MGMT 701 Information Systems Business Management 

You will do research on some management information systems topic. The presentation will be made using your favorite presentation software (Microsoft Office, Libre Office etc.). Each project should have one particular focus, based upon a topic chosen from the list below: 

§ Business Intelligence. Business Intelligence is the exploration or mining of business data in search of meaningful patterns. Provide a brief overview of this technology and its relevance in business and government settings. In your presentation, make sure that you discuss the concepts of a data warehouse and data marts. 

§ Geographic Information Systems. GIS or spatial information systems are becoming an important component of business computing. However, GIS are ‘special’ in that they require special database and processing technology. Provide an introduction to GIS and its increasing relevance in business. 

§ IT Outsourcing. Provide an overview of the ‘outsourcing’ of software development phenomenon. How big a phenomenon is this? Is it growing? Why? What trends can be observed? What does it mean for the future of Western computing? 

§ DB Market. Who are the major players in the database market? At which sectors of the database market are their products targeted? Who is competing with whom? How big are these companies? Who owns them? What products do they offer? What role does database software play in their product portfolio? 

§ Disaster prevention and recovery. The laws of system entropy, natural disasters, acts of terror and computer crime are but some of the things that can destroy an organization’s information flow and storage. Explore how companies are protecting themselves against these mishaps. Are the information systems in our college properly protected against these things? If not, what advice would you have to mitigate this situation? 

§ Oracle vs. PeopleSoft. In the Spring of 2003 Oracle Corp. initiated a hostile takeover of PeopleSoft. Provide an overview of this conflict and the interests involved. Why did Oracle want PeopleSoft? What products did PeopleSoft offer and how do they relate to Oracle’s? What are enterprise computing and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and what were/are Oracle’s and PeopleSoft’s roles in this market? What strategies did Oracle Corp. use to convince PeopleSoft software users that the takeover was a ‘good thing?’ What is the current status of the conflict? 

§ W3C. Provide an overview of the World-Wide Web Consortium. Who are these people and what do they do? Who listens to them? What sort of influence do they have? What business processes do they follow? What is the relationship between W3C and so-called ‘open standards?’ 

§ Digital Asset Management. Digital Library (DL) technology provides new ways for businesses to manage their institutional memory. Provide an overview of DL technology, some of its implementations, meta data and meta data harvesting and briefly discuss some of its best-known products (e.g., Fedora, Digital Commons and DSpace). 

§ OSS Business Models. Provide an overview of the various business models that have been developed around Open Source Software. How do companies create businesses based on something that is free and open? Are these business models sustainable? Do they falsify business models based on exclusion; e.g., businesses based on patents? 

§ IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Google and Apple are all technology companies. Yet each of them ‘rode’ the .com bust rather differently. Provide an overview of these companies, their products, markets and financial performance. Compare the trajectories of their stock prices for the last 10 years or so and try to explain the different patterns. Finally, speculate on the future of these companies. 

§ RFID. For some time now, RFID has been an up and coming wireless technology. Provide an overview of RFID technology, its promises, potential and actual uses and some of the more controversial issues surrounding this technology. 

§ CRM. Customer Relations Management (CRM) is an important component of marketing. To support all aspects of CRM, various companies have developed extensive suites of so-called CRM software. Provide an overview of the functionality of these packages, their vendors (who are the main players? e.g., Siebel (now Oracle)) and their impact on the management of customer relations. 

§ Acquiring a Web presence. How do companies acquire a web presence? The easy –and uninteresting– answer would be that they buy hosting from a Web hosting company. But how does it really work? How does your company acquire (own) its domain name? Who sells them and who regulates them? And how do computers on the Web find your web site? And how do Google and other search engines get to know about your Web site? Also, important: what is all of this going to cost you? Who builds and maintains your Web pages? 

§ XBRL or eXtensible Business Reporting Language is a new standard for exchanging and reporting business financial data. It is an implementation of the by now very popular and intensively used XML or eXtensible Markup Language. Since its invention in the late 1990s, XML has revolutionized and standardized electronic data exchange. As a consequence, businesses can now easily share information with each other. This has profound consequences for all business fields including finance, accounting and most of all, marketing. 

§ Closed source and open source software. In the age of technology and automation, software is being used more and more in day-to-day tasks. No matter what type of uses the software has, there are two overarching types: closed source and open source. Compare and explain the differences, e.g., security, innovation, price, quality. (MS Windows vs Linux, MS Office vs Libre Office, Photoshop vs Gimp, Windows Media Player vs VLC, Chrome vs Chromium) 

You are expected to upload the presentation (10-20 slides) 

Evaluation: 20% by instructor (see Appendix 1) 

Appendix 1 Group Case Presentation Evaluation Form 

Needs Work – Good – Excellent 

A. ORGANIZATION 

1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5 

1. Introduction  

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2. Body  

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3. Transitions/ Connections  

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4. Conclusion with justifications 

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5. Accurate documentation of sources 

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B. CONTENT 

1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5 

1. Interesting 

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2. Originality and complexity 

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3. Clear structure and focus 

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4. Good support and details 

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5. Relevant and significant 

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TOTAL points (min 10 – max 50)