Job Openings in Information Technology & Decision Sciences: Home Brew Business Intelligence for Fun, Education and Maybe Even Profit

This project did not begin as a focused research study; so we beg your indulgence for a humble laxity in academic rigor.However, we believe our explorations of online, real-time, job openings data for thirty specialized information technologyand decision science job categories over the last five years will keep your interest. When we started this project, we merelywished to see if the market for our majors was improving, identify the high potential job areas, and look at growth areas forfuture curriculum development. By 2006 the number of majors in our department had shrunk to 120 from a high of nearly500 majors in 2001 [Becker, et. al., 2006]. We began to collect job openings data the old fashioned way—by hand--from thepopular CareerBuilder.com website in mid-January 2006. Using the following key word searches: Analyst, Six Sigma, Lean,and SAS—we recorded our first four job openings within the State of Texas; using job openings that had been posted in thelast 30 days. Since then, our database has grown to nearly 1,800 observations. Using relatively simplistic data miningtechniques we are now able to produce a number of monthly IT job opening forecasts that keep our students, faculty, CareerCenter, and advisory board looking for that next update

How to Connect the Americas: An IS/IT Academic Research Plan for Tomorrow

During the last decade we have engaged in several heretofore separate and at least initially, somewhat independent research initiatives: 1) Virtual teams and collaborative technologies [Ballantine, Becker, et. al.; 1999], [Becker, Ballantine, et. al., 1999, 2001], [Becker; 2003], [Becker and Cline; 2005]; 2) building bridges between researches across the borders of the Americas [Becker and Sanchez; 2006, 2007, and 2008]; and 3) analyzing the dramatic and alarming declines in IS/IT majors [Becker, Hassan, and Naumann, 2006]. Within the last few years we have come to discover that these research streams appear to be converging in a welcome and pleasantly synergistic manner. When combined these research streams result in an action plan to utilize a combination of virtual collaborative technologies and face-to-face interactions with faculty and students throughout the Americas to increase the number of IS/IT majors at all educational levels: undergraduate, masters and doctoral degrees. This paper describes what brought us to this epiphany and my plan for the next year-long phase of this study, which will commence in summer 2009 for this author. A partial list of the planned activities, objectives and metrics are shown in Appendix

Case Study: Content and Connections in the Information Systems Curriculum

Maintaining and growing interest in information systems (IS) courses and enrollment in the IS major continues to be a significant concern for university information systems departments. Research in this area understandably focuses on the content of the IS curriculum: the courses to be included, the topics to be taught in those courses, and specific teaching techniques and examples to be employed in the classroom. We argue that alongside these considerations of content, it is critical to examine the connections between these curricular elements and the interests and activities of key stakeholders in the university community including, for example, faculty and their research interests, alumni, employers, and students and their cocurricular interests. We briefly point to existing examples of this focus on connections in existing research and then describe how this focus on connections is put into practice in our university’s information systems curriculum

Desperately Seeking IS Curriculum Relevance: Teaching Information Systems in a Cross-Functional Context

The information systems academic community has been searching for an effective response to the steep decline in enrollment in IS programs. Researchers have identified the design of the introductory IS course as a critical opportunity for increasing student interest in the IS field. In this paper we describe our experience redesigning an introductory IS course in the context of a semester long cross-functional product development project for college juniors. By including practitioners in the design process, we identified four areas to be addressed to increase the career relevance of the course and used this agenda to develop new content which tied the IS course more closely to the semester project, especially in the area of online marketing

Combating the IS Enrolment Crisis in Australia: The Design and the Effectiveness of a Five-Minute IS Promotional Talk

This paper reports on the design and the effectiveness of a five-minute IS promotional talk that is used in one of the leading Australian universities to promote IS courses to existing accounting students. In particular, this paper explains in details the elements that were employed by the promotional talk to stimulate accounting students’ interest in IS courses and shaping their perception towards the IS discipline. The paper then develops an evaluation mode and a survey questionnaire, and uses structural equation modelling to evaluate the effectiveness of the promotional talk. Evaluation results show that, by providing useful and sufficient information regarding available IS courses and by providing justified reasons to take IS courses, the five-minute IS promotional talk is indeed effective in promoting accounting students’ interest in IS courses and their perception of the relevance of IS courses to their current degree

Information Systems Enrollments: Can They Be Increased?

It is almost unbelievable that in this age of technology we are experiencing decreasing worldwide enrollments in Information Systems (IS) programs. Suddenly, within a year or two, enrollments decreased as much as 70-80 percent throughout the world. Industry is begging for more graduates with a business and technical background and is expecting an even greater shortage in the next few years. Despite reports of the outsourcing of technical positions, there is a growing demand for IS graduates. This paper presents an overview of the discussion, resulting from a panel at the Americas Conference on Information Systems (AMCIS) 2007, of declining enrollments and some suggestions to reverse the trend. Two major themes, marketing and curriculum, emerged

MIS Vision 2015

Enrollment for Management Information Systems (MIS) majors has been declining since shortly after the turn of the century. The purpose of this document is to identify the indisputable benefits of maintaining a strong MIS degree program in the School of Business & Economics at Michigan Tech. We begin by clarifying what is meant by MIS and defining the discipline, reviewing the history of MIS in the SBE (e.g. average nearly 20% female majors in this particular STEM field), summarizing an analysis of our degree program (i.e. SWOT analysis), and outlining a plan to improve the number of MIS majors within the next five years

Creating value in an introductory business IS and IT unit

Given the downturn in student enrolments in Information Systems (IS) and Information Technology (IT) units, and the poor performance of a first-year IS and IT common-core unit in a business school, a new unit was developed. Action and design science research methods were employed. The new unit has a unique focus on two key skills and on modern IT and information literacy. The first skill involves describing information systems, and the second, determining how to create business value with IT in specific business contexts. Modern IT tools like a Web-based productivity suite and professional networking services are introduced, together with advanced search techniques and services and an information quality evaluation framework. The evaluation of the utility and efficacy of the unit is based on the institutional standard student feedback survey and unsolicited feedback. The unit has achieved a significant improvement in evaluation results and feedback from students, as well as converting students who were previously averse to IS and IT to study further in these areas.<br /

Student Attitudes toward Information Systems Graduate Program Design and Delivery

This study examines student preferences regarding graduate management information systems (MIS) education. One hundred and eighty four graduate students responded to a survey exploring student attitudes towards degree program content, delivery format, and peer group interaction. Study results indicate that students prefer a program with an even mix of business and technical coursework taught by full-time faculty featuring frequent guest lectures by industry professionals. The most often cited business courses that should be required include quantitative business analysis, operations management, strategy, and leadership, and the most often identified management information systems courses that should be required were internships, business intelligence, data warehousing, management information systems fundamentals, and information technology project management. The study also explored how students with and without prior work experience differed in their preferences, which will help administrators and faculty with insights and tools to design more effective programs of study