The popularity of graduate Management Information Systems (MIS) courses within the M.B.A. program and repeated inquiries from prospective students made the leaders in the College of Business see a demand for a graduate degree in MIS that could be met.

Lamar University’s new Master of Science in Management Information Systems, which begins in Spring, 2019, will be a 30-hour STEM program that will take one year to complete for full-time students. The program will be offered entirely online.

“We thought there was a gap here between the programs offered and the student demands which we can fill,” said Dr. Kakoli Bandyopadhyay, Professor and Chair of the Department of Information Systems and Analysis. “We will differentiate ourselves from other regional universities in the state by offering a master’s in MIS that is mainly focused on Enterprise Resource Planning.”

Current courses teach the leading business software SAP for enterprise resource planning, which is used throughout the Southeast Texas and Houston region by major employers such as Exxon Mobil, Total, DuPont, Chevron Services and others.

“This region has the demand and looks for people with this knowledge,” Bandyopadhyay said. “That way, we have an advantage.”

More than 404,000 customers in more than 180 countries use SAP applications, which means this College of Business program will prepare students with a competitive edge for careers around the globe in positions such as data analysts, systems analysts, enterprise resource planning consultants and business intelligence designers.

“Although the new master’s program emphasizes enterprise resource planning using SAP, that is not its exclusive focus. The program will also teach a variety of highly desirable commercial software such as Tableau for data visualization, the customer relationship management software Salesforce, SAS Visual Analytics, Visual Studio, Primavera P6 for project management, and Oracle-SQL for database,” Bandyopadhyay said.

Learn more about the program at lamar.edu/misgraddegree.