(5 credits)
Businesses often do not have the knowledge or resources to execute a project on their own. As a result, they rely on external resources, often times using offshore vendors who have the skills and tools required to complete the job. While this process allows business-lucrative opportunities, it also requires someone to manage the relationship between the organization and outside vendor. In this course, students examine the conception of information systems (IS) as collections of services aggregated in a supply chain that stretches across organizations and continents. Students investigate the concept of service-oriented architecture and the various disciplines of open interfaces, open source software, service-level agreements, and client-vendor relationships that allow complex assemblies of services to work. They analyze and discuss the business and organizational strengths and weaknesses of different approaches for a real-world, practical understanding of IS service management.