Information Technology (IT)
Today's Information Technology (IT) and Management Information Systems (MIS) environments have to address the management of the entire organization's environment as a collection of interacting automated/manual information systems. These systems are so critical to the "digital" organization that KCI has a series of courses designed to provide a comprehensive understanding of the key elements needed to manage IT or MIS.
Some of these offerings can be packaged into a designed certification program for your organization.
Getting the right Business Requirements
Description:
Business requirements analysis is more than just gathering some needs input from the business. It forms the basis of understanding and improving the business from several perspectives, performance, technology utilization and effectiveness.
Understanding where to apply scarce resources for improvements that yield measurable results is a key result of requirements analysis. The goal is results that are less expensive and easier to achieve than the existing methods. The mapping of requirements today into a technical solution is one of the more difficult tasks facing business systems development. The focus in this course is on business analysis, developing the business requirements and connecting to potential solution approaches.
Business requirements analysis takes a perceived business need and transforms it to a beneficial solution for the enterprise. Often this is a combination of both manual and digitized solutions. Years ago, business systems requirements had a simple and single focus: to automate existing processes. The approach to developing a business system consisted of computer application systems analysis, design and development.
Today there are several ways to provide a solution to a set of business needs, depending on a range of new approaches, methods and techniques. Outsourcing processes, business systems development and operation of enterprise infrastructure are popular. Acquiring packaged solutions and changing how you do business is also appealing. Alternatively, building your own new business system provides benefits of a unique solution. Future system solutions may involve a mix of these approaches for the most effective results. You will learn the following:
- Develop a consistent set of requirements for a variety of solutions
- Produce a requirements checklist
- Partition the resulting set of requirements into two or more solution approaches as needed
- Prepare a basic cost/benefit analysis and impact analysis assessment
- Appraise the impact of changes in processes and systems on the business as a result of requirements development
- Appraise and align IT performance, initiatives, applications and technologies that support business needs and justify IT investment
Duration: 2 days
To learn more, get a 
IT Business Requirements course brochure.
Business Systems Analysis
Description:
If you have the business requirements how do you decide on what systems to build and deploy? This course builds on existing and working ideas of requirements analysis with new ideas and techniques. It provides a focus to several emerging areas of concern such as e-business, business intelligence and new application development approaches. Many requirements approaches focus on data and process requirements for computer applications. Others are specific to specialized disciplines such as object techniques and structured analysis. This course offers a baseline of techniques and a means of adapting them to various requirements needs.
Duration: 4 days
Requirements Driven Applications
Description:
Now that you know what systems are needed you can focus on the construction and deployment of various applications and a variety of approaches such as packages, SOA, SaaS and others. Business systems development takes a perceived business need and transforms it to a beneficial solution for the enterprise. At the core, the key to successful business system development today is properly stating the requirements for the solution. Pulling both business and system requirements together in one place and then partitioning for the different emerging needs and approaches is the way to achieve success.
Since there are several ways to provide a solution to a set of business needs, depending on a range of new approaches, methods and techniques, this can be a challenge! The mapping of requirements today into a technical solution is one of the more difficult tasks facing business systems development.
Duration: 4 days
Implementation of Business Systems
Description:
Successful business system implementation today is properly engineering the solution in a high quality manner. Systems development has gone through a remarkable transition. One thing has remained the same is that a general set of principles govern the development life cycle regardless of the approach to construction.
Once the requirements are complete, a design is generated for the new system. Along with the design is a plan for testing and implementation of the result. Applying Agile and other development methods help keep projects in budget and on schedule.
Duration: 4 days
Current IT Management Environment
Description:
IT management today is under considerable pressure to perform. That performance has many facets not the least which are to delivery services, control costs and protect the IT assets of the enterprise. So the job of IT Management has become more complicated. At the same time, there are many tools and techniques for dealing with the management issue faced by IT.
What should an IT manager know to effectively manage IT? Many of the basic rules applied across the enterprise regarding how to mange are also applied to IT. Service agreements are being put in place and business management expects to hear about alternative approaches to delivering applications.
Here’s what you can expect to learn in this dynamic, hands-on course:
- Explain the techniques of IT management and leadership to define the services for core IT functions
- Develop a security plan for using the cloud and pro-tecting critical business data
- Compare the needs of each core IT function for assigning proper resources and skills
- Create effective leadership goals for IT managers
- Design an effective change management plan for IT as a response to business changes and the impact on IT
- Differentiate the needs of mobile, on-line and web options for the business
Duration: 4 days
To learn more, get an Essential IT Management course brochure.
