Advanced Strategic Information Technology

• Senior financial executives, managers and professionals, who need to understand the impact and opportunities arising from advances in IT, the internet, social media, cloud and open standards, in order to inform the board of emerging IT risks and opportunities
• Financial executives, managers and professionals, who are responsible for budgets and projects and must know the costs, economics and potential impact of computing and how to introduce computing projects
• Senior company executives who are in charge of change management, ERP, CRM and IT projects

• Appreciate the advantages and risks of corporate and internet computing, in achieving financial, efficiency and other objectives
• Explain the costs, economics and opportunities provided by the corporate computing systems, the internet, cloud computing, open standards and social media
• Create plans to introduce efficient enterprise computing systems, cloud computing and Software as a Service (SaaS)
• Create plans for the application and management of ERP, CRM and IT projects using agile project management to achieve efficient and reliable and effective performance

IT strategy

• Advances in IT and developments in corporate computing
• IT applications, security, and architecture
• Issues in formulating IT strategy to meet organisational needs
• Current themes and trends – open standards and the new digital environment
• The IT strategy framework
• Where and how to start
• Common mistakes and SWOT

Project Management

• Large versus small projects
• Agile versus other methodologies: SSADM and Prince II
• Big project case studies and research findings
• Procurement and contract management: life cycle procurement
• IT benchmarking

Agile Project Management

• History and successes
• Agile practices
• Agile disciplines and fulfilling control and reporting needs
• Setting up the agile team

Cloud Computing

• The economic case for cloud computing
• The opportunities from cloud computing: SaaS, IaaS, PaaS etc
• Cloud issues: security, confidentiality, performance, limitations (big data and content)
• Purchasing and procurement of cloud
• Cloud as an opportunity to upgrade and to rethink data and processes
• What is SOA and should I care?

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)

• ERP and workflow – history and economics
• Functionality and vendor analysis
• ERP pitfalls
• ERP and open standards
• Common mistakes and SWOT

Advanced Business Intelligence

• Information and intelligence to run an organisation: data driven models and budgetary control; decision support systems; risk modelling and data-mining
• Further techniques to define information: Critical Success Factors, KPIs, Balanced scorecard and benchmarks
• Specialist needs: combating money laundering; fraudulent trading etc.
• Communicating with the Boardroom: BI dashboards and BI usage
• The future: using BI to deliver policies

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

• Second generation CRM and functionality
• Selecting and specifying your CRM – on-premise v cloud
• Marketing analysis and campaigns, 360° relationships and social media
• The application of CRM in public and private sector (sales v. citizen interactions)
• Common mistakes and SWOT

Using the Web and Social Media for Competitive Gain

• BI and data-mining analysis of marketing and selling data
• Pro-active use of social media Facebook, viral campaigns, community groups
• Analysis of tweets and social media
• Dealing with big data and data discovery

Management Information and Financial Systems

• Selecting and specifying your financial system, including appraisal against IFRS
• Managing a large organisation – meeting board, management and regulatory needs
• The impact of cloud and big data issues
• Data efficiency, utilisation and control, avoiding data silos
• Business Intelligence and an integrated view of the organisation