Since its beginnings the growth and development of the information systems and technology (IS&T)
industry has been shaped, and limited, by the availability of sufficient numbers of skilled technical and
professional workers. The main stakeholders include educators, students, industry executives, human
resources professionals, and government officials and policymakers who are concerned with ensuring
and improving the ongoing supply of IS&T professionals.
In addition to traditional concerns including student recruitment and induction; curriculum content
and delivery; employment recruiting and career development; and the role of professional associations
many tertiary IS&T programs throughout the world have experienced a dramatic decline in student
numbers in recent years. The reasons for this decline in the face of growing demand are unclear.
Unfortunately, integration between and understanding among stakeholders is mostly topical and
uneven. What articulation exists is mainly local in nature, generally involving a limited number of collaborating
partners in a specific geographical area.
IS&T have become so critical to human enterprise and society that improving the integration of the
stakeholders in the supply of new professionals, of understanding and “tightening” the human resources
supply chain for the global industry, has become increasingly necessary in order to meet the needs of
the industry in the decades ahead. This book is intended to help stakeholders to communicate and better
articulate their efforts.
The purpose of this book is to provide a forum for illuminating and better understanding the dynamics
of supply and demand for professionals in the IS&T industry. The objectives of the book include:
Helping stakeholders to understand these issues and learn how others perceive and deal with
them
This book provides an international perspective from academic, industry, and government personalities
in Asia, Europe, Ireland, the Middle East, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
In Chapter I, titled A Dynamic Structural Model of Education and Skills Requirements for Careers in
Information Systems: Perspectives Across Gender and Time, Glenn R. Lowry, Rod L. Turner, and Julie
Fisher present a directional model of the contribution and importance of education and skills required
of IS professionals. The model provides a replicable and robust empirical approach for the quantitative
interpretation of the relative importance of the respective variables from the perspectives of student and
employer stakeholder groups toward the education and career development of IS professionals.
In Chapter II, Leveraging Diversity in Information Systems and Technology Education in the Global
Workplace, Eileen M. Trauth and members of the Penn State University Center for the Information Society,
including Haiyan Huang, Jeria L. Quesenberry, and Alison J. Morgan identity two human resource
gaps that affect the preparation of tomorrow’s IT workforce. These are a participation gap in which
women and certain racial/ethnic groups are under represented in the IT workforce, and a knowledge gap
in which students who do not develop cross-cultural awareness are not being adequately prepared for
the global IT workplace of the 21st century. The authors argue that diversity is a lens that can be used to
both understand human resource gaps and to develop curricular responses to them. The chapter presents
a course titled “Human Diversity in the Global Information Economy” to exemplify a way of addressing
the diversity dimension of the IT skill set.
In Chapter III, Critique: I. S. Academics’ Core Competency?, Mike Metcalfe explores the proposition
that the core competency of IS academics is a capacity for pragmatic critical thinking for developing
unique and useful concepts to reflect on industry-related problems, rather than addressing specific
technical problems and issues. Metcalfe discusses ways of critiquing problems, of seeing issues from
differing perspectives, and argues that academics can usefully serve industry by developing and teaching
new ways to critique management practice.
In Chapter IV, titled Enterprise Systems Software in the Business Curriculum: Aligning Curriculum
with Industry Requirements, Ravi Seethamraju presents a review of literature on the inadequacies of
business education, the pedagogical value of incorporating enterprise systems in the curriculum, and
an analysis of the effectiveness of curriculum design and delivery. This chapter presents an analysis of
the pedagogical value and effectiveness of an attempt at enhancing student learning about enterprise
integration through IS&T. The author analyses the benefits, strategies, and challenges of incorporating
industry–standard, enterprise system software solutions into business school curricula and reports on
the effectiveness of some attempts.
In Chapter V, Globalising Software Development in the Local Classroom, Ita Richardson, Alan
Malone, Sarah Moore, Valentine Casey, and Dolores Zage provide Irish and American academic and
practitioner perspectives on preparing students to work in an environment in which the software industry
has had to adapt to a global software development (GSD) strategy that has become increasingly popular
as software development has become a globally sourced commodity. The authors provided students
with an opportunity to take part in a learning experience that transcended geographical and institutional
boundaries, giving them first hand experience of working within globally distributed software teams.
