Saturday, January 13, 2007

I am currently teaching two courses at the Information School of the University of Washington. The graduate course is titled, Management of Information Organizations. Here is the course description:

The management of information organizations (e.g. software organizations, crisis management centers, libraries, consulting organizations, government intelligence and national security centers, etc) represents a critical challenge. Even though most managers take a deterministic approach to management, the current operating and competitive environments can be characterized as emergent, complex, incomplete. Moreover, it is imperative for organizations to operate in an agile manner if they are to compete (or even survive). In this class, we will study the management of information organizations from the perspective of building agility throughout the organization. In order to build agile information organizations, we must account for how organizations are conceptualized, created, and managed. At the completion of the course, students should be able to:
• Describe the characteristics of agile information organizations
• Appreciate the complex nature of information flows in organizations
• Assess organizational readiness for information systems
• Conceptualize agile information systems
• Construct agile information systems
• Manage information systems
• Evaluate the contribution of information systems to business objectives

The undergraduate course is titled, Intellectual Foundations of Informatics. Here is the course description:

This course will examine the concepts of ‘information’ and ‘information systems’. We begin by discussing the concept of information. In particular, we will focus on the following issues: what information is, what the characteristics of information are, how information is different from knowledge, and how to management information. Next, we address the topic of ‘information systems’. Here we will focus on: describing information systems, designing information systems, and managing information systems. In addition, we will survey emerging issues such as the role of ethics in the management of information, knowledge management, government information policy, etc.

No comments: