Professional Development: ICT Trends and Strategies in East Africa
Carnegie Mellon University in Rwanda (CMU-R) will be delivering Professional Development courses starting in January 2012. These courses will challenge students to examine trends and strategies in the dynamic ICT industry within the East African context. Targeted for both mid-career professionals and recent graduates with a strong background in technology, the Professional Development courses will cultivate students for a career in leadership and innovation.
These courses will be for non-degree students (individuals not enrolled in a CMU-R graduate degree program), offered in a format and schedule convenient for people who are working full time. Students will registered as CMU-R students and will receive credit that can be applied as elective credits toward a CMU-R graduate degree if a student subsequently enrolls in a CMU-R graduate degree program.
Application Requirements:
- Download and complete the application form.
- Send completed application form and a current CV to: CMURadmissions@cit.cmu.edu.
Tuition fee per course is $1575 USD. Scholarship funding is available. For more information, please visit the Financial Aid section of our website.
The following courses will be offered:
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Introduction to Strategic Uses of Digital Information Professor Michel Bézy February 14th - March 27th* Tuesdays | 6 sessions 6:00 p.m. - 8:30 p.m. *Please note the date change. |
An unprecedented access to real-time and unfiltered world information is providing enterprises with new strategic information assets. The ability to pull value from this data is a crucial competitive differentiator. The challenge is to turn this massive amount and continuous stream of data and information into knowledge and insights in real-time to provide actionable information to assist decision makers in enterprises. This course will survey some of the new emerging generation of information systems used to manage the explosion of this new real-world real-time information and deliver business analytics. Topics to be covered include the use of mobile technology, broadband internet, and cloud computing. |
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Building Mobile Services for Emerging Markets Dr. Bill Thies (Microsoft Research India) & Professor Bruce H. Krogh March 26th - March 30th Monday - Friday | 5 sessions 1:30 p.m. - 5:30 p.m. |
The explosion of mobile phones around the world has ushered in a new generation of mobile services, spanning diverse domains such as health, education, finance, and entertainment. These services hold particular promise for low-income users, who lack access to computers and rely on mobile phones as their only portal for digital information and communication. This course will survey the design and implementation of mobile services, including SMS servers, interactive voice response (IVR) systems, smart phone applications, and mobile Internet sites. It will focus specifically on emerging markets, including case studies of recent projects that utilize mobile phones to foster socio-economic development of poor communities. Time in this course will be split between lectures and labs, during which students will work in small teams to design and implement a fully functional SMS-based application. Due to the laboratory component, fluency in at least one programming language is a prerequisite for enrollment. |
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Introduction to Market Planning Professor Michel Bézy April 19th - May 24th Thursdays | 7 sessions 6:00 p.m. - 8:30 p.m. |
Market planning is the process used to develop and maintain a business plan. The process starts with an understanding of the marketplace that the enterprise decided to serve through market analysis, a segmentation of the marketplace based on the customers' needs (market segmentation), a selection and prioritization of the segments (portfolio management)and developing objectives and strategy for each segment selected (strategic planning). Finally the tactical actions to implement the strategy are documented in a business plan to ensure integrated execution of all tactical elements. This course is an introduction to the basic principles of market planning. The course will present an overview of the different steps of the market planning process and explain the quality criteria for such a process. The course will be illustrated by real example from the IT industry. Selected students from this course will have the opportunity in June and July to apply the tools from this course to do market analysis for some local industries in collaboration with students from Carnegie Mellon's Pittsburgh campus. |