Master's in Information Technology Management
On-Campus Course Schedule for Fall 2024

Agile Frameworks for Lean Ent

Agile organizations quickly sense and adapt to external and internal changes to deliver relevant results in a productive and cost-effective manner. This course explores merging life cycle approaches, which lead to greater organizational agility, and provides an in-depth examination and evaluation of Lean-Agile principles and values and the drivers behind becoming a more agile organization. Students learn how organizations can achieve agility at scale by funding ecosystems of teams that deliver large initiatives, allowing decentralized financial decision making within the portfolio, and continuously prioritizing their backlog of activities within each agile project. Learning objectives for this course include the ability to achieve true end-to-end business agility by utilizing industry standard agile frameworks (such as Scrum, Kanban, and SAFe); establishing the strategic themes that guide an organization's strategy and investments; determining and funding the relevant value streams; defining and prioritizing cross-cutting portfolio backlog epics; and monitoring the performance of the portfolios using applicable Lean portfolio, program, and team metrics. Students learn how to link an organizational strategy into relatively small investment increments called epics, study the breakup of epics into features that can be delivered by program teams, and explore the decomposition of features into user stories delivered by single teams in individual sprints. This course also explores organizational factors that impact the use of agile approaches, such as culture, readiness, business practices, and the role of the PMO.

Capstone

The Capstone Course is the culmination of the student's academic and professional experience in the Technology Management program. Over the course of the semester, students will be asked to apply the knowledge gained during the program to a project. With a focus on technology for social good, students will incorporate the skills necessary for analyzing key issues, thinking creatively, and making sound decisions in order to develop and execute plans. Projects will address global and local challenges. During the semester in which students are enrolled in the Capstone Course, it is strongly recommended that they only take one additional course along with it. Students must earn a grade of B or better in the Capstone Course in order to graduate.

Note: This is a core requirement of the degree. Students must earn a grade of "B" or better.

Cloud Computing & Virtual Data

The Cloud Computing and Virtual Data Centers course explores the emergence of Cloud Computing and Virtual Data Centers in Information Technology. The course provides a complete introduction to cloud computing, virtualization, legacy hardware and software considerations and approaches to transitioning Information Technology from legacy systems to a shared managed service model, Various Cloud Computing models will be covered including Private, Public, Hybrid and Community Clouds. Management of Cloud Computing Providers using automated tools and Service Level Agreements will be discussed, along with security and privacy considerations. Students will learn how to effectively plan, implement and manage Cloud Computing in virtual data centers and complete introductory coursework in VMware Virtualization software.

Communication for IT Managers

The Communication for Technology Managers course is designed to expose students to best practices in internal communication to foster organization-wide understanding and buy-in; ensure that employees understand how a technology decision impacts their work; and act upon internal needs as the technology project is implemented. Messaging exercises will focus on effectively communicating to leadership, employees and stakeholders during a technology change/design, implementation rollout, or crisis. Students will understand the technology manager’s key role in coordinating communications.

Creativity and Generative AI

This year's winner, Rie Kudan, of Japan's Akutagawa Prize, the nation's most prestigious literary honor, drew headlines worldwide when she admitted that she used ChatGPT extensively during her writing process: to generate ideas for character and plot development, and occasionally to write the actual sentences that comprised the critically acclaimed novel. Creatives worldwide are currently grappling with the emergence of generative AI tools — some decrying the use of these models as cheating, and others, like Kudan, arguing that they are a means to unlock their artistic potential. In this course, we face these issues head-on, building an understanding of what is possible with generative AI, and how people can best leverage them in artistic domains. This course provides an overview of generative AI, defining its role and capabilities in creating novel content. The course focuses on the practical applications of generative AI in various creative domains. Students will explore how AI is used to generate visual art, create music, design products, and even write creative literature. The course will showcase a range of case studies and examples where generative AI has been successfully implemented, offering insights into its transformative potential. Students will also engage with the creative process behind generative AI. This involves understanding the human-AI collaboration in creative work, and exploring how artists and designers can guide AI to enhance creativity rather than replace it. Discussions will include the ethical considerations and implications of AI-generated content, particularly regarding originality, copyright, and authorship. We will also examine issues of bias and the future of work as generative AI reshapes the global market for creative content. Students will be introduced to careers in the intersection of AI and creative fields, hearing from guest speakers on different strategies for participating in and benefiting from the generative AI transformation. They will learn the fundamentals of how these models are trained and how they produce creative outputs. Then, they will build on this knowledge to see firsthand where AI shines, where it reaches its current limitations, and how they can use AI to reach their own creative goals. Upon completion of the course, students will have AI-assisted artifacts of their own design, as well as frameworks and processes that they can apply to new technologies still to come.

