MIS (Management Information Systems) Resources

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I recently visited an MIS department at Baylor University.  Since my background is in engineering and development, I had to do a little homework to determine what functionality would be the right fit for this type of program.  Here are some tools that I found really useful and presented to the faculty there.

 

Top Recommendation:  Web Service Education including XML Education. 

High-tech companies and other businesses are centering their data-driven processes around Web Services.  Exposing students to notions, examples, and experiences of consuming and creating web services is a key to their ability to discuss and apply these concepts in an industry environment.

 

If you're new to Web Services, here are some examples to help you get started:

Beginners: It's all about you :   Learn how to use a web service in less than 1 hour by Creating a Vanity Search Page. Call the Windows Live Search service to create a vanity page that displays images, news articles, and websites about you.

Intermediate:  Noah Coad runs through how to create and consume a web service.  His blog post contains an overview, code, and a video example of how to pull web service data into Excel.  This is a fast-paced video, perfect for the Visual Studio gurus but watch twice or pause if you're an intermediate programmer. 

 

Other MIS features:

Connecting to Datasources.  Combining programming with data is an important concept for MIS and IS students.  I walked through an MSDN Example on Creating Database Connections from an ASP.NET Project.  I presented an example using ADO.NET and ASP.NET and Access 2007 Databases.  Here are the slides and the code that I used for this Project.  I also found this great resource connectionstrings.com so you don't have remember all the strings for database connections.

Presentation: Connecting to Datasources   Source Code:  OLEDB connection to accdb

Data Mining in Excel.  Cy Khormaee a colleague of of mine pointed me to this great data mining demo.  Data Mining combines the power of SQL Server underneath Excel to examine your data an identify the key influencers affecting your market.  Ever wonder whether Marital Status or US Region is influencing the purchase of your product?  The Data Mining in Excel plug-in is for you.  The Data Mining Home Page and the Data Mining Video are both great choices.