Course Schedule: Spring 2002

Three hours of lecture per week. Project planning and scheduling, process design, project management and coordination. Analysis of information needs, specification of system requirements, analysis of alternatives, design of alternatives. Quantitative methods and tools for analysis and decision making. Document management. Design, implementation, and evaluation of a project.

This is the fourth required course for all Masters students in the School of Information Management and Systems, and it is open for enrollment only to students in the School.

The course provides a general introduction to information and knowledge management in organizations, including:

• An introduction to tools and methods for the analysis and design of information systems.
• The management of the process of information system analysis and design, that is, project management.
• Analyzing the social and organizational contexts of information technologies, in everyday work, in solving problems, and in managing organizational change.

One primary objective of the course is for the student to conduct an analysis of an information system and, if appropriate, design an alternate system. This system may be a manual procedure in need of improvement, a manual system that needs automation, automated procedures that need improvement, or an analytic study of an existing system. This analysis is due at the last lecture of the course and will be accompanied by a class presentation of its results. Projects are to be done on an individual basis.

The course provides the student with the tools to conduct the study. Among the topics covered in the lectures and readings are the process of identifying and selecting projects, project initiation, systems requirements determination, system data collection, interviewing and questionnaire development, workflow analysis and design, data flow diagramming, statistical and cost analysis, forms and screen design, and the implementation and evaluation of systems. It is up to the student to find a project for the course. The instructors will provide guidance. The break between semesters is a good time to begin looking for organizations and/or systems that need analysis and/or improvement.

Knowledge management topics include observing and analyzing organizational dynamics in working groups, in presentations and meetings, personnel actions and budget development, managing change and the role of institutional cultures in implementing technical change to increase productivity.

Part of the course is devoted to the use of Microsoft Project, a project management system. The student will use Project to develop a schedule of the activities for the project and will supply updated schedules to the instructors during the semester.

In addition to the analysis/design project, there will be additional assignments in specific management areas and to develop skills on the topics covered in the lectures. Among these assignments are the use of statistical analysis tools, spreadsheet programs, and data-flow modeling tools.

This course addresses concepts and methods of user experience research. The emphasis will be on methods of collecting and interpreting many kinds of data about real-world user activities and practices and translating them into design decisions. The course includes hands-on practice with a number of major user experience research methods, including heuristic evaluation; observation; interviews, surveys and focus groups. The emphasis will be on naturalistic/ethnographic (qualitative) methods, but we will also address major quantitative methods. Finally, we will discuss methods of bringing user experience research into the design process.

This course is appropriate for both 1st and 2nd-year MIMS students, and for students from other departments with a strong interest in user experience research, with the instructor's permission. Students will complete at least one major group project related to needs assessment and evaluation. Second-year MIMS students may use this project to meet their capping project requirement.

Standards and practices for organization and description of bibliographic, textual, and non-textual collections. Design, selection, maintenance and evaluation of cataloging, classification, indexing and thesaurus systems for specific settings. Codes, formats, and standards for representation and transfer of data.

A continuation and expansion of the introductory core course 202. Organization of Information with emphasis on organization of and access to textual and non-textual materials in paper-based and digital collections. A project-oriented course designed to provide theoretical foundations for current practices and for exploration of new methodologies for effective retrieval of information content. Emphasis on implementation and evaluation of organization and retrieval systems. Designed for Master's students expecting to manage paper-based and digital collections of information resources. Includes application of standard cataloging rules and indexing methods.

Outline of Topics

1. Systems for organization of paper-based and digital bibliographic and textual collections of information.
   • Use and evaluation of classification systems, including those employed in the organization of bibliographic collections; organization of abstracting and indexing services.
   • Use and evaluation of standardized codes and formats for the organization and cataloging of textual and bibliographic collections.
2. Systems for organization of non-textual collections of information (objects, images, sound, numerical and digital formats).
   • Use and evaluation of systems.
   • Use and evaluation of standards.
3. Design and evaluation of collections management systems, including criteria for systems design.

Course requirements will include: readings on theoretical framework and evaluation criteria for development of collections management systems; assignments in the form of projects that require use and evaluation of a variety of organizational schemes and systems; evaluative papers that require analysis of the readings, combined with evaluation of existing systems; a final project that replaces a final examination and requires design, implementation and evaluation of an organizational system for a given setting.

