Communicating Technology Concepts to Business Professionals

 Congratulations!  This week, your internship rotation takes you to the company’s IT Department where you’ve been asked to help prepare a short presentation for one of the company’s Brown Bag Lunch training events. This training event will be attended primarily by business professionals who have familiarity with information technology but at a very high level; the attendees use IT to perform their jobs on a daily basis.

For this 10 minute presentation, you should focus upon meeting the information needs of the attendees from the internal (business) organizations which are supported by the IT department. You should also anticipate questions which your audience might ask during the 10 minute Question & Answer period which follows your presentation. (When you write your peer critiques for this week — ask and then answer at least one question that you believe the audience is likely to ask.)

Choose one of the following articles to present to the attendees.

1. Selecting the Right Cloud Operating Model: Privacy and Data Security in the Cloud

2. Understanding Managed Services (focus on the benefits of Managed IT Services)

3. Shadow IT: Mitigating Security Risks

After reading the article, prepare a set of slides (talking points) with speaker notes in which you highlight key information about the article and why Padgett-Beale employees should “care” about the topic. Make the presentation relevant for Padgett-Beale by integrating information about its business operations (use the company profile, the weekly descriptions, and other readings in this course). At least one of your slides should address cybersecurity issues and concerns that arise in the context of your chosen article (use the CSCU textbook’s material and other course readings to help you identify these issues and concerns). 

You should have a title slide, a slide containing the article title & publication information, content slides, and a summary slide — 8 to 12 slides total. At the end of the presentation, include a Q&A slide followed by “backup” slide which has additional resources that the audience can consult for more information.

Each slide must have speaker notes (at least one paragraph). Watch out for jargon! Write in business appropriate language and/or plain English but do not speak down to your audience.