Enterprise Application Integration
Description:
Integration means more today to a business than just linking applications together. Data integration, systems integration, content and knowledge integration are all terms we hear today when talking about integration. Equally significant today is the newer issue of application segregation, separating the data and code from existing systems. What is needed is a key set of integration strategies, approaches and concepts that form the foundation of new technology driven business opportunity such as e-commerce, grid computing and business intelligence. A key result of integrating mission critical applications is achieving a simpler, flexible, efficient and effective enterprise, one that is less expensive and easier to restructure than the existing enterprise.
This course presents the different integration approaches, architectures, methods and tools for achieving the degree of business and application integration for competitive business execution. Integration approaches that depend on web services, portals, leveraging legacy systems and data are emerging that expose the enterprise to new opportunities not available before.
During this course, the relationship of various integration strategies is presented and an Enterprise Application Integration methodology is defined with supporting methods for EAI major steps. Exercises performed at the end of key sections plus product demonstrations provide a head start in framing an effective EAI solution or evaluating your current efforts.
Duration: 4 days
Driving towards Enterprise Business Data Management
Description:
The business view of data is differs from the IT view of data. IT focuses on the technology used to manage various forms of data such as databases, documents, signals, content and so on. The business view of data management takes into account the meaningful use of all types of data. Business data management includes how you effectively use the data, information, content and knowledge scattered throughout the organization. So, data management today encompasses a larger scope than managing a database with numbers or some application data files. Further, old data methods and thinking like old technology inhibit successful enterprise excellence.
Business data management is squeezed between two strong forces of change. The IT function and related data management are subject to pressure from new technologies as well as business volatility. These pressures demand better data and information management and planning. Changing technology such as cloud computing and increased uses of information and related delivery systems means alignment and direction becomes more critical to success of the business.
- Explain the various types of data that an organization has to manage.
- Define the life cycle for the different types of data within the organization.
- Assess the data management strategy and show where there are impacts and opportunities.
- Describe the options in organizing the various types of data in an organization.
- Prepare a metadata management plan and suggest the appropriate tools for managing the metadata.
- Describe and define the document management needs of the organization.
- Explain the knowledge management process and the types of knowledge that are significant to the business.
- Prepare a structure that represents the organization of various types of content.
- Propose a project that would identify the types of data that are meaningful to the business.
This course is intended for those who are concerned with data management and the strategic use of data by their enterprise. This includes a number of key tasks such as, aligning data strategy with the direction of the business, understanding the role of data in the business today and implementing a reliable methodology for developing the data management plan. This course also covers the related topics such as metadata management that are needed to properly complete an understanding of data management needs. The goal is to develop the correct data management direction for the business.
Duration: 4 days
To learn more, get an 
Information Technology (IT) course brochure.
Understanding and forecasting IT Technology
Description:
Is Information Technology at a point of change? There are symptoms that IT is ending a major cycle and entering a new cycle. New technologies are reaching commercial viability and may have a large impact on IT as we know it today. This leads to many questions. If we are entering another period of major change how does that impact your IT planning? What happens to the existing tools and techniques we use to deliver functionality? Where should we focus our training and skills development?
General technology evolution impacts IT technology changes. Often we are still surprised when a major shift occurs even though there are signs well ahead of time. Understanding how to anticipate the change and its possible direction is key in dealing with technology change today. Techniques do exist for identifying the change, understanding the types of technology, their impact on IT and the enterprise and the flow of technology into the IT environment.
This workshop covers the concepts, ideas and practicality of how to forecast and anticipate change and successfully incorporate it into the enterprise infrastructure. Understanding how to forecast change, assess the impact and identify a successful deployment strategy are parts of the IT planning and implementation tasks.
Duration: 2 days
Levering your Web Presence
Description:
The web using xhtml is one of the key methods used to improving business performance today. It is the basis of enterprise transformation, integration within the enterprise and delivery of content across enterprises. It is also the foundation of e-commerce and enterprise information delivery. A key result of learning xml and xhtml is how it naturally fits into business processes. Xhtml helps convert an enterprise into one that is less expensive and easier to restructure due to the availably of its content.
