How I Became IS: Understanding the Major Decision

For over a decade, the IS discipline has been struggling to increase student enrollment. The enrollment problem isexacerbated by the fact that females/minorities are graduating college in increasing numbers and the IS discipline hashistorically attracted white males. This study assesses the effectiveness of the many enrollment interventions recommendedin the IS literature by reporting on how and why students, who have been exposed to a plethora of enrollment interventionsduring their college career, become IS majors. Addressing the differences between white males and females/minorities, thisstudy provides rich and contextual insight to the IS enrollment literature and finds that IS programs need to emphasize thatstudents do not need a technical background to become IS majors and to promote IS as a second choice for studentsstruggling in degree programs like computer science that do require a technical background. IS programs seeking toimplement enrollment interventions into their curriculum will benefit from this study

Shadow Analytics

Gartner predicts that analytics will revolutionize how we conduct business. By 2019 worldwide analytics implementation are estimated to reach $187 billion (Olavsrud 2016). Unfortunately, many internal IT departments lack the business acumen, financial resources and data science expertise to initiate analytics initiatives (Goldberg 2012). This leads functional departments, armed with use cases, trying to launch their own analytic program. We call this shadow analytics. To add insight to this shadow analytics phenomenon, this paper uses an in-depth longitudinal case study of one department’s shadow analytics initiative. Using technology affordances and constraints theory, we investigate what enables and constrains a shadow analytics initiative. This study offers practical insights to others trying to launch an analytics program and shows a shift in client vendor outsourcing projects towards, agile delivery, experimentation and failure acceptance

Partnering with the Majors: A Process Approach to Increasing IS Enrollment

Information systems (IS) programs have been struggling with declining enrollment since 2001. The IS community has addressed the enrollment crisis by sharing best practices in journals and at conferences. Typically, such practices focus on improving enrollment through either (1) recruitment events or (2) program/curriculum development initiatives. While such efforts have been helpful, additional work is needed to examine this issue in a more systematic fashion within the inter-dependent process of recruitment, retention and placement. Furthermore, current research has been largely silent on the potential role that current IS majors may have in recruiting new students into the major – students recruiting students. This paper shares the enrollment initiatives that Baylor University has implemented over the past 2.5 years that have addressed both of these issues. First, we report on how we embedded enrollment initiatives within the overall student development process starting with recruiting students into the major, retaining them and then culminating in placement upon graduation. Secondly, we present a novel student-driven approach to enrollment; where current IS majors are at the heart of the effort. Our IS majors work in close collaboration with IS faculty and corporate recruiters to draw students into the major and help them find jobs. The paper shares these initiatives along with best practices and results