Union Graduate College Announces New School of Management Faculty Member

Union Graduate College is pleased to announce that Dr. Peter Otto will be joining the School of Management faculty full-time in September 2008. Dr. Otto has a PhD in Information Science and Systems from the Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy, State University New York, Albany;  an MBA from the Graduate School of Business Administration Zurich, Switzerland and University at Albany , State University of New York  and a Master in Marketing Communications from SAWI Biel, Switzerland.   Dr. Otto has taught for a number of years at Dowling College, School of Business, SUNY Albany and the Graduate School of Business, Zurich, Switzerland. In addition he has several years of experience in consulting, strategic planning, management and marketing. Dr. Otto will be teaching core and advanced courses in Information Systems Management.

Dr. Peter Otto will teach the following course in 2008/2009:

MBA 545.  ACHIEVING BUSINESS VALUE FROM INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY (Core)

Information Technology is pervasive in today’s organizations. For many firms IT is the single largest capital investment, often exceeding 50% of capital expenditures. As a result, in this course we take the strategic perspective of the general manager and study how organizations can get more value from their IT investments. Thus, the course focuses on the business value that can be achieved rather than the details of the technology. The issues covered include planning an IT application portfolio, enabling business processes with IT, and implementing IT systems.  The applications covered include transaction processing systems, decision support systems, and knowledge-base systems.  Participants will work in a group environment on cases, presentations, and a project report as described below. An IT background is not required and this is not a “technical” course. This is, however, an integrative course, including issues of business strategy, finance, and the study of organizations and people for the creation of business value requires the successful integration of these issues with the potential of information systems.

MBA 640  INTEGRATING eSYSTEMS INTO GLOBAL BUSINESSES  (Advanced Course in the Management category, **Global)

The objective of this course is to introduce participants to web-enabled commerce, strategies, critical issues and applications. The issues we will cover include business planning and strategy development for E-Commerce processes, identification of critical success factors, security threats, and the implementation of EC application to facilitate global business processes. The applications we will discuss in class include front- and backend systems, transaction processing systems, and collaboration technologies such as customer relationship management, supply chain, and web-enabled decision support systems. While the course is focused on managerial issues of E-Commerce, participants need to have a good understanding for the underlying technology, which facilitates the data exchange. Participants will work in a group environment on cases, presentations, and a project report.

MBA 642.  BUSINESS ANALYSIS USING INFORMATION SYSTEMS  (Advanced Course in Marketing/Operations Category)

This course examines a set of information systems which specifically support managerial decision makers: Decision Support Systems, Group Decision Support Systems, Executive Information Systems, Data Warehouses, Expert Systems, and Neural Networks. Over the semester, we will explore and discuss the development, implementation, and application of these systems, how these systems can be applied to current business problems, as well as how organization issues impact the implementation and usage of these systems. This will involve developing conceptual knowledge for such systems as well as gaining practical experience with the structural dimension for decision support applications. The focus in this course is on how techniques for managing knowledge can be applied, enhanced, extended, and integrated in the development of computer based DSSs. Each student will work on a project to identify the value proposition for a decision support systems and how such a system or application can be deployed within an organization.