Computing and information technology are dramatically changing peoples' lives, and more change is to come. The promise of ubiquitous computing is that people will be assisted by computers in many new ways, and will interact with them naturally, on the human's rather than the machine's terms. Computing research today is about new ways of connecting people to computers, people to knowledge, people to the physical world, and people to people. Computers must function in human contexts, rather than requiring people to learn and follow the machine's rules. That requires a thorough understanding of those contexts. HCC is an interdisciplinary program involving sociology, psychology, and education theory as well as computer science and engineering. Its goal is to study social contexts and human behavior, to design and evaluate computer applications in those contexts. HCC can be viewed as an evolution of HCI (Human-Computer Interaction), but represents a shift in perspective. HCC is not an area within computer science, but represents a theme that impacts all areas of CS. It coincides with the transition of computing from tools built for and by professionals to tools for everyday tasks for "every citizen". Understanding the complexity and diversity of human behavior will be an important first step in building the future "killer applications" of computing.

The course includes talks by leading researchers from on and off campus on HCC-related topics. The talks are about current research, but are colloquium-style and accessible to a broad audience. The goal is to allow graduate students from one of the participating areas to undertake research that cuts across the HCC areas, or to partner with students from other HCC fields.

Note: this course is now 243: Document Engineering and Information Architecture.

This three-unit course introduces a new discipline of 'Document Engineering' for specifying, designing, and deploying the electronic documents that serve as the interfaces to e-business applications and web-based services. It is natural to conceptualize the business relationships between companies as document exchanges, and XML, with its ability to define formal structural and semantic definitions for electronic documents, has rapidly emerged as a key enabling technology as e-business takes hold on the Internet. After introducing XML syntax, styles and transformations, and schema languages, a substantial part of the course is devoted to teaching students practical skills for designing and implementing the documents that enable e-business transactions and applications. These skills include: developing information requirements, analyzing existing documents, identifying and organizing document components, implementing XML schemas, modeling business processes, specifying business processes and service interfaces using XML schemas, and'choreographing' complex chains of document exchanges for multi-company business activities.

The course also introduces and evaluates the relevant XML standards, specifications, and software architectures for the design, development, and deployment of document-centric e-business applications, e-marketplaces, and web services. It explains the co-evolution of document-centric e-business models and their enabling architectures and computational environments (it has been said that 'XML gives Java something to do'). It interleaves technology issues with management and business concerns, such as selecting a standards strategy, assessing an organization's readiness for document engineering, and meeting the legal, policy, and interoperability challenges within and between electronic trading communities.

About the Instructor

Bob Glushko is an Engineering Fellow at Commerce One, which provides software and services for electronic marketplaces. Before becoming an Engineering Fellow in November 2000, Glushko was Director, Document Engineering and Director, Advanced Technology, responsible for Commerce One's XML architecture and technical standards efforts. He joined Commerce One in January 1999 when it acquired Veo Systems, which pioneered the use of XML for e-commerce and which he co-founded in 1997. Prior to Veo Systems, Glushko co-founded two companies specializing in SGML-based electronic publishing. He has worked at AT&T Bell Laboratories and the Software Engineering Institute of Carnegie-Mellon University. He has an undergraduate degree from Stanford, an MS (Software Engineering) from the Wang Institute, and a Ph.D. (cognitive psychology) from UC San Diego.

This course is intended to provide the core skills needed for the identification of opportunities that can lead to successful, entrepreneurial high technology ventures, regardless of the individual's "home" skill set, whether technical or managerial. We examine in depth the approaches most likely to succeed for entrepreneurial companies as a function of markets and technologies. Emphasis is placed on the special requirements for creating and executing strategy in a setting of rapid technological change and limited resources. This course is open to both MBA and Engineering students (who enroll through the College of Engineering), and is particularly suited for those who anticipate founding or operating technology companies.

The seminar explores selected advanced topics relating to 'digital libraries' with special emphasis on:

• Access to networked resources
• Use of two or more resources in conjunction
• Combined use of two or more retrieval systems (e.g. use of pre- or post-processing to enhance the capabilities)
• The redesign of library services

It is expected that these issues will require attention to a number of questions about the nature of information retrieval processes, the feasibility of not-yet-conventional techniques, techniques of making different systems work together, social impact, and the reconsideration of past practices. More generally, the seminar is intended to provide a forum for advanced students in the School. Anyone interested in these topics is welcome to join in -- and to talk about their own work. This is a continuation of the previous Lynch/Buckland seminars.