To all BSc (IS Management) students:

The IS depth electives offered by SIS during Term 1 of AY2008-09 are summarised below:

All of these electives are extremely “high value add” and will help you in your near and long term professional development and success. Please check out these electives and sign up where it makes sense.

Remember, the more student demand there is for IS Depth Electives, the more electives we can offer.

IS Technology Depth Electives

Course Title: IS305 - Enterprise Web Solutions
Course Design Document
Faculty: Ori SASSON

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

Web-based solutions are becoming the de-facto standard for Enterprise Information Systems. This course is designed to provide a deep understanding of Web application architectures and solutions. It focuses on the implementation of an enterprise portal as a way to model the complete end-to-end Enterprise solution. The course is intended to provide students with the opportunity to gain hands-on experience in developing content-rich Web applications using Portal servers. The intent is to focus on solutioning through assembly from building blocks rather than development from scratch.

This course is highly useful for students as it exposes them to concepts relating to portals in general and to Microsoft SharePoint in particular.

Neat things students will do in the course

• Build a website in a matter of minutes using SharePoint site templates.
• Integrate search, workflow, and collaboration tools into sites.
• Construct and end-to-end Web application leveraging on existing building blocks.
• Develop deep understanding of multi-tiered Web solutions in the context of a business environment.
• Gain technical understanding of Microsoft SharePoint.

Comments from faculty

This course is exciting as it targets important real-world skills which are seldom taught in an academic setting. The course format follows Enterprise Integration (EI), and will include lots of hands-on work in labs and projects. Personally, this is the second course I am teaching in SIS, and it will give me an opportunity to build on the experience I gained in EI last year to create a stimulating learning environment for students in the course.

Course Title: IS403 – Advanced Information Security and Trust
Course Design Document
Faculty: DING Xuhua

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

As information systems, databases and internet-based distributed systems and communication have become pervasive in the commercial world, coupled with the increased intensity and sophistication of security-related attacks, organisations now recognise the need for a comprehensive security strategy.

Built on the foundation of the Information Security and Trust course (IS302), the Advanced Information Security and Trust course draws on hard-won experience to explain the latest developments in security protocols, network security, web security, application security and industrial standards. Classroom instruction and discussion will closely integrate technical principles with real world applications such as secure e-banking, secure corporate networking, and multimedia system security. In addition, case studies will be used to demonstrate that security and trust are not only for protection of information assets, but also means of improving business operation or even starting new businesses.

Neat things students will do in the course

• Understand important security principles, industrial standards, security protocols and their applications.
• Be able to analyse and evaluate security mechanisms and systems, contrast competing schemes, explain strengths and weaknesses, and identify potential errors or vulnerabilities.
• Understand the common attacks to security protocols and be able to design security protocols to satisfy security requirements and constraints in real world, e.g. e-banking.
• Be aware of current and future trends in security research and applications.

Course title: IS414 - Search Engine Technologies
Course Design Document
Faculty: PANG Hwee Hwa

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

Enormous amount of information is stored in free or unstructured text in personal, corporate and public databases. Even in enterprises that generate large quantities of numeric transactional data, unstructured text has been estimated to constitute more than 80% of the data. The textual data include emails, news articles, reports, product brochures and, of course, the ubiquitous web. Information technology is needed to facilitate the retrieval and analysis of these text collections, in order to support timely and informed business decisions.

This course will study how search engines crawl the web, and how they retrieve relevant documents from a text archive to satisfy a user query. We will also introduce classification and clustering techniques for automatically grouping documents by content, to improve the understandability of search results. In addition, we will examine best practices for enterprise search applications, case studies in law enforcement, sports, healthcare, etc, as well as innovations in search applications. Through the course, students will acquire proficiency in both the technical concepts and applications of search technology.

Neat things students will do in the course

• Gain an understanding of basic text retrieval and mining techniques for unstructured text documents.
• Acquire hands-on experience with a  Java-based search engine, so students will be able to build text search function into their future projects.
• Gain familiarity with a commercial text analytic software.
• Study best practices and case studies for text processing applications, platforms and the underlying information techniques.
• Learn how to search the Internet effectively, and be discerning about quality of information gathered.

Course title: IS416 - Mobile and Pervasive Technology and Applications
Course Design Document
Faculty: BALAN Rajesh Krishna

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

This course will explain to students how mobile & pervasive technology is changing the way businesses operate. As part of the class, students will understand the technologies involved and the reasons why numerous companies are adopting these technologies. Students will also be introduced to cutting edge mobile & pervasive technology developed by companies such as Hewlett Packard, Microsoft and Google.

