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Semester One
This course is designed to provide students with a basic understanding of database management systems (DBMS) and the skills needed to design and implement a relational database. Students will be introduced to data modeling concepts, modeling tools, the process of transforming conceptual models into relational database designs, and finally the steps needed to implement those designs. Emphasis is placed on Entity-Relationship diagramming, data normalization, database administration, and data definition, data manipulation and query development using Structured Query Language (SQL). Other topics covered include: object-oriented databases, database security and integrity, web/database integration, application development in a Client/Server environment, distributed databases, data warehousing, data mining and knowledge management via the Internet to support electronic commerce. Readings, lectures, interactive case assignments and a database design project reinforce the role of DBMS in supporting organizational systems, transaction processing and decision support applications.
Credits: 3
Semesters offered: Fall 2023
This course covers the fundamental concepts in statistics that are essential for business and data analytics. Probability Theory and Sampling Theory are the two foundations of both descriptive and predictive forms of analytics. Building from these foundations, students are introduced to the statistical concepts of data analysis. Topics covered include: descriptive statistics, probability theory, discrete and continuous probability distributions, sampling theory, estimation, hypothesis testing, distribution fitting using chi-square tests, simple and multiple linear regression, introduction to causal modeling and predictive data analytics. MS-Excel based data modeling will be used extensively throughout the exposition of the concepts.
Credits: 3
Semesters offered: Fall 2023 | Spring 2024
Total credits: 6
This course is designed to introduce students to the technical facets of the information technology and systems field. Students will learn about the contemporary technologies that underlie and support modern-day technology infrastructures. As a corollary, students will be able to weigh how strategic enterprise technical considerations have a bearing on organization competitiveness, vision and strategy. Key technologies covered will include hardware capabilities, data center hosting, virtualization techniques, cloud infrastructures (public, private, hybrid, IaaS, PaaS, Saas), networking, operating system and software capabilities. Student will also learn of key emerging technologies in the field along with the ability to analyze these technologies for maturity and opportunistic fit. Students will be led down a journey of how IT can be aligned as an organizational partner, enabling it to act as a crucible for innovation. Discussions on information security, resourcing considerations and enterprise architecture will underpin all topics.
Credits: 3
Semesters offered: Fall 2023
This is an introductory course in Digital Forensics where students will learn how to acquire, authenticate and analyze digital evidence. Technical and managerial topics will be explored, providing students with both theoretical and practical hands-on experience using forensic equipment and software. The additional topics of E-Discovery, Data Retention, Litigation, Internal Investigations, Regulatory Compliance and Incident Response will also be discussed within the context of Digital Forensics. EnCase, Access Data FTK and other open source forensic software programs are used in this course.
Credits: 3
Semesters offered: Spring 2024
This course provides an overview of the growing phenomenon of IT-enabled globally-distributed services (GDS), what has come to be commonly known as IT and business process outsourcing. The course will cover the various phases of the GDS life cycle and discuss how companies can use the GDS paradigm to innovate their various services and processes. Topics to be covered include GDS strategy planning, process distribution analysis, global collaboration and virtual teamwork, knowledge and risk management in GDS, vendor capabilities evaluation, management of contracts and service level agreements, and governance and relationship management with GDS partners. It is also planned to have some virtual collaboration and team work with students in other foreign universities to give a hands-on feel to our students about the issues and dynamics of global collaboration.
Credits: 3
Semesters offered:
This course will introduce students to the concepts and practices of project management in an IT context. The challenges and issues that are specific to IT projects will be the focus of this course. IT Project Methodology and the concept of measurable organizational value will provide a foundation for this course. Several techniques and metrics for IT project scope, time and cost estimation such as function point analysis will be introduced. The class will also enable students to understand the integrative nature of risks associated with IT projects as a part of the risk assessment and risk management component of the course. Quality systems, such as ITIL, CMM, etc, that support IT project quality will be discussed. The students will be introduced to change management issues including human resources and communication issues which arise as a result of a new IT project. Real world business cases will be used to further emphasize the above topics. The course will provide some basic body of knowledge that may help the students prepare for the PMI certification exams.
