To all BSc (IS Management) students:

The IS depth electives offered by SIS during Term 2 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: IS204 – Networking
Course Design Document
Faculty: GAO Debin

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

One may argue that understanding of the underlying infrastructure is not important as long as there are technicians to "do the dirty work". However, there is a set of basic networking knowledge, without which, one will not be able to appreciate the latest and most advanced networking technology (e.g., 3G, 4G, VOIP, sensor network), to do basic networking diagnose (e.g., "do you have a public IP address?"), or even to communicate effectively in some scenarios (e.g., "I don't need guaranteed throughput; best-effort type of services will do.").

This course prepares the students to design, deploy and manage the enterprise data communication infrastructure. It covers fundamental computer communication concepts, including switching, signaling, encoding and transmission, modern network technology, protocols (TCP, UDP, IP), the OSI model, and wireless (cellular and wireless LAN). Besides helping students to understand the key technologies conceptually, the course is structured to develop students' business skills in analyzing and managing enterprise networks.

Neat things that students will do in this course

• Understand the role of networks in a modern business enterprise.
• Understand data communication basics, including components, models and standards.
• Be able to differentiate the functionalities provided by various networking technologies and compare their strengths and weaknesses, as well as their benefits and costs.
• Be able to define and analyze the enterprise's business data communication needs.
• Be prepared to learn emerging technology trends and advanced networking project management skills.

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.

Neat things students will do in the course

• Build a web-site in a matter of minutes using SharePoint site templates.
• Integrate search, workflow, and collaboration tools into sites.
• Construct an 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 run of this new course, so I am very excited about further improving it.

Course Title: IS410 – Advanced Data Management
Course Design Document
Faculty: MOURATIDIS Kyriakos

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

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, transaction management, and data warehousing. 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 monitoring, 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 instructor.

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.

Neat things students will do in the course

• 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.
• Familiarize with commercial database tools that are widely used in the industry.

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

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

The world seems smaller with advancing IT technologies such as the Internet, changing forces of globalization 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.

Neat things students will do in the course

• Register and experience teamwork with students from CMU, CMU-Qatar or ITU Copenhagen! Write a report from a case study and develop an application using components from other student teams.
• Feel if research is your destiny by researching on a GSD topic of your choice with some guidance.
• Learn different cultures and understand the issues in GSD.
• Expand your horizon and be a global person!

Comments from faculty

Here are some quotes from SMU students. Most find the global project experience a unique part of this course.

“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 completed report when I woke up for my morning class that day!”

Some students find it difficult to work in a global project.

"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."

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

Course Title: IS415 - GIS and Business Intelligence
Course Design Document / More info on course projects
Faculty: KAM Tin Seong

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

In this globalizing and competitive business environment, the value of location as a business measure is fast becoming an important consideration for organisation. Geographical Information System (GIS) with its capability to manage, display, analyse business information spatially is emerging as a location intelligence tool. In US, Starbucks, Blockbuster, Hyundai, and other thousands of businesses use census data and GIS software to help them understand what types of people buy their products and services and how to better market to such people. McDonald's Japan uses a GIS system to overlay demographic information on maps to help identify promising new store sites.

The use of GIS in business, however, tends to confine to simple map visualization. This is mainly due to the lack of proper understanding of GIScience and geovisualisation and geospatial analysis skills among the business analysts. Thus, this course provides students with an introduction to practical applications of GIS in business operations. Emphasis will be placed on locating, acquiring and integrating BI data into a GIS, understand the principles and methodologies of the geocoding process, become familiar with geovisualisation, spatial analysis and location modeling techniques for BI, and explore the technologies and possibilities of server-based and/or web-based geographic analysis for BI.

Neat things students will do in the course

• 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.

Course Title: IS420 - War Gaming as a Business Tool
Course Design Document
Faculty: Ori SASSON

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

This course is designed to provide a deep understanding of war gaming as a tool in business. Business war gaming is aimed primary at simulating competition in the market place. Top executives play on several teams, representing their own company, its main competitors, and the market. The course focuses on hands-on experience in the design, development, and execution of computer-aided business war games. Students will learn how to design, develop, and use computer-aided business war games. The course emphasized hands-on experience both in developing business simulation and in playing business war games. Students will work in teams to develop various features of the simulation game, ranging from simulating the impact of advertising and pricing strategies to presenting business outcomes in a friendly and comprehendible manner.

Neat things students will do in the course

• Learn how to use business war games for real world problems such as strategy testing, change management, crisis response preparation, and developing insight and foresight into the market place.
• Understand how information systems can be used to simulate real world business activities.
• Play against each other in teams in a business simulation.
• Go through the various stages of war game, such as design, preparation, execution and debriefing.

