Education and Research in Strategic ICT Planning

 

Course: Strategic ICT Planning in the Digital Age  

Description: This course introduces the basic principles of strategic thinking and shows how these principles can be used to strategically plan, integrate, secure and administer the complex information systems that support and drive the current and future digital enterprises. The first part of the course introduces systems engineering principles and reviews the emerging features of current and future enterprises (e.g., globalization, service orientation, reliance on web and mobile services, globalization, and agility). The focus is on establishing a strategic view of modern enterprises in the public and private sector.   The second part explicates the role of ICT to enable and drive such enterprises and explains the building blocks of the modern ICT systems that span business processes, enterprise applications, databases, computing and platforms, and wired/wireless network services.  The final segment explores how the needed IT systems can be planned, engineered/re-engineered, integrated, secured and managed by using the best practices and common standards in governance, enterprise architectures and systems engineering. Extensive case studies and examples will be used and hands-on experiments with available computer aided planning tools will be emphasized throughout the course. 

 

Note: This is a graduate level course that is currently being converted to an online format .

 

 

Course: Architectures and Integration of Modern Enterprises

 

Course Description: Modern digital enterprises are characterized by increased automation, mobile services, extended B2B operations with global business partners, and on-demand business services. The main issue in such enterprises is to architect and integrate a very wide range of services quickly and effectively.  This course presents a ‘systems’ perspective based on service oriented architecture (SOA) that combines processes, people and technologies  and  highlights the role of information and communication technologies, enterprise models, and emerging SOA standards in developing flexible and integrated business architectures.  Within the conceptual framework, the topics continually evolve as new technologies, techniques, methodologies and standards emerge. The course is roughly divided into four phases. The first phase concentrates on business processes, enterprise models, and enterprise applications.  The second  phase introduces and reviews the basic techniques that are needed to support enterprise architectures and integration. The third and fourth phases concentrate on developing and evaluating integrated architectures by using the latest thinking in service oriented architectures (SOA), architecture frameworks, integration patterns, and evaluation techniques. A wide range of case studies (successes and failures) will be discussed and hands on integration projects will be assigned for experimentation with available tools. 

Note: This is a graduate level course that is currently being converted to an online format .

 

 

Published Paper on Computer Aided Planner

 

Umar, A. and Ivanovski, A., ”Computer Aided Strategic Planning for eGovernment Agility: A Global Instrument for Developing Countries”, Invited Paper, AAAI (Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence) Symposium on “AI & Business Agility”, Stanford University, March 2011. Click Here.  



Current Areas of Research 

 

§         Evaluation of ICTs for Accelerating MDGs: Myths versus Reality  

§         Planning and Integration of Health Information Networks in Developing Countries

§         Planning and Integration of Mobile Health Clinics in Developing Countries

§         Establishing Supply Chains for Food Distribution  

§         Developing ICT Communities in Developing Countries

§         Developing Flexible Disaster Recovery Systems

Note: These research projects are currently being pursued by graduate students at the University of Pennsylvania and Harrisburg University of Science and Technology

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