“Billionaire or Bust” is the headline on an article in Chicago’s RedEye featuring two undergrads in Information Technology and Management. Waylon Janowiack ’13 and Joshua Hensley ’14 are partners with graphic designer Jenna Compton on GoSosh, a site that will allow businesses to reward customers through social media. The article chronicles the travails of the three young entrepreneurs as they tweak their product in preparation for an unveiling set to take place later this year. Janowiack and Hensley are both honor students in the ITM program and are members of IIT’s chapter of Gamma Nu Eta, the National Information Technology Honor Society; Janowiack is the Vice President. In the story Hensley comments on their efforts: “Success is not achieved by earning a mountain of cash or securing some great corporate title. Success is finding your passion and using it to effect positive change in the world.”

The Board of Trustees of Illinois Institute of Technology, during their Spring term meeting, approved the School of Applied Technology’s proposal to offer the Master of Cyber Forensics and Security degree. The program includes courses drawn from the ITM program and additional courses from the IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law curriculum to give cyber security and forensics practitioners a thorough grounding in legal issues and compliance.  Core courses for this 30-credit-hour degree will include:
ITMS 538 Cyber Forensics
ITMS 543 Vulnerability Analysis and Control
ITMS 548 Cyber Security Technologies
ITMS 578 Cyber Security Management
LAW 273 Evidence

Electives will include twelve hours selected from:
ITMS 518 Coding Security
ITMS 528 Database Security
ITMS 539 Steganography
ITMS 549 Cyber Security Technologies: Projects and Advanced Methods
ITMS 555 Mobile Device Forensics
ITMS 558 Operating System Security
ITMS 579 Topics in Cyber Security (May be taken more than once)
ITMS 588 Incident Response, Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity
ITMM 585 Legal and Ethical Issues in Information Technology
ITMM 586 Information Technology Auditing
ITMO 456 Introduction to Open Source Operating Systems
ITMT 594 Special Projects in Information Technology
AND at least three hours chosen from:
LAW 240 National Security Law
LAW 478 Computer and Network Privacy and Security: Ethical, Legal, and Technical Considerations
LAW 495 Electronic Discovery

Prerequisites for this degree include ITM 301 or ITM 302, ITMD 411, ITMD 421, and ITMO 440 or ITMO 540. Watch here for more details!

When the Fall 2012 course schedule is published, you will notice something different: instead of ITM, courses in our program will have four-character “subject codes”. They’ll still all start with ITM but the fourth character will indicate a broad subject area. The new subject codes are:
ITMD   Development: Application development, web development, multimedia, data management
ITMM   Management: Management of information technology, business, law and ethics
ITMO   Operations: Networking, communications, operating systems and system administration
ITMS   Security: Security and forensics
ITMT   Theory and Technology: Theory, systems, system design & general topics in IT
Initially all courses will still have  the same number as they did before the transition, but new courses will gradually begin to overlap numbers so you will need to read both the subject code and the number to make sure it’s the correct course. 100-, 200- and 300-level courses will retain the familiar three-letter ITM subject code. We know it’s a bit of a hassle, but really, this is a good thing: it only happened because our program is so healthy that we were in danger of running out of course numbers!

Critiquing Your Rewritten Resume
Tues, Feb 7 from 6:30 – 8:30 pm @ Perlstein 131

Resume Review – Have your resume reviewed by IIT staff
Fri, Feb 10 from 10:00-2:00 @ Perlstin 131

IIT Career Fair
Thur, Feb 23 from 11:00-4:00 @ Herman Hall

Questions? Contact Madeleine England at mengland@iit.edu

Pictures from the School of Applied Technology party at the Bog on Tuesday, January 24th are now posted on Facebook. If you didn’t make it, we’re sorry, because it was a great time. It was super to see so many students and faculty turn out and a special thanks goes out to ITM Program Coordinator Madeleine England for doing such a wonderful job setting this all up.  Anyway, plan on making it to our picnic next September: we’ve learned our lesson and we’ll do everything we can to not run out of food!