Duration: 4 days
Business results through IT Performance Management
Description:
Performance for information technology today is much more than measuring characteristics like uptime, availability and service level agreements. The current change in perspective, defining IT as a commodity, drives a need for a more business oriented approach to IT performance. Years ago, IT performance was focused on simple delivery of technical capability and the measurement of asset consumption like storage and machine cycles. Today, performance of IT as an integral part of the business includes web presence performance, total cost of operation, portfolio management, new technology deployment, customer service, standards management and e-commerce performance.
Further there are more standards and standard approaches such as ITIL, Cobit, CMM and others to assess the performance of IT along several dimensions not just technical capability. Adopting new technology such as portals and content management also require some implementation of performance measures that identify the value the business receives from their investment. As new technology and capability is deployed methods of measuring the performance and assessing value are needed.
IT is still expected to be accountable for its resource performance as it has in the past. Building upon the basic concepts of traditional performance management you have updated performance needs that relate directly to business performance. At the heart of performance is the return the business is expecting and receiving related to IT asset use.
Duration: 4 days
More...
Using Metadata Management to leverage Business
Description:
For many years enterprises have been organizing and accumulating data and content about its operations, customers, competitors and suppliers. Today we hear a lot about the inability to get to that data, navigate web sites, drill down in business intelligence systems or organize enterprise performance data. At the same time we hear about tools that make it simple. Metadata is a term heard frequently in the discussions about access to the data and content. Most of the time the discussion is around application integration or business intelligence systems. Regardless of the focus, this important topic is not well understood. Since it is not well understood, the impacts of not dealing with metadata issues are not clear.
This course is intended for people who want to put the ideas and concepts of metadata into effective use in their enterprise. The focus is on the discovery, organization and structure of both technical metadata and business metadata. Concepts of reconciling the technical and business view, including knowledge and the new technical areas of objects and portal navigation are covered. Further, the methods and methodologies needed to make these ideas definitive are discussed in some detail. Concepts of knowledge integration are included to provide long-range opportunity to link the different types of metadata found in an enterprise.
Duration: 4 days
Being a Flexible Strategic IT Manager
Description:
Managing IT today has never been more interesting or full of challenges. On one extreme IT is viewed as a commodity, on the other as a strategic weapon. Reality may be anywhere on the spectrum.
New technologies and electronic services impact IT performance and perceptions. Service architectures, cloud computing, electronic services, content management and many current approaches change the computing paradigm. Coupled with this is the increasing scrutiny of IT, its ability to move with business changes and the risk associated with IT performance.
Performance of an enterprise revolves around the management approach, the definition of the business and a basic understanding how IT contributes and fits into the overall picture. IT is involved whether the performance interest is operational, strategic, financial or providing data to partners and customers. Strategic IT panning is crucial to making the alignment connection with the business. Assessing that impact assures IT meets its goals.
The focus of this course is on the emerging, changing and evolving relationship of IT with the business. With many new options available to businesses today such as outsourcing, off-shoring, partnering and other IT business models, a great deal of flexibility and adaptation in making effective use of IT is needed. Topics in IT management, governance and risk are covered as well as emerging development approaches to delivering solutions to the business. In this course, you will learn the following:
- Explain the role of IT with respect to the rest of the organization.
- Describe the difference between an IT architecture and a business architecture.
- Identify the risk and exposure of IT to technology and to business change.
- Prepare an IT technology forecast covering 5 to 10 years estimated changes and explain it to management.
- Describe the implications of cloud computing and electronic services to the performance of the organization and the impact on IT.
- Determine what should go on an IT dashboard that best describes IT performance within context of the organization.
- Explain the use of social software in business and the value creation opportunity along with risk.
- Define the value proposition for customers related to improved IT performance.
Duration: 4 days
To learn more, get a Strategic IT Manager course brochure.
Why SaaS makes Sense
Description:
Software as a service along with other types of services are rapidly changing the way we do business. This course focuses on the value added by using the variety o ‘Something as a Service’ approach to IT.
Duration: 4 days
Leveraging your Web Presence
Description:
Making the website a part of increasing the value of the enterprise involves several web optimization aspect including searching, taxonomy, content and knowledge management, external facing relationships, e-flows, internal facing services, web analytics and customer centric enterprise interests and strategies. The focus in this course is on understanding how to pull together all the basic components of truly leveraging the web-oriented component of your business.