STUDY GUIDE · GKU 2

Global professional practice: projects, governance and the law study guide (Information Technology)

An IT specialist does not only build systems; they plan work, estimate it, govern it, and answer for how it treats people and their data. This unit covers the professional side: the tools of project management (work breakdown, critical path, earned value), the process groups and phase gates that keep a project under control, the system development life cycle and its models, IT governance and organisational culture, and resource management with its costs and power. The second part covers the rules around the work: ethical codes and conflicts of interest, legal duties and contracts, privacy and data protection, and intellectual property, including open-source licences and transnational questions. Each section opens with a quick-revision card; the project and resource sections carry worked calculations. An information system is people, process, data, software, hardware and networks organised to collect, process, store and distribute information for a purpose; the technology is only one component, which is why governance, policy and training decide whether it works.