Credits: 3
Semesters offered: Spring 2024
This course provides an exposure to Information Systems used in the delivery of healthcare. Specifically this course will introduce students to IT systems that are deployed at a variety of organizations such as Hospitals, Ambulatory Care, Home Health, Tele Health and Online communities to better understand how information is gathered, analyzed and disseminated. The course will include content relating to IS Effectiveness and Success, task-technology fit, IT Communications and Compliance, IT Risk modeling and assessment, business modeling of innovations in healthcare services and delivery, and business performance issues relating to the deployment of IT. The course focuses on how current and emerging technologies can be better utilized to improve access, quality of care and business efficiency.
Credits: 3
Semesters offered:
This course provides managerial and strategic perspectives on improving the planning, deployment and delivery of healthcare services enabled by IT. Effective healthcare management requires innovative approaches that integrate people, processes and technologies in healthcare organizations and services. Whether in IT, finance, operations, marketing, or any other domain, aspiring leaders in the healthcare field need to understand the US healthcare system, and the opportunities and challenges arising from the healthcare information revolution, especially as it relates to patient safety, quality of healthcare, and profitability. This course will elucidate broader perspectives on creating and leading a variety of healthcare initiatives in our contemporary society.
Credits: 3
Semesters offered:
Senior management in any enterprise today agrees that risks to information technology related processes and systems, that support and enable business, have never been higher. The need for understanding and effectively managing the risks to meet business goals is growing. IT Risk Management is a practice that examines information technology processes and systems and associated controls for effective risk mitigation. With increasing reliance on interconnected information systems and evolution of unique threats, IT Risk Management has become a critical role in any organization. The course will provide insights into knowledge and tasks needed to 1} perform risk identification, assessment, evaluation, response and monitoring and 2) design, implement, monitor, and maintain IS controls.
Credits: 3
Semesters offered: Spring 2024
This course is designed to provide advanced conceptual and practical knowledge of concepts, tools, and techniques for effective IT risk management process through designing, evaluating, and implementing risk responses and developing processes, frameworks and tools for monitoring and assessing risks and controls (KRIs) while maintaining an effective and relevant IT risk profile for an organization.
Credits: 1.5
Semesters offered:
The course is designed to introduce basic tenets of IT auditing and structured way of conducting IT audits. The course will teach students concepts and approaches to audit, control, monitor, and assess an organization's information technology and business systems. The course will impart skills and knowledge to assess vulnerabilities, report on compliance and institute controls within an enterprise.
Credits: 3
Semesters offered: Fall 2023
Instructional and practical experience in skills and techniques of research through association with a faculty member actively engaged in research. Credit up to 6 hours, depending upon type and amount of research activities. May be taken for credit more than once.
Credits: variable
Semesters offered: Fall 2023 | Spring 2024
Students will learn contemporary terms, philosophies, technologies, controls and strategies that go into buttressing an organization¿s informational, data-driven, well-being. Students will gain experience assess the growing number of cyber risks to our organizational assets, and how to treat these risks by prioritizing and arraying resources. Common information security controls (both technical and programmatic) will be covered, guided by an analysis of the leading information and cyber security control frameworks such as ISO 27000, NIST CSF, and the CIS top 18 security controls. Students will learn about strategic level security program implementation including, policy management, governance, return on investment and compliance whilst continually improving risk exposure. Cybersecurity is one part of the cross-functional milieu that this class will examine. Multidisciplinary topics that intersect with security program implementation will include Technical, Managerial, Executive, Finance, Human Resources, Business Continuity, Strategic IT Management, Legal, Psychological, Audit, Compliance and Control partnerships. Various IT hosting strategies including on-premises and cloud classifications will be examined for their security merits, challenges and risk exposures. Emerging impactful topics such as new/changing regulation and growth of generative artificial intelligence will be examined in terms of their implications on the information security industry and the deployment of future-proof protections.