Disruptive Tech & Org Change

This course explores the impact of disruptive technological innovation on organizations and their ability to adapt to change. More precisely, students learn how to detect and anticipate disruptive technologies and their potential impact on organizational culture, processes, and strategies. The course places an emphasis on understanding organizational values, processes, resources, and migration capabilities. Upon completion of the course, students will be able to identify and apply sustainable solutions to accommodate disruptive innovations and capabilities to cope with organizational and industry changes.

Enterprise Modernization

Enterprise Modernization is about enabling and managing effective IT modernization/integration in an organization. In this course, students will focus on using a systematic approach to identify, plan and communicate modernization initiatives that leverage technology to improve organizational outcomes, aligning to the mission as well as financial and business goals. You will explore new and emerging technologies that provide opportunities to drive transformation across the enterprise. Areas of study will include introducing complex change in large organizations and the role of IT as an enabler and collaborator of modernization across the organization.

Ethics in Info Tech

The management of information technology is strongly related to the management of people. This course will help students understand how people - their suppliers and their customers, their partners and their competitors, and their superiors and their direct reports - come to have moral opinions on ethical dilemmas. Exploring both rational and affective theories of human morality, it will show how to resolve moral questions, and to make moral arguments. It will examine common ethical scenarios involving technology, as well as how ethics is handled in the business world. Finally, the course will review the ethical issues around Artificial Intelligence which may transform both the technology, and the people, with whom students will work. Throughout the course, students will be introduced to moral issues that technology managers have to recognize and resolve in their careers. In addition to other requirements, students must earn a grade of "B" or higher in the Ethics course.

Global Competitive Intelligenc

This course examines Competitive Intelligence (CI) as the collection and analysis of information to anticipate competitive activity, see past market disruptions, and dispassionately interpret events in a global perspective. In addition, students will develop techniques to develop analysis, which provides insight into marketplace dynamics and challenges in a structured, disciplined, and ethical manner using published and non-published sources.

Info Management for Comp Intel

This course examines how organizations can use information to create competitive advantage. Students will learn how organizations can become data driven by having the proper elements in place, such as strategy, data governance, and leadership. They will also gain knowledge on security and privacy requirements for information and how to monetize information for competitive advantage. Finally, the course covers best practices for sharing information within organizations and among organizations, and how to convert tacit knowledge to explicit knowledge.

Introduction to IT Management

The course provides a theoretical and practical understanding of modern technology solutions used by businesses/organizations to solve complex business problems, optimize existing processes, innovate, compete, and enter new markets, business transformation. Over the duration of this course, students will work both individually and collaboratively in teams to complete group projects, assignments, design thinking activities, and in class exercises. After the completion of this course students will be able to identify and evaluate the impact of modern technology solutions on businesses, employees, and consumers.

IT & Data Governance Strategy

Corporate governance is crucial to the success of any enterprise as it provides strategic direction and oversight on the company management by the board of directors. Similarly, IT and data governance provide valuable direction and oversight to the organization’s IT and data managers regarding the use of IT to meet business objectives and for the proper and secure handling of corporate data assets. In this class we will define and develop the critical elements of effective IT and data governance frameworks and explore the relationship between strategy and governance

Lean & Agile w/Scrum & Kanban

This course provides students with a solid foundation and a good understanding of practicing Agile with Scrum and Kanban. Scrum is a framework for designing, developing, and delivering products, services, and/or solutions of the highest value incrementally. Scrum is also known as a popular agile method in the computer software industry for addressing unknown and complex requirements iteratively and incrementally.. Scrum implementations require the use of self-organized teams who are flexible individuals willing to adapt quickly to change. Students will learn about the rules of the game specific to Scrum events (the sprint, sprint planning, daily Scrum, sprint review, and sprint retrospective), Scrum artifacts (e.g. product backlog, sprint backlog, and increment), and the importance of the definition of done. Kanban is another lean framework for developing and delivering products and services by balancing demands with available capacity, and by improving the handling of system-level bottlenecks. Students will also learn essential lean principles and discover how to use a Kanban board to help them visualize workflow and prioritize work items more effectively.

Req. Analysis & Sys. Design

This course focuses on the fundamentals of requirements engineering and system architectures, and the relationship of the two areas. It details the requirements activities starting with Organizational goal expression or with a stakeholder need, to stakeholder requirement discovery, through to systems requirements derivation in both agile and traditional methods. The course includes examining the alignment of the system architecture to the enterprise goals to validate the architecture (i.e. building the right system) as well as quality aspects of the architecture (building the system right). The course highlights linkages between early architectural decisions driven by business requirements and concept of operations, and system operational and support costs. The course centers on the hands-on application of class material via a group project that students pursue in small teams.

Security Architecture & Design

This course introduces students to fundamental logical hardware, operating system, and software security components, and how to use those components to design, architect, and evaluate secure computer systems. Understanding these fundamental issues is critical to effective information security management. The course is divided into three sections. The first section covers the hardware and software required to have a secure computer system. The second section covers the 9 logical models required to keep the system secure. The third section covers evaluation models that quantify system security.