IS Technology Depth Electives

IS Depth Electives

IS Technology Depth Electives

Students need the appropriate BSc (ISM) core courses as prerequisites. Details on prerequisites are given in the respective course design document for each course.

IS Technology Depth Elective	Offered in
Retail Banking Processes and Solutions	Term 1, AY2008
Financial Markets Processes and Solutions	Term 2, AY2008
War Gaming as a Business Tool	Term 2, AY2008
Intelligent Agent Design & Application	Term 1, AY2008
Enterprise Adaptive Decision Support	Term 2, AY2008
Advanced Data Management	Term 2, AY2008
Search Engine Technologies	Term 1, AY2008
Data Warehousing & Business Analytics	Term 1, AY2008
Data Mining & Business Analytics	Term 2, AY2008
GIS and Business Intelligence (GIS=Geographic Information Systems)	Term 2, AY2008
Networking	Term 2, AY2008
Advanced Information Security & Trust	Term 1, AY2008
Global Software Project Management	Term 2, AY2008
Mobile and Pervasive Technology & Applications	Term 1, AY2008
Enterprise Business Solutions	Term 2, AY2008
Enterprise Web Solutions	Term 1 & 2, AY2008
Guided Research in Information Systems - Technology Area	Term 1, AY2008

Elective Name

Summary

Retail Banking Processes & Solutions

Course design document

• Gain an understanding of retail banking industry and the business drivers for IT systems in banks.

• Learn about the design of various banking systems such as core banking, branch platforms and delivery channels including ATM, internet and mobile banking.

• Study different types of payment systems, their design and transaction flow. These include cheque processing, debit and credit cards, electronic money and internet micropayments.

• Explore the concerns of banks and how technology is used to address the various issues such as banking security and regulatory compliance.

• Understand the use of customer analytics in banking business, global trends in the industry and technology innovation.

War Gaming as a Business Tool

Course design document

• Learn how to use business wargames 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.

• Experience the various stages of wargame, such as design, preparation, execution, and debriefing.

Intelligent Agent Design & Application

Read more info about this course

Course design document

• Introduces the foundations required for designing and analysing intelligent software agents.

• Start from the most naive agent design that assumes stationary and deterministic environment, students will learn how to gradually incorporate complex features including, but not limited to, uncertainties, dynamics, and multi-period decision making.

• We put emphasis on both practice and theory: every important phase (which consists of several sessions) will be concluded with a mini-project highlighting the use of learned technologies.

• Students will have their chance of competing to each other in a commodity trading scenario.

• The methods and models learned in this class can be applied to a wide range of real-world decision making problems (e.g. financial trading, supply chain management). With the experience gained in this course, students will be confident in applying intelligent agent technologies to these problems.

For more information, please refer to: http://www.mysmu.edu/faculty/sfcheng/classes/is418.html

Find out more about how AI is used to create intelligent software trading agents in this Article from AI magazine.

Enterprise Adaptive Decision Support

Course design document

• Introduces a variety of problems relating to adaptive decision making/support in an operational (often real-time) context, particularly in a customer-oriented service enterprise

• Exposes students to both foundational building blocks as well as emerging technologies for modeling and solving adaptive decision support problems

• Students will be required to frame a sufficiently complex problem, then combine analytical skills and enterprise integration skills to implement a prototype for the problem

Find out more about the adaptive enterprise in this article from OR/MS Today

Advanced Data Management

Read more info about this course

Course design document

• Covers advanced topics on practical data management issues including internet databases, transaction management, data warehousing, indexing, etc.

• Exposes students to emerging, non-conventional data management topics such as data-stream management, location-based services, preference queries, etc.

• Includes an extensive hands-on technology component where students familiarize with commercial database tools (e.g. Oracle) to solve exercises based on practical scenarios and using real datasets.

• Includes a group project requiring in-depth study and survey on some advanced database topics.

• Provides theoretical knowledge and hands-on experience necessary for deploying and using real-world database systems, and cultivates the ability to identify design tradeoffs when dealing with large collections of data.

Search Engine Technologies

Read more info about this course

Course design document

• Introduces text retrieval techniques in search engines as well as classification and clustering techniques for automatically grouping documents by content.

• Reviews case studies of these techniques in different business sectors.

• Students will acquire a working knowledge of text retrieval and mining, and also their application in enterprise information systems and business intelligence.