Credits: 3
Semesters offered: Fall 2023
Pre-Requisite: MGS 602 and MGS 605 or MIS student
The ability for one device to communicate with another is a defining hallmark of the information age. As trends in the information sciences evolve to include elements of cloud computing, containerization and hybrid approaches, so too must our definition of what a network is. This class will take an in-depth look at contemporary network concepts ranging from TCP / OSI models, topological considerations for physical networks, virtualization, software defined networking principals (infrastructure as code), and cloud service deployments (infrastructure as a service). Physical network elements, hardware and design architectures will be surveyed. Private, public, virtual and hybrid network considerations will be discussed. Security touchpoints and common controls within networked ecosystems will be analyzed. Students will walk away from this class with conversancy in the burgeoning network trends found in today¿s and future deployment paradigms.
Credits: 3
Semesters offered:
Pre-Requisite: MGS 602 Or MGS 607 Or MGS 650.
The aim of the course is to provide students with an overview of measures, models and methods of analysis that can be used to study social networks to further business interests within organizations using data from internal and external IT data sources. The focus of the course will be on modeling methods and IT tools to analyze large volumes of data for predictive and descriptive analysis. Students will also learn the use of standard statistical software packages such as SAS and special network analysis software.
Credits: 3
Semesters offered: Spring 2024
Large scale computing environments aggregate resources from many autonomous computers to satisfy the information processing needs of modern enterprises. This course introduces techniques for creating functional, usable, high-performance distributed systems. Objectives are twofold: (1) gain a solid understanding of the technical issues, concepts and systems in the rapidly advancing technologies in distributed computing, and (2) acquire substantial knowledge on how to work with big data in distributed environments. The course is organized into two parts: study of DCS technologies, and study of large scale systems. We will discuss communication and networking services, application support services, large scale distributed system design, data management and interoperability of systems including consistency and data replication. Students will learn to use a framework for data intensive distributed applications (Apache Hadoop) and an associated parallel programming model, MapReduce.
Credits: 3
Semesters offered: Fall 2023
In large organizations, data invariably resides in multiple-platforms and in multiple formats. Therefore, it becomes essential to pre-process the data at appropriate levels of normalization for meaningful analysis. Extraction, transformation and loading data into structures such as data marts and data warehouses are essential steps to predictive data modeling and mining. These analytical tasks begin with a basic understanding of where the data is stored and how it can be assembled for business purposes. This course provides students with a hands-on introduction to data warehouse design, data cleansing, exploration, and visualization within a cloud-centric ecosystem.
Credits: 3
Semesters offered: Fall 2023
Pre-Requisite or Co-Requisite: MGS 613 (Database M
The main objective of this course is to introduce students to the theory and practice of doing business via the Internet. Topics include: elements of the infrastructure of electronic commerce; technologies and applications in electronic commerce; using electronic commerce for the creation of competitive advantages; planning technology-based strategies to achieve business goals. The course will rely heavily on research and peer learning with the instructor serving as catalyst, facilitator, and evaluator in a collaborative environment.
Credits: 3
Semesters offered: Spring 2024
Investment in government and business infrastructure has lead to the accumulation of vast amounts of data in recent years. This course will discuss how techniques from convex optimization can be used to extract useful knowledge and business value from the data collected. It introduces students to the theory of convex optimization of relevance to managerial decision making and machine learning. Topics include convex sets and functions, formulation of convex optimization problems, and convex optimization algorithms including gradient, sub-gradient, proximal and interior point methods. Numerous examples will be chosen from machine learning problems including classification, regression and clustering. Students will have hands on experience with the R programming language and optimization packages including MOSEK. We will examine real world examples and case studies from text mining, medical applications, fraud detection, finance, and social networks.
Credits: 3
Semesters offered: Spring 2024
MGS 642, MGS 650 and MGS 651 are components of the Information Assurance certificate. If you take three of these elective courses, you will be eligible for the certificate in addition to the MS degree. See additional information on the Information Assurance certificate.