Reference no: EM133543483

Assignment: Enterprise Systems Management

The capstone project will be a research paper that applies technological or research skills acquired from the overall MIS program. It is a comprehensive proposal for an information technology solution: an application, product or service, to be applied to a realistic business scenario and reaching a pre-defined, measurable objective. The project is group based and should involve substantial complexity and original contribution to the existing knowledge and literature.

Because the enterprise IT field is rapidly changing with emerging new trends and technologies, students are open to choose any relevant IT topics e.g. from the class readings, bring real-life industry scenarios, or discuss a topic with the instructor.

One recommendation is to identify a firm that you know something about, for example a media company, a non-profit firm, a retailer, a manufacturing firm or a bank that is seeking to upgrade its enterprise information systems, modernize its technology infrastructure, or is faced with a challenge that can be solved by IT. It could be the organization that you work for or one that you are familiar with based on your network.

The ideal project is to solve real business problems. If you do not have connections to businesses, you can at least try to justify the necessity or urgency of the problem based on such evidence as statistics, news reports, and case studies.

You can also explore how the concepts introduced during the course have altered your perception of how IT can harness businesses, particularly the adoption and usage of new technologies or the new business models to facilitate the transition of various industries (e.g. education, healthcare, travel) to the digital world.

Students will submit a final project report, which is a written version of their project. A typical project report is recommended as

I. Introduction: a short summary explaining why you chose the particular project;
II. Research question(s): what problem you are trying to resolve, improve, examine or show;
III. Hypotheses, Model, Results for data analytical projects;
IV. Source code and screen shots for technical projects;
V. Analyses of Pros and Cons (of Proposed Solutions) for case study projects;
VI. Discussions: what you learned from the project;
VII. Conclusion: summary of the project and limitations.

Midterm Progress Report

You will be working on the project throughout the course, and write project progress report during the middle of the semester. You are required to reflect the progress of the project. It is supposed to be a proposal that include the description of the project, ongoing work, and future plan for the rest of the semester. Some teams may have made significant progress and collected lots of data, while some may have just selected a project topic. Regardless, mid-term presentation and progress report is the opportunity for me and your peer classmates to provide feedback and help you move forward or improve your design of the project.

Project write-ups

Project reports should be in the form of a single Word document, and have a minimum - requirement of 15 pages with 1 inch margin on all sides, <=1.5 spaced, and 11-point font. The size and scope of these reports will vary according to the nature of the project. For a technical project, aside from the introductory summary and "lessons learned", the report might consist mainly of code snippets and screenshots; other projects involving technology development will likely be similar. For a white paper project or case study, on the other hand, the report will represent the most important part of the project.

Presentation peer evaluations

At midterm and final, each group is required to present the project (or proposal), lasting no longer than 20 minutes. The students not presenting will evaluate the other teams' performance of presentation using online forms that I will provide. These forms will be evaluated, and will be combined with my grading to determine the final project presentation scores.

Some sample topics

I outlined some suggested topics. Each item may contain multiple reports. Your team is only required to answer one question with sufficient evidence and support. Feel free to modify those questions or topics or create new ones.

I. Design a working website for a real business

II. Improve the function of existing IT systems of a business to achieve a better efficiency and greater value

III. A new IT supported sales channel other than ecommerce or m-commerce.

IV. How do users of different demographic types use Internet, mobile, or social media differently? And how businesses should act on the differences?

V. What affects the participation and outcomes of crowdsourcing contests or crowdfunding projects?

VI. How to make marketing plans for mobile apps?

VII. ERP system for nursing care patients

VIII. Physician/hospital referrals/recommendations and care quality

IX. Potential business applications of new media or new information technologies

i. Video mining
ii. Gamification
iii. Mobile payment.