They identified three specific forms of learning that took place: (1) pedagogical, (2) pragmatic, and the
(3) achievement of specific globally distributed competencies. The chapter presents a discussion of how
the projects were implemented and the educational research that was undertaken during the projects.
Findings from the research are presented.
In Chapter VI, Creating an Entrepreneurial Mindset: Getting the Process Right for Information
and Communication Technology Students, Briga Hynes and Ita Richardson emphasize the importance
of entrepreneurship education in preparing students for professional information and communication
technology (ICT) careers. The authors discuss how entrepreneurship education, through its broad and
integrative philosophy, accommodates to changing workplace demands. This approach links together
the synergy of enterprising activity and the small firm ICT sector through entrepreneurship education.
This is achieved through the adoption of the process framework for ICT entrepreneurship education.
Describing how to facilitate and encourage a more creative and enterprising mindset in ICT students, the
authors present two courses that have been successfully implemented at the University of Limerick.
In Chapter VII, Curriculum Change and Alignment with Industry: The Student Perspective, Krassie
Petrova and Gwyn Claxton focus on the need to understand the dimensions of the process of aligning
ICT curriculum with industry requirements. This chapter presents the design and results of a study that
focuses on students as stakeholders in the education process. A general framework based on a nomological
net is introduced and used to derive the research models underpinning data gathering and the subsequent
analysis of those data. The findings indicate that students realistically evaluate gaps in their learning
but put more emphasis on technical skills, ignoring or undervaluing soft and business skills, despite
academic efforts to develop these through skill-centered teaching. The authors also found a mismatch
between student expectations of required skills and skills demanded by employers.
In Chapter VIII, Aligning Learning with Industry Requirements, Jocelyn Armarego is concerned that
the underlying “socialization” necessary for new graduates to achieve “working professional” status
is poorly addressed in formal education. After introducing a framework for comparison, this chapter
presents an action research study in which nontraditional and innovative learning models are applied
to address identified mismatches in alignment between formal IT education and industry requirements.
The findings of the study suggest that models which focus on independent learning and soft skills prepare
students to enter industry with enhanced ability to engage in the career-long professional learning
required for success in professional practice.
In Chapter IX, Relevance of Computing Programmes to Industry Needs in Jordan’s Higher Education
Institutes, Ala M. Abu-Samaha reports on efforts in Jordan to better align industry requirements
with academic curricula. The author aims to articulate the concerns and issues surrounding the relevance
of computing programmes of higher education institutes in Jordan to market and employer needs. The
chapter presents the findings of a study conducted in 2004 that identified many hard and soft skill gaps
in existing curricula.
In Chapter X, Professionalism and Ethics: Is Education the Bridge? Zeenath Reza Khan, Ghassan
al-Qaimari, and Stephen D. Samuel, writing from the United Arab Emirates, take up the topic of the role
of ethics in the ICT profession. This chapter reports a study of the knowledge and views held by ICT
professionals on ethical issues such as personal use of e-mail, net surfing, net privacy, and copyrights,
recognized by professional societies such as ACM, IEEE, and ACS. Using a grounded survey approach,
the authors investigated the relationship between unethical behavior in the workplace and knowledge
and values gained through high school and university education. They investigated the extent to which
unethical behavior is related to students’ education and awareness of ethical issues. The authors suggest
ways to include material that highlights ethical issues in the workplace.
In Chapter XI, Experiential Group Learning for Developing Competencies in Usability Practice, Phil
Carter provides an industry perspective of software usability and reflects on his years of experience in a
usability lab. Over the past several years, an approach to usability called situated co-inquiry has become
a useful way to structure the teaching of software usability. This chapter introduces and illustrates how
this experiential learning approach has been used effectively in a group setting.
In Chapter XII, Industry-Academic Partnerships in Information Systems Education, Mark Conway
highlights several of the leading IT-focused, industry-academic programs such as Hyperion’s Academic
Alliance Program, the Teradata University Network, and SAP’s University Alliance Program and references
similar initiatives from Cisco, SUN, and IBM. As an industry practitioner, Conway offers insight
into what motivates companies to sponsor industry-academic partnership programs, what the goals of
those programs are, and how participating companies and universities benefit.
