The course presents how to develop innovative IT projects and the elements for performing feasibility studies for information systems projects, focusing on their organizational and technological components, project management, and discussing the main choices to be performed in feasibility studies.

Business process improvement through technological projects is examined, focusing both on the development of completely new systems to be offered to the market and on innovative projects within an existing organization. Case studies will be presented in the course.

Part 1 – The technological components (15 hrs)

• Architectural components in an Information System: from front end to back end components.
• Enterprise systems integration; e-business networks; Service Level Agreements.
• IS security, privacy issues, and the risks connected to systems vulnerability and abuse.
• Data quality and the cost of low quality.
• Foundations of Business Intelligence: databases and information management and the importance of knowledge generated, managed, and exploited by present-day organizations.
• IT infrastructure and emerging technologies: service-based approaches (Iaas, PaaS, SaaS), cloud computing, mobile information systems.

Part 2 – Project organization and management (20 hrs) 

• Organizations, management and the networked enterprise, a preliminary analysis of Innovation Systems in present-day global systems and their role inside world-class organizations and small enterprises.
• Global eBusiness collaboration, the link between business processes and Information Systems and the central role of systems enabling collaboration in modern-day environments.
• Achieving operational excellence and customer intimacy: enterprise applications and how to exploit Information Systems capabilities to acquire, manage and keep customers in the rapidly-changing environment of today’s markets, thanks to updated and effective Information Systems.
• E-commerce and the evolution towards digital markets and, most importantly, digital goods, thanks to the most recent Internet capabilities and the fast diffusion of new markets (e.g., the mobile transformation of markets).
• Managing knowledge and how to exploit enterprise-wise data in all its forms, from structured information to unstructured and volatile data.
• Managing projects, best practices for project selection, management and exploitation, acquiring perception on Information Systems business value, change management and risk management.

Part 3 – Feasibility studies (15 hrs)

• Information Systems, organizations and strategy, the role of management inside organizations and how it relates to ICTs inside the enterprise.
• Main components of feasibility studies: vision documents, feasibility analysis.
• Non-functional and functional requirements, the steps from textual representations to a high level architecture of the system and use cases.
• Cost evaluation.

Written examination.

Possibility of additional complementary project work.