Now more than ever, corporations are investing heavily in IT. The quality of these investments affects the daily work of millions.

Yet it’s not uncommon to see industry surveys where the failure rates for IT projects is over 50%. It’s possible to do better and it’s possible to do so consistently. Use the Business Model Canvas to focus your company strategy and facilitate buy-in from stakeholders.

In this two-week course, we’ll step through major challenges within corporate IT and how to address them with the disciplined use of design thinking, Lean Startup, and agile as a team framework.

Translate your work on the Canvas to specific charters in IT. Rapidly prototype strategically-aligned processes for implementation within your IT infrastructure. How do you define a customer-centric strategy you can actually execute? To do strategic IT, you’ve got to have a strategy! Ideally, you need one that’s easy to understand and use as a clear basis for action. 

That’s what you’ll learn in this course.

A Short Description

A customer-centric way of doing business is a way that provides a positive customer experience before and after the sale in order to drive repeat business, enhance customer loyalty and improve business growth.

But, a customer-centric company is more than a company that offers good service. Both Amazon and Zappos are prime examples of brands that are customer-centric and have spent years creating a culture around the customer and their needs. Their commitment to delivering customer value is genuine – In fact, Zappos is happy to fire employees if they do not fit within their customer-centric culture!

But, how important is being customer-centric? The good news is that’s becoming very important! Econsultancy recently asked what the most important characteristic is in order to establish a truly “digital-native” culture. The answer to that question and leading the responses with 58% was to be customer-centric. 

Enroll in this course to find out.

Much of the world’s data resides in databases. SQL (or Structured Query Language) is a powerful language that is used for communicating with and extracting data from databases. 

Working knowledge of databases and SQL is a must if you want to become a data scientist. No prior knowledge of databases, SQL, Python, or programming is required.

The purpose of this course is to introduce relational database concepts and help you learn and apply foundational knowledge of the SQL language. It is also intended to get you started with performing SQL access in a data science environment.  

The emphasis in this course is on hands-on and practical learning. As such, you will work with real databases, real data science tools, and real-world datasets. You will create a database instance in the cloud. Through a series of hands-on labs, you will practice building and running SQL queries. You will also learn how to access databases from Jupyter notebooks using SQL and Python.

Anyone can audit this course at no-charge. If you choose to take this course and earn the Coursera course certificate, you can also earn an IBM digital badge upon the successful completion of the course.