Comments from faculty

This course focuses on a small yet exciting niche of designing business games. Personally, this course is exciting for me since it is the first time I am teaching an elective course with a smaller class size.

Course Title: IS421 - Enterprise Adaptive Decision Support
Course Design Document
F aculty: LAU Hoong Chuin

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

How does Coca-Cola optimize product delivery of 42 billion soft drinks per year? What happens behind the scene when you press 999 or 995? How does a telecom company manage her call centres and field engineers to respond to customer requests? How should an airline change ticket prices dynamically on the web to maximize her revenue?

All these questions share one common answer – each company needs IT innovations that enable them to meet business objectives and satisfy stringent customer demands.

In this course, we discuss these problems and learn to design intelligent systems to deal with them. We study analytics and emerging technologies that enable a firm to adapt its decision making in real-time operational settings.

Find out more about success stories on Coca-Cola and others that deploy such analytics in:
http://www.xerox.com/innovation/2007_Edelman_Book.pdf

Neat things that students will do in this course

You will be exposed to the latest analytics across multiple disciplines, ranging from Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence and Operations Research, applied to solve planning and operations problems arising in the above settings.

Students will be required to frame a sufficiently complex business problem, and then combine analytical skills and enterprise integration (SOA) skills to implement a prototype innovative system to deal with the problem.

Comments from faculty

In an increasingly dynamic and interconnected business world where change is the only constant, decisions must be made in real-time to respond to changing environments. Plans and schedules need to be generated and updated continuously to accommodate new requests and events, often under severe time constraints. Such applications are becoming increasingly common in service industry (logistics, telecommunications, healthcare, hospitality, defence, to name a few).

This course will get you thinking about these challenges, and prepare you for designing real-time adaptive decision support systems in business. We will devote half of the course equipping you with foundational analytical skills that will not only be helpful for this course, but also other courses. In the second half, we will focus on applying these methodologies to cases arising in supply chain management, disruption management, and customer service management.

Course Title: IS423 - Financial Markets Processes and Solutions
Course Design Document (currently being completed with collaboration from Barclays Capital)
Faculty: YEO Loy Khim

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

Firms operating in the financial markets are among the most intensive and innovative users of information. Over the years, voice-based trading has been replaced with electronic channels linking up market participants from across the globe. Traders are equipped with real-time price and market information, and are able to perform complex data analytics to advance their competitive edge. At securities exchanges, open-cry trading floors have been replaced by automated trade matching and straight-thru-processing (STP) has replaced error-prone paper-based settlements processing resulting in shorter settlement cycles. These are some examples of how IT is playing its part in shaping and transforming the financial markets.

This course provides an introduction to the financial markets products and services, markets and market participants. Focus will be placed on the foreign exchange and equities products and the processes and solutions that support the trading and settlement of these instruments. As an IS Technology Depth Elective, the course will include the architecture and design of the IT application systems that support these processes. It will cover how the deployment of STP has enabled efficiencies and eliminated risks by the end-to-end streamlining of operations within and across firms from trade initiation to settlement.

Neat things students will do in the course

• Understand end-to-end trade life cycle process from pre-trade, trade, post-trade to post-settlement processes for foreign exchange and equities products.
• Understand the application architecture of the IT systems that support the processes.
• Take a close look at straight-through-processing (STP) components & design.
• Listen to and engage with industry speakers from investment banks, exchanges and IT system vendors.
• Barclays Capital prize award for best term project.

Comments from faculty

Singapore is being positioned to be a world-class financial services hub. Initiatives by the government has resulted in many international investment banks, such as Barclays Capital, Credit Suisse and Merrill Lynch to establish global transaction processing hubs as well as IT development and support centres here in Singapore. As these are recent developments, there is a demand by these banks to recruit IT personnel for these areas. Understanding of the financial markets & the supporting IT systems will be relevant for those with an interest in working in the financial services sector.

Course Title: IS424 - Data Mining and Business Analytics
Course Design Document
Faculty: LIM Ee-Peng

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

Data mining consists of a wide range of data analysis techniques that can be applied to large datasets to discover patterns, trends and other forms of knowledge embedded in the data. In the commercial world, data mining is often conducted on enterprise data stored in relational databases to help managers make informed decisions so as to keep businesses competitive and attuned to changing market conditions. With the recent advances in data generation and collection, new data types such as text, Web, spatial, and temporal data have emerged creating new opportunities for mining knowledge from data for business intelligence.

This course provides an introduction to the fundamental issues and basic techniques of data mining. The topics covered include data mining process, data preprocessing, data mining techniques and data mining evaluation. In particular, the use of data mining to support business intelligence and decision making will be covered through labs, projects and case studies.