Data Warehousing & Business Analytics

Read more info about this course

Course design document

• 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.

Data Mining & Business Analytics

Course design document (available soon)

• Large collections of customers, sales, operations, financial and other types of business data contain a potential “goldmine' of information that can be of great value to the business, if management is able to mine the value buried within the vast data sets.

• This course will introduce students to data mining methods and applications used to identify or discover interesting relationships in large, multidimensional data sets.

• The course will emphasize how established, recent and emerging data mining methods can be applied to real-world business situations using selected examples from a variety of industries.

GIS and Business Intelligence

(GIS=Geographic Information Systems)

Read more info
about this course

Course design document

See students' project examples

• Provides students with an introduction to practical applications of GIS in business operations.

• Emphasizes on locating, acquiring and integrating business data into GIS; understanding the principles and methodologies of the geo-coding process; familiarizing with geo-visualisation, spatial analysis, spatial data mining and location modeling techniques; and exploring the technologies and possibilities of server-based and/or web-based GIS analysis for business intelligence.

• For applications in retail trade area analysis, store site selection, sales territory planning, geo-marketing and market segmentation, logistics and fleet management, and location-based service.

Check out the presentation on Infusing GeoIntelligence and GeoAnalytics skills to Business IT students

Networking

Read more info about this course

Course design document

• Prepares the students to design, deploy and manage the enterprise data communication infrastructure.

• 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).

• Helps students understand the key technologies conceptually.

• Develops students' business skills in analyzing and managing enterprise networks.

• For application in modern business enterprises.

Advanced Information Security & Trust

Read more info about this course

Course design document

• Built on the foundation of the Information Security and Trust course (IS302).

• Draws on hard-won experience to explain the latest developments in security protocols, network security, web security, application security and industrial standards.

• Integrates classroom instruction and discussions, and technical principles in real world applications such as secure e-banking, secure corporate networking, secure messaging in healthcare environment and multimedia system security.

• Uses case studies to demonstrate that security and trust are not only for protection of information assets, but also means of improving business operation or even starting a new business.

• For application in e-banking, corporate networking, healthcare and multimedia distribution.

Global Software Project Management

Read more info about this course

Course design document

• The course involves three parts – case study addressing practical issues, research on current software engineering issues, and team projects.

• The course case studies will cover best practices, lessons learnt, skills sets, collaboration tools, etc.

• Students will learn and practice project management working in a global project with team members from CMU.

• Students' experience gained from the global project would help them adapt and work more efficiently in teams with global members.

• Student will learn distributed project management to manage requirements using computer mediated communication (CMC) tools.

• Research on current software engineering issues includes experimenting with technology areas (e.g. SOA, BPEL, Web2.0, usability, object vs relational DBMS, open source development, etc). Where possible, students are expected to deploy, implement or use these technologies.

Mobile and Pervasive Technology & Applications

Read more info about this course

Course design document

• Provides a holistic view of mobile and pervasive technology and applications.

• Covers technologies such as RFID, NFC, cell phones, context-aware systems etc., that are at the core of the mobile and pervasive technology boom.

• Also covers the business reasons for adoption of mobile and pervasive technology e.g. how many companies have realized that investing in these technologies can make a significant difference.

• Meshes the technology and the business reasoning together to describe some of the new and business-changing uses of mobile and pervasive applications.

• Provide hands-on sessions where students will get to play with mobile and pervasive technology and use that to build new cool applications.

• Understanding the technology and how to use it offers a distinctive advantage when interviewing at companies that already have or plan to support a mobile or pervasive platform.

Enterprise Business Solutions

Course design document (available soon)

• This course will expose students to advanced and emerging technologies and systems for enterprise business solutions and process management.

• Students will gain experience with the new and next generation of tools for automating and integrating business processes, and for creating and managing enterprise solutions.

• This course will further develop the knowledge and skills students acquired through previous coursework in Process Modelling and Solution Blueprinting, Enterprise Integration and Architectural Analysis.

Enterprise Web Solutions

Course design document

• Provides a deep understanding of Web application architectures and solutions.

• Focuses on the implementation of an enterprise portal as a way to model the complete end-to-end Enterprise solution.

• Provides students with the opportunity to gain hands-on experience in developing content-rich Web applications using Portal servers.

• Experience in solutioning through assembly from building blocks rather than development from scratch.

Guided Research in Information Systems- Technology Area