Overall, this class will be highly useful for any student who plans to work in IT later as it will allow him/her to appreciate and make informed business decisions with regard to mobile and pervasive technology.

Finally, students will get an opportunity to develop and present either a research or a business proposal in the area of mobile and pervasive computing. This experience will be highly valuable as it provides training in articulating their thoughts concisely and in presenting ideas with impact.

Neat things students will do in the course

• Develop a research or business proposal in the space of mobile and pervasive technology.
• Deliver this proposal to an audience and have it appraised.
• Develop a cool project using building block tools/systems from Nokia, Hewlett-Packard, Google, University of Toronto, and other places.
• Learn to critique the use of mobile and pervasive technology to improve business value.
• Read interesting papers describing cutting edge mobile and pervasive research ideas.

Comments from faculty

This course is incredibly exciting as it will expose students to some of the cutting edge systems that are helping change the way businesses operate. For example, business such as UPS, Comfort DelGro, Google, etc. would be far less functional without these types of systems.

I am very enthusiastic about this course as this area is very cool and highly relevant to anyone who wants to work in IT. I have been performing research and building systems in this area for the last decade, and the prospect of sharing some of that knowledge with receptive students greatly excites me.

This course will also be presented in a very different format from other courses. I do not plan to provide a lot of information upfront -- mostly because the field is so broad that I do not have all the answers myself.

Instead, the information will be obtained together through discussions in class, background reading material, and videos shown in class. You will also be given the chance to let your creativity express itself fully in the course assignments (You choose your presentation and project topics. I will provide suggestions and help where needed though).

The reason for this is because, since this is a senior level course, one of the main skills I hope to impart is the ability to understand how to approach and understand a new technical field. Hence, we are going to be exploring this space together in class. Overall, I am very excited about this class and I aim to make it a very different, yet incredibly enriching and fun experience compared with other classes you might have taken.

This course was offered for the first time last semester and I encourage you to talk to your seniors and understand why this course is so different.

Course Title: IS417 - Data Warehousing and Business Analytics
Course Design Document
Faculty: SHEN Jialie

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

Data warehouse provides an integrated enterprise information platform to help the organization's success in the modern business environment. It has been widely applied to daily business analytics operations in different application domains (retail, banking, insurance, telco, and others). This course gives an introduction to fundamental issues and novel applications of data warehouse. Issues covered include data warehouse planning, business modeling, design, and application case studies. In particular, we will learn the role of data warehouse in supporting high-quality business intelligence (BI) and effective decision making to gain business advantage.

Through this course, students will:

• Gain an understanding of basic data warehousing techniques, how these techniques enable business intelligence capabilities that are used across many sectors of industry.
• Learn about key methods and relate theories as well as applications based on these methods.
• Acquire hands-on experience with key components of a data warehouse system using an advanced software package from leading industrial partners.
• Study 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 organized into a “data cube”.
• 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.
• Use data warehousing techniques to create business intelligence for solving real world analysis problems.
• Study best practices and case studies for data warehousing processing applications, enterprise platforms and the linkage to different families of BI applications.
• Gain highly desired and marketable skills for meeting real work force needs that will lead to excellent career opportunity.

Neat things students will do in the course

• The participants understand value of a data warehouse and what is involved in developing a data warehouse for BI process.
• The participants will explore applications of data warehousing techniques on business intelligence.
• The participants have an opportunity for hands-on experience with an advanced software package from leading industrial partner.
• Using case studies, assigned reading, labs, project and class discussion, the participants will learn how to use data warehouse to gain business advantage in various application domains effectively.

Comments from faculty

I am very, very excited about teaching this course since it will be a great learning journey providing a nice balance between theory and practice. It is quite unique comparing traditional data warehousing course whose main focus is on theoretical aspect. Through participating in this study, students can master good knowledge about data warehousing techniques and have an excellent experience to develop business intelligence solution for 'real' problems. Furthermore, marketable skill gained through this study allows the participants to easily meet real work force needs. At the same time, I believe that students will enjoy the course content - labs, project, class discussion..... which will benefit their career development in the future.

Course Title: IS418 - Intelligent Agent Design and Application
Course Design Document
F aculty: CHENG Shih-Fen

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

An intelligent agent is an entity that can perceive and reason about the environment and perform appropriate actions in order to achieve its goal. This paradigm covers almost all of human activities, and we are beginning to see the emergence of intelligent agents in many important domains. Some notable applications of intelligent agent technology includes financial trading (programmed trading programs that are part of everyday operations), logistics planning (used in the 1st Persian Gulf crisis), planning and scheduling (the autonomous planning of NASA's space exploration), game playing (the defeat of world champion by IBM's Deep Blue), autonomous control of vehicles (a computer-controlled van that crossed the United States), and many others.

