Grad Prereq: MSDT students only
The objective of this course is to provide an overview of the concept of systems architecture and how it has evolved from a technical notion to an important business issue. The course has several themes: (1) Students develop an appreciation of how a business may leverage architectural design choices for operational and competitive advantage, both at a technical and business level. (2) Students obtain insight into how interface driven systems (those using APIs) enable flexibility and increased innovation. (3) Students are confronted with the difficult aspects of modern systems, such as parallelism and concurrency, and how these technical challenges are managed. An introduction to programming in Python provides a context to help students develop a hands-on understanding of these concepts. Care is taken to not just apply the technical material to management contexts, but also inform business strategy and organization and operations through these architectural principles.
[ 3 cr.]