Meeting new challenges in higher education: Two educational activities and an interdisciplinary competency framework

This article explores how educational institutions are faced with changes in the modern global business environment, and how this leads to a need for changes in curricula for business schools and information systems schools. Most of academia still uses a strict disciplinary model of education resulting in a high degree of specialization within each discipline while the modern business environments require knowledge workers who can address problems that cut across disciplines on an increasingly global scale. Research papers and governmental reports call for more emphasis on particularly three interdisciplinary topics; 1) competencies in globalization issues, 2) communication/working in team, and 3) information literacy. The academic disciplines of business education and information systems education in particular have received much attention in this respect with several calls for change. How to bring about such a change is, however, still an open question. Currently many universities are looking into their educational offerings in order to adapt to the new situation. This paper proposes to address this issue in two ways; by suggesting two new educational activities and by proposing a new educational interdisciplinary competency framework to guide curriculum development when including interdisciplinary topics

Educational Activities and a Competency Framework for Meeting New Challenges in Higher Education

In his article we explore how educational institutions are faced with changes in the modern global business environment, and how this leads to need for changes in curricula for business schools and information systems schools. Most of academia still uses a strict disciplinary model of education resulting in a high degree of specialization within each discipline while the modern business environments require knowledge workers who can address problems that cut across disciplines on an increasingly global scale. Research papers and governmental reports call for more emphasis on particularly three interdisciplinary topics; 1) competencies in globalization issues, 2) communication/working in team, and 3) information literacy. The disciplines of business and in particular information systems education have received much attention in this respect with several calls for change. How to bring about such a change is, however, still an open question. This paper proposes to address this issue in two ways; by suggesting two new educational activities and by proposing a new educational interdisciplinary competency framework to guide curriculum development when including interdisciplinary topics

Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns

Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modelling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. As a statement of research-in-progress this paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial methodological framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework borrows ideas from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse

Collaborative ERP Education: Experiences from a First Pilot

Collaboration between universities and thus the sharing of expertise is of increasing importance when teaching complex systems like Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software. Results from an empirical survey give an overview about current activities in the area of collaborative ERP teaching. This paper presents an international pilot to teach ERP in the form of virtual teams. The learning objectives, the communication infrastructure and the evaluation of this project in the form of students\u27 feedback are described. Planned future activities are discussed

Business Process Management Education in Academia: Status, challenges, and Recommendations

In response to the growing proliferation of Business Process Management (BPM) in industry and the demand this creates for BPM expertise, universities across the globe are at various stages of incorporating knowledge and skills in their teaching offerings. However, there are still only a handful of institutions that offer specialized education in BPM in a systematic and in-depth manner. This article is based on a global educators’ panel discussion held at the 2009 European Conference on Information Systems in Verona, Italy. The article presents the BPM programs of five universities from Australia, Europe, Africa, and North America, describing the BPM content covered, program and course structures, and challenges and lessons learned. The article also provides a comparative content analysis of BPM education programs illustrating a heterogeneous view of BPM. The examples presented demonstrate how different courses and programs can be developed to meet the educational goals of a university department, program, or school. This article contributes insights on how best to continuously sustain and reshape BPM education to ensure it remains dynamic, responsive, and sustainable in light of the evolving and ever-changing marketplace demands for BPM expertise

ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks: a literature review

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) implementation is a complex and vibrant process, one that involves a combination of technological and organizational interactions. Often an ERP implementation project is the single largest IT project that an organization has ever launched and requires a mutual fit of system and organization. Also the concept of an ERP implementation supporting business processes across many different departments is not a generic, rigid and uniform concept and depends on variety of factors. As a result, the issues addressing the ERP implementation process have been one of the major concerns in industry. Therefore ERP implementation receives attention from practitioners and scholars and both, business as well as academic literature is abundant and not always very conclusive or coherent. However, research on ERP systems so far has been mainly focused on diffusion, use and impact issues. Less attention has been given to the methods used during the configuration and the implementation of ERP systems, even though they are commonly used in practice, they still remain largely unexplored and undocumented in Information Systems research. So, the academic relevance of this research is the contribution to the existing body of scientific knowledge. An annotated brief literature review is done in order to evaluate the current state of the existing academic literature. The purpose is to present a systematic overview of relevant ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks as a desire for achieving a better taxonomy of ERP implementation methodologies. This paper is useful to researchers who are interested in ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks. Results will serve as an input for a classification of the existing ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks. Also, this paper aims also at the professional ERP community involved in the process of ERP implementation by promoting a better understanding of ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks, its variety and history

The Collaborative learning handbook: A Best practices guide

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Using a Group Role-Play Exercise to Engage Students in Learning Business Processes and ERP

With the increasing process-centric focus and proliferation of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems in organizations, it is imperative for business graduates to understand cross-functional business processes and ERP system’s role in supporting business processes. However, this topic can be rather abstract and dry to undergraduate students, most of whom have little work experience. In this paper, we present a group role-play exercise that has been used in an introductory management information systems course to actively engage students in learning business processes and ERP systems. Student learning outcomes and their perceptions of the group role-play exercise were measured using a questionnaire. Results indicate that student knowledge of three key business processes and ERP system’s role in supporting business processes increased significantly after participating in the role-play exercise. Students also had positive perceptions of the group role-play exercise. Teaching suggestions for implementing the group role-play exercise, as well as contributions of this study, are discussed

Redesign of a Master\u27s in Information Systems Curriculum: The Influence of Global Sourcing

We present a case study of a successful response to outsourcing, and IS job and enrollment declines through an IS curriculum redevelopment in a business school. First, we examine literature on outsourcing/offshoring phenomenon and on IS curricular redesign. A conceptual framework is presented that is useful in understanding the role of global collaborative group projects for learning about outsourcing in the IS graduate curriculum. A case study of one approach to an IS graduate curriculum redesign is then presented. The case examines the results of a survey of IT executives that informed the design of the curriculum. The case study curriculum is compared to the MSIS 2006 national model, and results are interpreted from prior literature and workforce trends