All the above mentioned systems exist today, and we will explore the science, technology, and mathematics behind all these technological wonders. Upon the completion of the course, students will have necessary background in appreciating and applying the intelligent agent technologies.

The highlight of this course will be the competition of student-created software agents. Students will apply techniques learned in class to create fully autonomous agents that can manage a very complex supply chain operation.

Intelligent Agent Design & Application (IADA) will be one of the designated IS technology depth electives for the new Service Systems & Solutions Specialisation that will be launched in 2008 under the SIS 2nd major (Advanced Business Solutions).

Neat things students will do in the course

• Understand the basic framework of an intelligent agent and also the background knowledge necessary in creating an intelligent agent.
• Explore the state-of-the-art technologies used by real intelligent agents.
• Incrementally create an intelligent agent that is capable of managing a complex supply chain.
• Compete head-to-head with your fellow classmates in a supply chain management competition at the end of the class to show off the "intelligence" you have embedded in your software agent.

Course Title: IS419 - Retail Banking Processes and Solutions
Course Design Document
Faculty: NG Tock Soon

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

The financial services industry was among the early adopters of IT, achieving cost efficiencies and increased revenues through new opportunities enabled by IT.

This course introduces the banking environment and architecture. It outlines the various solutions to support banking products and processes spanning the front to back office. These include core banking and payment systems as well as delivery channels such as ATM, mobile devices and internet.

Topics such as banking security, customer analytics, emerging technologies and industry trends will also be covered. The course provides an overview of how technology supports the banking business and prepares students for an IT career in banks.

Neat things students will do in the course

Course lectures, assignments and projects will be based on real-world banking industry drivers and needs.

Through these, students will have an appreciation of the various IT projects in a retail bank such as ATMs and mobile banking systems; and understand the transaction flows, solution design and implementation.

IS Management Depth Electives

Course Title: IS404 - Enterprise Information Systems
Course Design Document
(Please note that the course design document is still being updated and will be finalised by August)
Faculty: Narayan RAMASUBBU

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

Imagine if you are tasked with one or more of these -- what would you do?

1. Make the human resource processes that serves 110,000 employees of a multinational firm to go     completely paperless -- like the ABB folks attempted.
2. Making a 42 billion Euro bank Basel II compliant -- like Johan Woest of ABSA Bank wants to.
3. Revamp the customer support processes to improve response rate by 100% and save USD 1 million a     year -- like what Adobe North America did.
4. Embrace open source to save USD 20.8 million in IT operations -- like Lee Kang-Ho of Samsung Life     Insurance was asked to do.

• Embark on a journey of instructor guided self-learning
• Practice being a consultant through simulated business consulting projects -- based on real world cases
• Practice being an enterprise architect by solving assignments drawn from real world enterprise system issues
• Investigate return on investments of IT investments and charge back mechanisms for IT services

Comments from faculty

Enterprise Information Systems course provides a good context for understanding the interrelations between organization design, firm strategy and IT. I am particularly thrilled by the ability of the enterprise information systems context to provide the necessary materials  - readings, assignments and projects -- to experience the endless opportunities that technological advancements create and influence the way firms operate.

I particularly like the design of this course because it provides students with the opportunity to take different preferred paths -- through academic style research of EIS topics, or business consulting projects, or even technology solutions building. Students choose the path they want to experience.

Course Title: IS425 - Advanced Seminar on IS Management
Course Outline
Faculty: WONG Yuet Nan (SIS Adjunct Faculty)

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

• Deepen and synthesize what you have learned in the past 3 years.
• A more holistic approach towards solving business IT problems and how to become effective change agents.
• Get to meet and learn from IT leaders.
• Career counseling and help students to be better prepared for a successful Business IT career.

Neat things that students will do in this course

• In depth case analysis and potentially meeting the key player in the case.
• Learn from IT and business (with IT background) leaders how to be successful.
• Career counseling.

Comments from faculty

I am thrilled with the opportunity to interact with the upper year SIS students. Through the use of case studies and assignments, I intend to help them synthesize what they have learned in the past 3 years in solving business IT problems more holistically. We will also work on how to become effective 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 and beyond. I will also set aside time for individual IT career counseling during the course.