Robert Half Technology has published their 2012 IT Salary Guide (worth grabbing a copy of!). They identify the following hot IT skills based on a survey of more than 1,600 CIOs in the United States and Canada:

5 TECH PROFESSIONALS FIRMS WANT NOW

• Systems and networking engineers: Skills – Cloud computing, Software as a Service, Virtualization
• Developers: Skills – .NET, Java, PHP, Silverlight, Flex, MySQL and portal technologies such as SharePoint
• Quality assurance professionals and business analysts
• Data warehousing and business intelligence professionals
• Security professionals

TOP TECHNICAL SKILLS IN DEMAND (after the break…) Read more…

On Wednesday January 18th many of your favorite websites–Wikipedia, the Internet Archive, Reddit, Boing Boing and more–will be blacked out for a day to protest two pending pieces of legislation now before the Congress of the United States: the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the U.S. House of Representatives, and PROTECTIP (PIPA) in the U.S. Senate. If passed, this legislation will harm the free and open Internet, stifle online innovation and creativity, and bring about new tools for censorship of international websites inside the United States. They appear to violate provisions of the U.S. Constitution by operating with a presumption of guilt and denial of due process, and could seriously harm the integrity of the Internet Domain Name System, particularly ongoing efforts to implement DNSSEC.  For more information about this legislation please see the Electronic Frontier Foundation‘s  site  and please contact your Senators and Representative to make your opinion heard.

According to a recent Computerworld survey, the top IT job skills employers will be seeking in 2012 in order of demand are:
1. Programming and Application Development (Especially Web development & Mobile application development)
2. Project Management (Especially those who also have skills as Business Analysts)
3. Help Desk/Technical Support (Especially those who can support mobile devices)
4. Networking (Need fueled in large part by virtualization and cloud computing projects)
5. Business Intelligence (Many need SharePoint developers)
6. Data Center (IT professionals with backgrounds in data center operations and systems integration, and experts in disaster recovery and business continuity)
7. Web 2.0 (HTML5, .Net, AJAX and PHP)
8. Security (Strong technical security and auditing skills)
9. Telecommunications (IP telephony skills)
Read more…

The last day to add courses or to drop them without a fee is January 20th. Please decide very soon what you really want to do this term, and if you are not yet registered, GET REGISTERED! After the final add/drop date, we will add folks to our Microsoft Developer’s Network Academic Alliance software subscription.

Cloud computing is a hot topic these days; if you are considering taking ITM 444/ITM 544 Cloud Computing Technologies in Fall 2012, you should take ITM 456 Introduction to Open Source Operating Systems this spring. It is not a prerequisite, but students who do not have a solid grounding in Linux will be at a  distinct disadvantage  in the class. (And no one wants to be at at a  distinct disadvantage now, do they?)

Social Media Marketing, ITM 495/ITM595, is a last-minute addition for the Spring term. Students in this course will explore the tactics, tools and strategies of incorporating new media channels to successfully grow a business, and/or to maximize the goals of other types of organizations. Topics will include social media components and tactics such as Social Networks, Blogs, Microblogs, Photo Sharing, Audiocasting/Videocasting, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Marketing, Mobile Apps; social media tools; social media strategies; how to run a business based on social media; and use of social media for customer relationship management (CRM). The course will be taught by Robert VanDame and will meet Tuesday evenings at 6:25pm in Stuart 238 on the Main Campus. Grading for the course will be based on three exams and a Student Project consisting of development of a Social Media Marketing program for a real or fictional organization. If you need a last-minute addition to your schedule this might be the thing.

As a reminder, our BookList is at http://www.itm.iit.edu/data/ITM_Booklist_12S.pdf.

By the way, we hope to add additional seats to all of our closed sections except ITM 461 sometime on Monday.