In Chapter XIII, Industry-University Collaborations in Research for Information Systems: An Exploratory
Study of a Management Model, Tom O’Kane, writing from an industry perspective, has conducted
an exploratory study of a management model for industry-university collaborations in IS research projects.
He proposes the extension of concepts found in commonly used software process standards for managing
software projects to the management of IS project collaborations with universities.
In Chapter XIV, Ethics for the Graduating Class: Issues, Needs, and Approaches, Theresa M. Vitolo
and Barry J. Brinkman identify and discuss some critical challenges of teaching ethics to students
preparing for careers in technical professions. They argue that many of the issues and decisions facing
technical professionals are not about technology but about the ethical application and ramifications of
the technology in society. While historically, many higher education programs have focused primarily on
specialized major discipline subjects, there is a growing emphasis by accreditation boards, professional
organizations, employers, and society on the incorporation of ethical analysis into tertiary curricula. The
authors discuss on-going challenges limiting efforts to include ethics in undergraduate degree programs
and develop a composite of the ethical dimension of graduating college students in the IS&T field.
In Chapter XV, Tomorrow’s Workforce Today: What is Required by Information Systems Graduates
to Work in a Collaborative Information Systems Workplace?, Kathy Lynch and Julie Fisher report on
a study in which they identified the needs of today’s IS workforce in terms of the nondiscipline skills
required to work effectively in collaborative teams. The chapter includes a list of collaborative skills,
identified from the literature, extended and confirmed by key IT industry professionals. The authors
identified two sets of skills: individual skills and group skills, that IS&T graduates must possess to
work effectively in today’s professional workplace. Their findings suggest that curriculum developers
need to carefully consider how these skills can be taught and learned to properly equip our graduates
for tomorrow’s workforce.
In Chapter XVI, COCA: Concept-Oriented Course Architecture: Towards a Methodology for Designing
and Teaching Information System Courses, Youcef Baghdadi introduces COCA as a new architectural
approach to designing IS courses and curricula. COCA is a building-block approach for designing and
teaching IS courses. Based on a flexible, scalable, well-specified architecture of IS concepts and their
organization, COCA facilitates the complex and resource-consuming task of designing and teaching IS
courses in an environment in which IS tools and concepts are rapidly evolving.
In Chapter XVII, Enhancing the Employability of ICT Students with Hybrid Skills: Insights from a
UK Survey with Small Business Managers, Yanqing Duan, Daoliang Li, and Yongmei Bentley present
an empirical study of UK small business managers’ perceptions of the importance of hybrid skills to
ICT staff in supporting business success. Their findings confirm the importance of hybrid skills from
a small business managers’ point of view and add further empirical evidence to support the call for a
change in ICT staff training design and development in education and training organizations. A hybrid
skills model is presented and significant implications of the findings are highlighted.
In Chapter XVIII, Teaching Business Intelligence in Higher Education, Paul Hawking and Robert
Jovanovic write that, as enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems have become a necessary part of
many business’ IT infrastructures, supporting the day-to-day transactions of many of the world’s leading
companies, some universities have attempted to incorporate them into their curriculum offerings.
In addition to such critical applications as customer relationship management (CRM) and supply chain
management (SCM), leading ERP systems have evolved to incorporate more strategic components such
as business intelligence applications. Universities and ERP vendors are investigating ways in which
the IS curriculum can be developed to include these new solutions. This chapter discusses a blended
approach adopted at one university in the development and implementation of business intelligence in
the curriculum.
The authors of this book include practitioners and academics from Australia, Ireland, Jordan, New
Zealand, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Together,
they provide a global perspective of key issues of staff supply and demand facing IS academics and
practitioners. These issues include the alignment of curriculum with industry requirements; soft skills
formation and development by students; and lifelong learning by professionals. We are grateful to our
authors for their contributions and are confident that their experience and insight will benefit the global
IS profession in coming years.
Glenn R. Lowry, United Arab Emirates University, Al Ain, UAE
Rodney L. Turner, Victoria University, Melbourne, Australia
May 2007