[MUSIC PLAYING] Welcome to this information systems management course, or Managing Information Systems for MBAs. My name is Dr. Matt Mullarkey. I am a professor here in the College of Business with an area of focus on information systems and design science. 

Hopefully what I bring to the course and bring to all the courses that I teacher here at USF is a background that's founded in the practical, pragmatic experience of being an executive. First of all, I've been where you are today, presenting to executives, and I've been the executive on the other side of the table listening to those presentations. And so everything that we have put into this particular course and that we've completed in the design the program is really in order to enable you to do what I did for 25 years. 

This course is one that we put together specifically for the MBAs in order to take the information technology component out of a book and into case discussions. Every single week, you'll investigate a case, and every case will have a technology component as it explores a real business problem. Almost all of our cases today have been built around companies that exist and operate here in the Tampa Bay area. 

The second part of the course is a project that you will conduct with three of your classmates. I'll assign those classrooms to you randomly, and the four of you will actually build a case and write it up for publication as a part of the course that we do together. This case that you build will ideally focus on a particular business that one of you is already active [INAUDIBLE], where you define a particular business problem with a technology component. 

And I will walk you through the process over the next eight weeks so that at the end of the day, the four of you will produce a case that probably exceeds your expectations and will certainly match my expectations. And if we work together well on it and you get real participation from a real business executive in our community, we will be able to present that case for publication in one of two or three different outlets. 

As senior leaders, we really want you to form an opinion, found that opinion in fact, and then present an action plan that would resolve the issue at hand. And that's the second takeaway from this course. 

The third takeaway is a real recognition that if we build great cases, we are really exploring meaningful problems that face every business leader every day. And there's nothing special to it, right? Business is about problems, and investigating those problems is so much bigger than information or technology. But it is one of the critical factors that will make this MBA meaningful for you as you apply what you learn here in the college and in this course to your everyday activities at work.