THE WALLACE E. CARROLL SCHOOL OF MANAGEMENT
MD 240: Management Information Systems
Fall 2000

Technology Analysis Project:
Your group consulting project team will perform this exercise. This exercise is intended to be a fun, unstructured exercise oriented toward brainstorming and exploration of information technologies. Because teams often need some initial time to figure out how they work together, it hopefully will also help your team get to know each other and start working well together.

In this assignment, you will need to specify a business problem that can be solved with IT. Keep this simple. Think about the kinds of activities you do with your computer at school or work - those for which you find yourself saying "I wish I knew of a way that I could save some time doing that." (Note that you must be more creative than just choosing a problem whose obvious solution is MS Office.) If your group is having trouble thinking of something, come talk with me.

Based on the business problem, you will need to surf the WWW to search out a type of Information Technology that appears to have some use for this problem. The keys here are in (i) specifying terminology that relates to your problem, and (ii) dreaming about how some technologies might be applicable to a business problem. A large part of being good with Information Systems is being able to develop a vision of how simple technologies can be useful. The problem and technologies you choose may or may not have relevance to your team consulting project.

Some useful links to find interesting sources of software and information systems are the following:

Search Engines
Google - http://www.google.com/

Shareware/Freeware Sites
Dave Central - http://www.davecentral.com/
Dr. Download - http://www.drdownload.com/
Freeware32.com - http://freeware32.efront.com/
FreewareFiles.com - http://www.freewarefiles.com/
Jumbo - http://www.jumbo.com/
Moochers - http://www.moochers.com/
Shareware.com - http://www.shareware.com/
SourceForge - http://www.sourceforge.net/
Stroud's Consummate Winsock Apps - http://cws.internet.com/
TUCOWS.com - http://www.tucows.com/
Winsite - http://www.winsite.com/

If you find any other useful links to hardware, software, or networking sites during your search, please send them to me, and I will include them here.

Often, when you find a company that has a relevant piece of software or hardware for your business problem, you can find a much larger set of companies that create similar software or hardware by using the "What's Related?" button in Netscape Navigator or the "Tools>Show Related Links" menu option in Microsoft Internet Explorer."

The deliverables of this project will be:
(1) A one-page write-up of several technologies you found for the problem of interest, and URLs for where those technologies can be found. If you can, try to find one type of program or technology for each of the people in your group (i.e., a five-person group should find five technologies). Of course, this may not be possible, and if it is not, note this in your report.
(2) A short presentation of your findings. The presentation should only be 5-10 minutes in length, and using overhead slides, will briefly describe your problem, and the software proposed to solve the problem. This presentation will take place during Sessions 6, 7 and 8.

The write-up should be stored as a text file or HTML, and emailed to me. These files will be posted below, and will provide classmates with a repository of descriptions of some interesting (and possibly obscure) technologies, that have some interesting potential uses in business.