovative product or service. This course assumes that the students have a business innovation and would like to understand the steps in building a technology company. It is a part of the technopreneurship track launched by SIS in AY 2009.

Students with interesting business innovation ideas can apply for a number of government grants either during or after completing this course. They can apply for i.JAM funding that will give them a grant up to 50,000 Singapore dollars to build an Interactive Digital Media application, product or service prototype. Alternatively, they could apply for the NRF POC grant that will give them a grant of up to 250,000 Singapore dollars to build a prototype that can be commercialised. They could also apply for a Yes! Startup grant of up to 50,000 Singapore dollars to build a company around their business innovation.

Learn how to build a technology start up company
- Acquire the key skills required to build a company
- Interact with proven entrepreneurs to learn the important ingredients required to build a company
- Prepare themselves for a summer internship with a start up company in Asia or Israel
Those with good business innovations will be assigned experienced business mentors to build their companies.

I wish there were such courses and funding opportunities when I was a student. Entrepreneurship is a very attractive career alternative. Students who come up with compelling proposals for innovation can look forward to gaining hands-on experience on creating a new business by working with experienced serial entrepreneurs.

IS427 – Technopreneurship Study Mission (South Korea)
Course Design Document
Faculty: GAN Kok Siew Benjamin

It is not by accident that Korea has the highest internet penetration in Asia. You will learn this unique internet culture and their approach to entrepreneurship. From Young Entrepreneurs' Society of Korea YES to Mompreneurs for women, we will cover the ecosystem and support structure. How do you compete in an economy that is second to Japanese, European and American products, mired by corruptions and bankruptcies of family-run chaebol, and government inertia? Yet, Korea continue to be resilient, churning out large successful companies like Samsung, Hyundai, LG, Daewoo, etc. We will investigate the environment by visiting start ups in Seoul.

Visit the soul of asia, Seoul and experience the unique culture by emercing ourselves in startups, ventures and government support structures. You will have the opportunity to speak to entrepreneurs and ask questions about their process, challenges, risks and rewards of starting up a new business. Is it Korean guanxi? Is it luck? Is it a culture or personality of the founders? Seek the X factor that is the ultimate ingredient for a successful business.

This is the first TSM in Korea. There will be some hiccups and problems along the way but I will thrive to make this a "fun" class with all the icing in it. A cute smile and can do attitude is a pre-requisite.

IS431 System Dynamics and Business Gaming is the second of a trilogy of courses on Exploratory Modelling. The first course is the well-known, and some say much feared, IS102 Computer as an Analysis (CAT) course. That course is challenging because new undergraduates have to use Excel in powerful ways to think about business concerns and help find resolutions alternatives. This is SMU students' maiden introduction to what modelling is and how the process of building models is more potent than the models themselves. With a strong set of spreadsheet skills learned, students can confidently examine ill-defined, unstructured problems, the kind executives and managers face every day.

In a fun and even more interactive ways, this new follow-on “CAT 2” course deals with complex and more interesting problems. Expanding beyond the tactical issues explored in CAT, IS431's exercises revolve around strategic concerns. Such large and nebulous concerns are characterised by feedback, accumulations and time- delays, and involving multiple agents with adaptive and nonlinear behaviour.

Like CAT, the course is open to all students in SMU, with only CAT as its pre-requisite. Spreadsheet skills and exploratory modelling approaches will still be much featured in the course. In addition, student will be introduced to Vensim, a graphically-oriented simulation software for System Dynamics.

In this advanced course, students learn how the “soft management science” of System Dynamics (SD) can be used, in a non-mathematical, intuitive and fun way, to analyse system structures, and to propose measures to prevent or mitigate undesirable behavior such as overshoots and oscillations. The SD methodology is being applied worldwide to business and city growth planning, technology diffusion and product development management, public administration of infectious diseases, and global action on social and environmental concerns. It is a well-recognised method with large followings in corporate board rooms and public service.

Students will learn useful diagramming approaches, such as Affinity, Causal-loop and Stock-and-flow diagrams, to collate and examine large complex issues. We will also look at “patterns” of system structures and from these archetypes, postulate their behaviour over time.

Following the success of the re-designed CAT course and fantastic response from students who took or are taking it, we have been thinking about offering a follow-on course for many years now. We have examined various possible options of what the course should cover and how it can be taught. Up to end year 2010, we were not able to pin down clearly what would be most beneficial to students. We hope those who have enjoyed CAT, learned to apply Excel spreadsheet skills and modelling concepts thereafter in other courses, and have matured enough to want look at more complex corporate, societal and global concerns would sign up. This is not an “IT Systems” class; the word “system” here refers to a closed set of tightly-knitted set of variables and entities. So it is a class for people with a consulting bent, who care about finding out the truth in a methodologically-based scientific approach.

Why is this course interesting, important and useful to students?

This course exposes you to the frontiers of IS technology or IS management research. Through one-to-one mentoring supervision by an SIS faculty, you get to experience first-hand the challenges and exhilaration of research, discovery and innovation - which provide an additional learning outcome that none of the existing SIS courses currently offers.

This course takes you through a process where you will learn the ropes of performing research. There are no assignments, no exams per se – but your supervisor will meet you constantly to work with you on a research problem.
This course enables you to interact and foster closer ties with SIS faculty as well as the wider research community at SIS.
You will be guided to write a term paper that may cover a mixture of the following:
1. for IS Technology elective: literature survey, technology case study, problem definition, solution design and modeling, evaluation/validation methodology, analysis
2. for IS Management elective: literature review, empirical research (e.g. case/field study, survey, experiments), analytical research (e.g. optimisation, simulation, industrial organisation modelling)
Selected projects stand a chance to be presented at the annual National Undergraduate Research Opportunities Programme Congress (NUROP).

Comments from faculty

Many view research as an activity that is exclusive and conducted by esoteric individuals who seclude themselves in laboratories, scholarly libraries, or within the precincts of a closed-door environment. But that's just a narrow view! The Singapore 's Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR) defines R&D as a process of “creative work undertaken on a systematic basis in order to increase the stock of knowledge and the use of this stock of knowledge to devise new applications". We invite you to have a foretaste of this enriching process, and who knows, this might guide you to consider/choose the right post-graduate studies or towards an R&D career!

Please note that IS470 and IS480 are NOT mutually exclusive. In other words, whether you are taking or planning to take IS480, you may still consider taking IS470. The learning outcomes for these courses are very different.