To All IS students:

As you are now registering for your AY 2007 courses, please keep the following in mind.

• For your second major option, you can do the Advanced Technology & Applications second major within SIS. In addition, there are all of the other second major options related to all of the other degree programmes at SMU. Information on second majors is given at the SIS Second Majors website. We SO STRONGLY recommend that SIS students do a second major.
  
• SIS is introducing optional specialty tracks within the Advanced Technology & Applications second major. The first specialty track to be launched as of Term 1 AY2007 is Business Analytics. Two electives listed below (Search Engine Technologies, and Data Warehousing & Business Analytics, are part of this new specialty track). Additional specialty tracks will be announced soon.
  
• You also have the flexibility to customise your Advanced Technology & Applications second major course choices, without doing one of the new optional specialty tracks.

IS404: Enterprise Information Systems
IS414: Search Engine Technologies
IS416: Mobile & Pervasive Technology & Applications
IS417: Data Warehousing & Business Analytics

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 SIS electives, the more electives we can offer.

Best regards,

Practice Professor Steven MILLER
Dean, School of Information Systems

Course Title:   IS404 - Enterprise Information Systems
Faculty: Narayan RAMASUBBU

Why this course will be interesting, useful and important to students:

Investments in Enterprise Information Systems constitute one of the largest chunk of a firm's IT budget. Further, these systems form the backbone of a firm's business processes and hold the information assets of a firm. In today's IT-enabled business environment, almost all employees of a firm will have to deal with one or the other enterprise information system in their day-to-day work. Irrespective of a student's academic major, a better understanding of such systems will help one to leverage these systems to perform well in their jobs.

The course is designed to provide an advanced introduction to enterprise information systems, primarily covering the managerial issues related to investing in, implementing, and customising enterprise systems, with a goal to develop perspectives in our students about leveraging enterprise systems for strategic intents of a firm. The course will be executed with an instructor guided self-learning philosophy and, by design, attempts to strike a balance between conceptual learning and exposure to practical training. For the conceptual learning part, the course takes a case-based analysis and discussion approach, augmented with instructor directed self-learning. Students will have the opportunity to interact extensively with the participating industry practitioners from both vendor and end-user sides. For the practical training part, industry practitioners will share their perspectives and conduct in-depth demonstration of their enterprise systems. Also, hands-on sessions are planned for students to work on selected enterprise system modules chosen from Oracle or SAP product lines.

Neat things students will do in the course:

• Analyse cases of enterprise information systems implementation and usage at real firms
• Embark on a journey of instructor guided self-learning (primarily from research and practitioner literature)
• Interact extensively with as well as learn from practitioners (vendors such as SAP, Oracle, etc; end-users such as MINDEF, SMU; consultants such as Ernst & Young)
• Investigate a real business situation involving enterprise systems for the course project (in the past students have investigated business situations at SMU, Pisma Textiles, Singapore golf club, SAP, SMEs such as Jia Ying trading, etc). Alternatively, for the course project, students can explore cutting edge research issues that culminate in publishable research reports.

Comments from faculty:

I really enjoy 'teaching' this course. Part of it is because my past work experience and current research deal with the same themes that we will explore in the course.  Also, significant involvement of practitioners in the course helps bring state-of-the-art and current trends to the class room, and to my own research. I have also enjoyed the diversity of the student perspectives (apart from the IS students, past enrollments have had students from the business, accounting and social science schools as well).

Course design document:

View the course document here.
Note: Enhancements to the course for this year will include the following:
1) More vendors, apart from SAP, and end-users such as MINDEF will participate in the course
2) While the structure of the course will remain the same, the reading list, cases, and the assignment spread will be modified, and will be announced by early August.

Course title: IS414 Search Engine Technologies
Faculty: PANG Hwee Hwa

Why this course will be interesting, useful and important 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 Design Document:

View the course document here.

Course Title: IS416 Mobile and Pervasive Technology & Applications 
Faculty: Rajesh Krishna BALAN

Why this course will be interesting, useful and important 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 and Virtual Maps.

Overall, this class will be highly useful for any student who plans to work in IT later as it will allow them 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 your 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, Virtual Labs, University of Toronto, and other places
• Learn to critique the use of mobile and pervasive technology to improve business value

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 eight years, and the prospect of sharing some of that knowledge with receptive students greatly excites me. To make this class even better, I have used some of my personal contacts to obtain cutting edge mobile & pervasive systems, for students to play with, developed by Hewlett Packard, Nokia, Virtual Maps, University of Toronto, and other places.

Course Objectives:

This course will introduce students to the technology used to build modern mobile and pervasive computing applications. It will also expose students to the business reasons why companies are eager to adopt these types of technologies. For the class project, students will build innovative mobile and pervasive systems on top of existing systems developed by Google, Nokia, Virtual Maps, Hewlett-Packard, and others.

Finally, students will learn how to write and present a research or business proposal in the space of mobile and pervasive technology.

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

Why this course will be interesting, useful and important to students:

Data warehousing has recently gained a considerable momentum as a paradigm for driving daily business analytics operations in different application domains (retail, banking, insurance, telco, and others). This course provides an introduction to fundamental issues and novel techniques of data warehouse. Issues covered include data warehouse planning, business modeling, design, and implementation. In particular, we will study the role of data warehouse in supporting business intelligence 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 undestand value of a data warehouse and what is involved in developing a data warehouse.
• 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.

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 theoritical 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. Futhermore, 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.