Short Paper (Weeks 6 through 8 -- due Week 8) 

Here is what the syllabus states about the paper that is due is week 8:

“A short paper will be required where the student relates the course material to the Information Systems or Information Technology environment at the business where the student is presently employed or was previously employed.”

This paper is your opportunity to demonstrate that you can relate what you have learned in this course to where you have worked in the past or to work that you might do in the future.

Requirements
Relate what you have done on a past or current job or school project to this course in a 3 to 10 page paper. 
1. Describe the job or project that is the basis for your paper.
	
2. Describe the technology environment at the job or project. (Types of computers, operating systems, development tools, programming languages.)

3. What analysis and design work did you do on this project (if any)? This would include simple activities such drawing flowcharts or making notes before writing a program all the way up to doing a complete analysis and design with Use Cases and Entity Relationship Diagrams.

4. What were the results of the job or project?

5. What problems did you encounter?

6. How did you overcome those problems?

7. What did you learn in this course that is relevant to the job or project?
8. What would you have done differently as a result of what you have learned?
9 Do you think the project results would have been different or that your job would have been easier if you had taken this course before starting the job or project? (Note: Either a “yes” or “no” answer is valid as long as you explain your answer)

Potentially Useful information

The information below is to help you think about what you might want to put in the paper.  There is no requirement for you to use this information:

Examples of past information technology work:
1. Work that you did as an employee or as a consultant or as a student on one or more projects (program, design, testing, operate existing systems, maintain existing systems)
2. Work that you have done as a supervisor or manager in an Information Technology Department. (manage projects, prepare budgets and project plans)

Examples of non information technology work:
1. Work that you have done for a company, school, or other organization where you did not work in the information technology department (wait tables, work in a kitchen, work in an office). You could consider what new systems you could propose that would have improved your job situation or would have improved the organization.

What have you learned in this course?
1. Discussion topics

When to convert to a new system
Have you seen a project fail?  What could have been done to avoid the problem?
What did you learn about application software (erp)?
What did you learn about project management?
What parts of system analysis and design would you automate with CASE tools?
What have you learned about application architecture?
	Location of data and processes
	Major systems software (IE, Firefox, JSP, PHP, ASP.NET, MySQL, Oracle, SQL Server, etc.)

2. Textbook topics (See table of Contents)
	Analysis
		Determining requirements
		Data Analysis
		Process Analysis
		Object Oriented Analysis
	Decisional Analysis and Application Architecture
	Design
		Data and Process Design
		User Interface Design
		Input and Output Design
		Object Oriented Design