Students are expected to learn data mining and its use in business intelligence through acquiring the basic data mining concepts and techniques, using them to explore data, and deriving useful knowledge patterns from the data through hands-on programming and experimentation that involve SAS Enterprise Miner, a well known data mining software package.

Neat things that students will do in the course

• Gain an understanding of basic data mining applications and techniques.
• Learn how to preprocess data before applying data mining techniques.
• Explore the use of data mining techniques on different datasets using software packages.
• Learn how to visualize the discovered patterns.
• Learn how to evaluate the data mining performance.
• Study case studies of applications using data mining.

Comments from faculty

Data mining is a new and evolving technology that is useful to a long list of applications and the list is still growing. As a faculty teaching the course, I am very much excited to cover the core, the practice and the application aspects of data mining. If we have time, I will also be interested to cover the future trends of data mining.

I look forward to both teaching and learning the data mining topics together with students in this course.

IS Management Depth Electives

Course Title: IS406 – Supply Chain Processes and Solutions
Course Design Document
Faculty: LEONG Thin Yin

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

Recent rapid developments in information and communications technology (ICT) have led to exciting changes in supply chain management (SCM) and brought it from backroom to forefront of businesses. SCM is now recognized as a key aspect of competitive strategy. Progressive companies like Walmart and Dell transformed their existing business sectors and made tremendous breakthroughs because of innovative application of SCM concepts. They would not have been able to do so without leveraging on IT.

Neat things that students will do in this course

We examine anew the business processes internal and external to a company and show with vivid practical cases how they apply. Students are introduced to software applications and technologies used in SCM in interesting ways that do not need them to have an IT background. We explore strategic opportunities and practical challenges related to their use in global operations. The course takes a supply chain IT user's perspective to discover business requirements and operational constraints, and understanding how to lever the applicable technologies surveyed. Two special topics covered authoritatively are global ocean shipping and seaport terminal operations.

Comments from faculty

No other business sector applies IT in more extensive and intensive ways than supply chains. Many analytical results of the past are beginning to be realizable because of information technology advancements. Exciting times are ahead when theory meets practice in fast and explosive ways.

Course Title: IS408 – IT Governance and Portfolio Management
Course Design Document
Faculty: NARASIMHALU Arcot Desai

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

Companies are taking a hard look at IT investments. This will only be even more relevant after the large financial services companies have taken a huge hit due to the sub-prime losses. The course will introduce an IT governance framework and the different steps involved in IT portfolio management. The knowledge of such frameworks will help students prepare better project proposals when they enter the workforce.

The course will be co-taught by Ernst and Young. Several students who took this course previously found internship opportunities and subsequent employment offers from E&Y. Some of the students have jobs in IT risk management and IT audit.

Neat things that students will do in the course

Students will discuss interesting local case studies and do assignments that will give them the power to develop persuasive project proposals in the near term and the skills to manage IT program office in the medium to long term.

HP Software is exploring instituting a prize for the best team. They had given a 1000 Singapore dollar worth of prizes last year that was distributed to the top 3 teams. Their contribution to this year's cohort is yet to be confirmed.

Comments from faculty

I have enjoyed teaching this course in 2007 and have also received very positive feedback from my students both about the course and the industry involvement. I was also happy to see students getting internships and land their dream jobs with E&Y.

IS Technology & Management Depth Electives

Course Title: IS426 Technopreneurship
Course Design Document
Faculty: NARASIMHALU Arcot Desai

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

The course is for those students who would like to develop prototypes that will lead to a product or service. Students will be able to follow up the course with application for National Research Foundation (NRF) Proof of Concept funding. This funding can be up to 250,000 Singapore dollars. The POC funding can be followed up by another application for funds for starting up a company. This funding can go up to 500,000 Singapore dollars.

So, this course is a great opportunity for entrepreneurially-inclined students.

Neat things students will do in the course

• Learn how to identify interested innovation opportunity.
• Those with good ideas can look forward to working with experienced business mentors.
• Students can apply for project funding of anywhere between S$50,000 to S$250,000 for developing a prototype.

Comments from faculty

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

Course Title: IS470 – Guided Research in Information Systems
Course Design Document
Faculty: LAU Hoong Chuin

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

Cutting-edge academic as well as industry relevant research is an integral part of the SIS faculty and student environment. 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. More detailed information about the course on this website http://se.smu.edu.sg/is470/ .

Neat things that students will do in this course

• 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. optimization, simulation, industrial organization modeling)
• Selected projects stand a chance to be presented at the annual National Undergraduate Research Opportunities Programme Congress (NUROP).