Information Architecture Needs You!

What is Information Architecture?

Owned an iPhone/iPad? Used iCloud? Or Google Document? iCloud and Google Document are examples of cloud computing, one of the forces that are changing how companies and individuals own and use IT and making it a challenge to design and manage the overall IT architecture for businesses.

The Information Architecture (IA) track prepares students to design and implement information systems that support and enable business strategies and operations. The track addresses topics covering concepts such as usability (including accessibility, experience design, interaction design, and user interface design), information design (including information findability and content management), componentbased design (including web services, services oriented architecture, process oriented architecture, and cloud computing), and enterprise systems. Students will be exposed to common packaged solutions and coached on best practices in adapting these solutions to a wide range of business problems.

What Career Paths can I go into?

Organizations are relying on increasingly more complex information systems to compete and survive. With the emergence of new technologies such as cloud computing and Software as a Service (SaaS), organizations are in dire need of IT professionals who understand how to design, deploy, and manage an efficient IT architecture to support their information systems.

Students graduating from the IA track can seek employment from any organizations who seek to improve the efficiencies of their information systems. Students may assume job titles such as System Architect, System Analyst, Enterprise Architect, Cloud Solution Architect, Content Manager, and Data Architect.

Advising Notes

College of Management students should seek general advising from the University Advising Center until they have earned 60 credits; and the College of Management Undergraduate Program Office once they have earned 60 credits. Students seeking advising regarding track courses should see a faculty mentor for their chosen track – see the CM Undergraduate webpage for details.

Advising for degree exceptions and policy overrides should go through the advising office for the College in which the student is enrolled (CM students should go to M-5-610), as appropriate.

Students should plan to take the track courses over the course of two years (four semesters) to ensure a wide selection of required and elective courses in the concentration. Some track courses may be offered once a year and are subject to sequencing due to pre-requisites, making this time allowance necessary.

The pre-requisites for these courses are strictly enforced; students should plan their schedule early and carefully.

Take all four of these required courses:

This course explains the core applications of a typical organization to support their fundamental business functions. It explains the role of IT in attaining competitive advantage and how modern organizations configure commercially available products to satisfy their information needs. The course makes extensive use of collaborative technologies and business applications to demonstrate the work of virtual teams and how they implement their operations.

Pre-requisites 60 credits.

This course provides a broad overview of the threats to the security of information systems, the responsibilities and basic tools to ensure information security, and the levels of training and expertise needed in organizations to reach and maintain a state of acceptable security. Students will learn and understand the key issues associated with protecting information assets, determining the levels of protection and response to security incidents, and designing a consistent, reasonable information security system, with appropriate intrusion detection and reporting features. IT 428L and MSIS 428L are the same course.

This course develops an understanding of applications architecture based on building IT systems out of common parts and a service-oriented architecture. These are collections of information services, modules and functional components that can be reused in a variety of common contexts. The course will apply several tools to exemplify the use of heterogeneous reusable modules to fulfill an information service. An underlying methodology for integration will be applied.

Pre-requisites 60 credits.

Introduces recent approaches to the analysis and design of computer information systems, including the hands-on use of computer aided software engineering (CASE) tools. The changing role of the systems analyst in both operations and systems applications in today's organizations is examined. The course critically analyzes systems development methodologies, including life cycle models and prototyping; reviews user-led developments and current approaches which facilitate user-developer collaboration; discusses effective diagramming and notational techniques now available to define and document functional requirements and operational business processes; and examines current methods used to test and evaluate the accuracy, completeness, and usability of documented requirements and convert them into efficient systems design or re-engineering processes. Topics include CASE tools, module and transaction design, human-computer interfaces, and system configuration. This course includes practical experience in analyzing and designing an organizational application. It discusses the concept of quality as applied to information systems and business process redesign as well as the role of information systems in managing quality within an organization.

IT 461L and MSIS 461L are the same course.

Pre-requisites IT110 and 60 credits