iReconnoiter

With my internship ending soon, I am definitely looking forward to immerse myself into the new modules this coming school term;

Business Study Mission – United Arab Emirates

This course examines the bustling business environments in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, along with their unique social, political and cultural environments as well as their developing relationships with Singapore.

Through case studies, student projects and guest lectures, the course aims to introduce us to the environmental influences and challenges that impact businesses in these Middle East economies. We will gain insights into the business opportunities presented by the region’s emerging sectors. The course, culminating in a trip to Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and UAE (Abu Dhabi & Dubai only), will allow us to develop a better understanding of the region, and specifically, real-estate developments in these case-study economies, through direct in-situ exposure.

This course consists of a set of core lectures which will introduce us to (a) the economic, political and socio-cultural frameworks for understanding the context of business in the Gulf Region; and (b) the application of contextual knowledge to the decision-making processes of companies operating in the region.

As part of this course, we are expected generally to apply the frameworks and theories to assess the business environment of the UAE, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, and specifically, to develop country scenarios for given time horizons. As well, we will also be required to analyze and make presentations about issues and challenges that are relevant to companies operating in significant business environments of the Gulf Region, relating to international business.

Search Engine Technologies

Enormous amount of information is stored in free or unstructured text in personal, corporate and public databases. Even in enterprises that generate large quantities of numeric transactional data, unstructured text has been estimated to constitute more than 80% of the data. The textual data include emails, news articles, reports, product brochures and, of course, the ubiquitous web. Information technology is needed to facilitate the retrieval and analysis of these text collections, in order to support timely and informed business decisions.

This course will study how search engines crawl the web, and how they retrieve relevant documents from a text archive to satisfy a user query. We will also be introduced to classification and clustering techniques for automatically grouping documents by content, to improve the understandability of search results. In addition, we will examine best practices for enterprise search applications, case studies in law enforcement, sports, healthcare, etc, as well as innovations in search applications. Through the course, students will acquire proficiency in both the technical concepts and applications of search technology.

Enterprise Information Systems

Investments in Enterprise Information Systems constitute one of the largest chunks of a firm’s IT budget. Furthermore, these systems form the backbone of firms’ business processes and hold the key information assets of firms. In today’s IT-enabled business environment, almost all employees of a firm will have to deal with one or the other enterprise information system in their day-to-day work.  A good understanding of the role of enterprise information systems in the context of IT-enabled business processes is thus very important.

This course is designed to provide an advanced introduction to enterprise information systems, primarily covering the managerial issues related to investing in, implementing, and customizing enterprise systems, with a goal to develop perspectives  about leveraging enterprise systems for strategic intents of a firm.

We will also have the opportunity to interact extensively with the participating industry practitioners from both vendor and end-user sides. For the practical training part, we will try our hands on enterprise systems, including those from the Oracle enterprise product line. Also, industry practitioners will share their perspectives with us on a variety of topics related to enterprise systems and may showcase their product lines through in-depth demonstrations.

Strategy & Organisation

This course explains the nature of business and the managerial functions of operating a business organization. The business aspects cover the setting and environment in which business operates (economic, technological, legal, social, cultural), the forms of competition, marketing, product development, and corporate strategy. The managerial functions pertain to the tasks of planning, organizing and motivating, tasks which collectively relate to how decisions are made in respect of human and other resources. Other topics include managing change, leadership, cross-cultural issues, and the impact of globalization and corporate social responsibility on modern business.

Accounting for Managers

This course provides us with what accounting is and how its information is used, and are taught how to manage more effectively through the use of accounting reports.