Management and leadership certificates

This certificate addresses the needs of practitioners engaged in, or considering initiatives for, process improvement, and covers topics relevant to business representatives involved in process analysis projects, IT staff involved in process automation efforts and executives involved in strategic process improvement initiatives. The program is also suitable for IT organizations with BPM tool offerings and provides business-level education for sales-force personnel, technical staff, and consultants.

The following courses are required for the certificate:

• MIS 690 Supply Chain Management & Strategy

• MIS 710 Business Process Innovation & Management

• MIS 712 Advanced Business Process Management

• MIS 714 Service Innovation

If desired, the above courses can be applied toward a full graduate degree from the School of Business, such as the master's in Information Systems or the MBA.

Human-Centered Design Thinking

This course deals with the theory and methods associated with design thinking, a problem-solving protocol that spurs innovation and solves complex problems. Design thinking involves a unique form of inquiry which goes well beyond product and service design. Students will develop an appreciation for design and develop skills for studying design systems. These concepts and methods have wide applicability as they can be used to design organizations of people, information structures, compensation systems as well as the entire consumer experience. Applying these approaches can often create entirely new systems that are more useful and usable. The logic of this approach can sometimes solve “wicked problems” which have defied previous solutions.

Leading Creative Collaboration

Innovative organizations are led by people who relentlessly nurture creative collaborations. These leaders stimulate imagination, teach others how to turn imagination into creativity, and build group structures and processes to enable people to turn creative ideas into innovations that drive business results. This course builds individual awareness of creativity and collaboration skills while increasing the student’s capacity for both. It teaches the science behind techniques, tools, interpersonal skills, leadership skills, organizational strategies, and environmental designs that increase group effectiveness. The overall goal is to strengthen the student’s ability to lead others to address meaningful problems and possibilities wherever they may be found.

Big Data Seminar

The field of Big Data is emerging as one of the transformative business processes of recent times. It utilizes classic techniques from Business Intelligence & Analysis, along with a new tools and processes to deal with the volume, velocity, and variety associate with big data. As they enter the workforce, a significant percentage of BIA students will be directly involved with big data either as technologists, managers, or users. This course will build on their understanding of the basic concepts of BI&A to provide them with the background to succeed in the evolving data centric world, not only from the point of view of the technologies required, but in terms of management, governance, and organization. Tools will include Hadoop, Hbase, and related software.

Service Innovation

This course leads students through the identification, analysis, definition, and deployment of service opportunities within public and private organizations. Each of these phases is analyzed in detail to encompass the principal activities, methods, tools and techniques applied in the respective phase. Students will learn how to identify appropriate supporting techniques and information technologies for the different phases of the service life cycle, assess the role of technology, and gauge the organizational impact of service-focused operations. The objective of the course is to enable students to identify, implement and evaluate innovative service offerings in their organization.

MGT 612 Leader Development

Project success depends, largely, on the human side. Success in motivating project workers, organizing and leading project teams, communication and sharing information, and conflict resolution, are just a few areas that are critical for project success. However, being primarily technical people, many project managers tend to neglect these "soft" issues, assuming they are less important or that they should be addressed by direct functional managers. The purpose of this course is to increase awareness of project managers to the critical issues of managing people and to present some of the theories and practices of leading project workers and teams.

MGT 641 Marketing Management

The study of marketing principles from the conceptual, analytical, and managerial points of view. Topics include: strategic planning, market segmentation, product life-cycle, new product development, advertising and selling, pricing, distribution, governmental, and other environmental influences as these factors relate to markets and the business structure.

MGT 657 Operations Management

This course covers the general area of management of operations, both manufacturing and non-manufacturing. The focus of the course is on productivity and total quality management. Topics include quality control and quality management, systems of inventory control, work and materials scheduling, and process management.

MGT 699 Strategic Management

An interdisciplinary course which examines the elements of, and the framework for, developing and implementing organizational strategy and policy in competitive environments. The course analyzes management problems both from a technical-economic perspective and from a behavioral perspective. Topics treated include: assessment of organizational strengths and weaknesses, threats, and opportunities; sources of competitive advantage; organizational structure and strategic planning; and leadership, organizational development, and total quality management. The case method of instruction is used extensively in this course.

The following courses are required for the certificate:

• MGT 616 Healthcare Leadership and Management

• MGT 609 Project Management Fundamentals

• MGT 612 Leader Development

• MGT 689 Organizational Behavior and Design

If desired, the above courses can be applied toward a full graduate degree from the School of Business, such as the master's in Enterprise Project Management or the MBA.

MIS 637 Data Analytics and Machine Learning

This course focuses on data mining and knowledge discovery algorithms and their applications in solving real business and operation problems. We concentrate on demonstrating how discovering the hidden knowledge in corporate databases helps managers make near-real-time decisions. Data preprocessing, K-nearest neighborhood algorithms, machine learning and decision trees, artificial neural networks, clustering, and algorithm evaluation techniques are among the concepts that will be presented.

BIA 662 Cognitive Computing

This course explores the area of cognitive computing and its implications for data analytics and its role in evidence-based decision making. Topics covered as part of this seminar include cognitive computing design principles, natural language processing, knowledge representation, advanced analytics, and IBM’s Watson DeepQA and Google’s TensorFlow deep learning architectures. Students will be challenged to explore how knowledge-based artificial intelligence and deep learning are the field of data science. 

BIA 667 Introduction to Deep Learning and Business Applications

This course introduces fundamentals of deep learning with a focus on business applications, starting with basic constructs of neural networks and progressing into widely used models, including convolutional neural networks, recurrent networks, generative models and reinforcement learning. In addition, various successful deep-learning business applications will be studied in this class. Moreover, the potential implications and risks of applying deep learning in the business world will be discussed, and relevant techniques to address such issues will be provided. 

BIA 668 Management of A.I. Technologies

This course surveys applications of artificial intelligence to business and technology in the digital era, including autonomous transportation, fraud detection, machine translation, meeting scheduling and facial recognition. In each application area, the course focuses on issues related to management of A.I. projects, including fairness, accountability, transparency, ethics and the law.

Upon completion of this certificate, students will be able to:

• Use machine learning to discover models, patterns and dependencies that enable predictions and intelligent scientific, business and operational decisions.

• Plan and execute a project that leverages the tools of cognitive computing.

• Develop, evaluate and interpret deep learning models.

• Manage the performance of AI systems and monitor their ongoing effectiveness.

• Assess AI systems along dimensions of fairness, accountability, transparency, ethics and the law.

• Develop a strategy for deployment of AI solutions within an organization.

The following courses are required for the certificate:

• MGT 609 Project Management Fundamentals

• MGT 612 Leader Development

• MGT 610 Strategic Perspectives on Project Management

• MGT 611 Project Analytics

If desired, the above courses can be applied toward a full graduate degree from the School of Business, such as the master's in Enterprise Project Management or the MBA.