Introduction to MIT681

This is the Capstone class for graduating MSIT students. The class is designed to exercise your IT skills and abilities and summarize all of your learning from IGU MSIT program within one class.

In this class, we will challenge you to research an important topic and demonstrate your skills and abilities.

This is an Online class, so there will be lots of online video sessions in lessons. Some of these videos will be from 2018, so when they mention some date in 2018 just disregard that, ok?

Here is the premise of this class:

You are the owner of a start-up company that will perform Data Analytics and provide reports using that analyzed data to customers who will pay you very well for your analytical skills. You want to ramp-up this company by expanding very rapidly to take on huge amounts of data to analyze and attract many more customers, or at least a few high-paying customers, or perhaps the US Government is a customer. You need to decide what hardware and software to buy, whatadditional data to collect, where to store this hardware and software, what networks to use, what security to establish, etc etc. In short, you need to make every decision related to IT, finance, and personnel that must be made, and you need to persuade a VENTURECAPITALIST to agree to fund all of this.

Every week we will cover a different topic inthis class. One week it will be NETWORKS - another week it will be SECURITY, then BIG DATA and HADOOP, then FINANCE, etc etc. There won't be enoughtime each week to fully cover each topic from start-to-finish and it is assumed that the student has already covered some or all of the material in another class. So we will be summarizing things in this class, and where you need additional depth in something, you will INDEPENDENTLY RESEARCH the material as needed. [You can always call me if you get stuck]

The student will write a separate report almost every other week - each one graded as it is turned in and returned back to you will comments. These reports will eventually become chapters within your final report, which will be due in the last weeks of the class, and which will also be separately graded.

As each report is reviewed and graded it will be returned to the student for corrections, but you will not turn it back in a second time - at least not untilt he FInal report, when you reassemble all the papers into one big paper - the equivalent of a THESIS.. When the final combination report is turned in itwill contain all of the corrections from the prior reports.

Your Challenge: Decide which topic ofData Analyticsyou would like write about.

For instance, maybe you know a lotabout SPORTS and you want to write about analyzing data on athletes to make predictions about sporting events. Or maybe you are interestedin CLIMATE CHANGE and want to analyze weather data to make predictions about the ENVIRONMENT. There are thousands of possibilities - you can choose your favorite topic, however, no matter what topic you choose you must stick with the idea that you are performingData Analytics. Furthermore, you must determine WHOM IS YOUR CUSTOMER. Who might pay you for this analysis? Where will you get the DATA to be ANALYZED?

Note that you are not using data analytics to simply improve the inner workings of your firm, you are in the data analytics business - this is what you deliver to your customers, ie some analysis of data.

In your report you are NOT selling computers....you are NOT creating websites...you are in the Data Analytics business.

THINGS DUE BY SUNDAY Jan 13 EOD

1. Report #1 is due SUNDAY JAN 13.

2. Your responses (2) to the Discussion Topic

We will draw selected information from two textbooks as shown in the syllabus, one is Fundamentals of Security and the other is Data Networks, however, we will also draw in material from many other areas and you are expected to research each topic as needed. Neither of these books is mandatory.

Here are some other things to look at this first week.

1. Welcome to MIT681

2. 9-dot challenge

3. Samples of Data Analytics

4. Cloud Processing - Hosted vs Multi-tenancy

See the Syllabus for report due-dates.

question 1 :

general description of your business. On what topic will you collect data and perform analytics? Whom is your customer? Where will you get the data?

Remember, you are in some facet of the Data Analytics business. You analyze data and you sell predictions of some sort.

What ideas do you have? I will soon post a video with a bunch of ideas.

Upload an MS-word document here. Do NOT download a description of an existing firm - you are a start-up!

discussion 1:

What is the "cloud"? What is it for? Is it a good thing for everyone? If not, why not? Do you find any evidence that's it's less expensive?