Business is part of everything we do, and the people who facilitate business transactions play a part in all kinds of human endeavor. That potential variety is what has always made careers in management so interesting.

Of course management is especially exciting now with the growing biotechnology and e-commerce industries creating so many new opportunities. But it would be a mistake to focus on only those industries. The fact is, all products have a limited life. Just ask the carriage makers whose obsolete factories were in the same neighborhood where New Haven's biotech companies are now blossoming.

That's why students in management and management information systems at Southern are developing skills that will help them do business far into the future -- skills like team-building, collective decision making, creativity and innovation, ethics, human resource management, labor relations, and legal issues in business.

An education at Southern is a solid foundation that can be applied in a wide variety of settings. Many of our students become entrepreneurs themselves, and many become middle- and upper-level managers in corporations or nonprofit agencies.

Students in the department of management and management information systems specialize in either management or MIS. Management concentrates on administrative techniques, human behavior and organizations, legal and ethical issues for managers, and entrepreneurship. MIS concentrates on how transactions are processed among organizations or departments.

According to some business theories, an organization is defined by its flow of information. MIS specialists have a decisive impact on the definition of an organization and the decisions it makes because they control the ability to organize and share information. They work on the transactions that take place between a company and its clients or between employees and managers, monitoring and improving the system of that transaction. For example, in a bank they might design a better system of cash flow between departments. In a human resources office, they might create a better way to keep track of employee vacation and sick days. In this way, the MIS specialist satisfies the information needs of an organization so it can work more smoothly and develop better policies.