TOURISM EDUCATION IN FRANCE AND CANADA: ARE UNIVERSITIES INCORPORATING ICT?

The field of tourism was noted at the 2005 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) conference to be global and growing (Keler, 2005). That growth has continued today, with no signs of abatement (Todd, 2008). Globally, international tourists numbered 900 million in 2007 (UNWTO, 2008). This figure is estimated to grow to 1.6 billion by 2020 (World Tourism Organization, 2005) and 1.9 billion by 2030 (Yeoman, 2008). In the two countries (Canada and France) examined in this paper, the tourism industry is important within the economy. Tourism contributes $28.6 billion (CDN) or 9.7 percent of Canada's gross domestic product in 2007 (Hernandez, 2008) and 36.9 million euros or 6.3 percent to France's gross domestic product in 2007 (Ministère de l'Economie des Finances et de l'Emploi, 2008). The tourism industry in Canada provided over 1.8 million jobs in 2006 or 11 percent of the national economy (Tourism Satellite Account, 2008). Despite France being the number one tourist destination in the world, it represents only six percent of its national income (Tourisme Infos Stat, 2008) and two million jobs (French-Property.com, 2008). It must be noted that these figures are based on different components and therefore may not be comparable. In both of these countries, as well as globally, the growth in the tourism industry is facilitated by information and communication technologies (ICT), including the Internet (Bloch and Segev, 1996). It is estimated that half the global B2C e-commerce turnover is in the travel and tourism sector (Fodor and Werthner, 2004-2005). With increasing time and economic pressures, ICT is an increasingly important component of tourism today. ICT facilitates travellers who do not have time to visit travel agencies or are looking to save money and travellers who are looking to design their own travel itinerary. Further, ICT provides an equalizing platform for increasing numbers of tourist destinations, many in developing countries (About UNWTO, n.d.) broadening the competition internationally. This inclusivity is incorporated into the practical environment (Cunliffe, 2008) as discussed by the World Tourism Organization (Tourism 2020 Vision, n.d.). Given that both private and pubic post-secondary educational institutions are the training ground that readies the graduate for the field of practice; these institutions have the opportunity to connect anticipated actions within society (Gherardi, 2009). In using mock real-life situations, it is found that student professionals are capable of learning at a new level with enhanced understanding (Gold et al 2007). With the emergence of ICT and virtual learning communities (Allan, 2007), the question of the inclusion of ICT in the curriculum of tourism programs is raised. Education performs two functions. One is the provision of specific, structured skill development that is based on behavioural modification such that the graduate ‘fits' into the workplace. Although beginning in technical and apprentice programs, many university programs, specifically those training individuals for the professional workplace, have answered industry's call to make higher education relevant to the workplace. The other function is the traditional purview of universities: training students to think independently, analyze, conceptualize, and innovate. Today, the traditional function to prepare them for the evolution occurring in practice has become blurred with institutions of higher education focusing on the established employment needs of their graduates (Gunn, 1991) and the industry (Bount, Castleman, and Swatman, 2005). Recognizing the dichotomy of training for an industry that is becoming more reliant on ICT while individual operators often do not recognize the need for ICT, we examine the educational training in etourism and ICT of graduates from public and private institutions of higher education in France and Canada. We find that the training provided reflects the status of the industry that has few standards. Thus different institutions interpret the industries needs uniquely. Following this discussion, we present recommendations for the industry and the trainers to establish a minimum standard for employability. We begin with a review of the literature that examines the training available for e-tourism.

Business Process Modeling for developing Process Oriented IT Systems

International audienceInformation system developers are challenged to develop systems that should meet the requirements of modern organizations. By promoting the enterprise-wide integration, the paradigm of Business Process Management contrasts with traditional information system development, which was suffered, but also crystallized, the vertical division of the enterprise activities. In addition, the paradigms of Business Process Reengineering and Business Process Improvement contrast with traditional information system development that focused on automating and supporting existing business processes. Now, enterprises should create new ways of working to survive in a competitive environment. This organizational transformation depends of the creation of a powerful vision of what future should be like. We claim that an in depth understanding of the current functioning is also required. In this context, enterprise modeling can help understanding the current business situation and establishing a vision of what the future should be like. Therefore, business process modeling becomes a pre-requisite for system requirements elicitation and system development

A Framework for Occupational Fraud Detection by Social Network Analysis

International audienceThis paper explores issues related to occupational fraud detection. We observe over the past years, a broad use of network research across social and physical sciences including but not limited to social sharing and filtering, recommendation systems, marketing and customer intelligence, counter intelligence and law enforcement. However, the rate of social network analysis adoption in organizations by control professionals or even by academics for insider fraud detection purpose is still very low. This paper introduces the OFD – Occupational Fraud Detection framework, based on formal social network analysis and semantic reasoning principles by taking a design science research perspective

Modeling the creation of a Learning organization by using the Learning Organization Atlas Framework

International audienceIn a continuously changing external environment, the learning organization can provide a competitive advantage. However, the concept has been largely criticized for the lack of guidelines and tools on how it could be developed. This undermines the opportunity for the development of the learning organization. This paper aims to contribute toward the debate on its creation by proposing a Learning Organization Atlas Framework approach. This framework comprises of the facets of the learning organization that characterize them, a Learning Organization Grid for the analysis and benchmarking of organizations, a Learning Organization Atlas that can be used for developing models of them, and a Learning Organization Road Map that includes the intentions of the organization and the strategies to achieve those intentions. With the framework and its four elements, we propose a method for modeling the learning organization and organizational change by providing embedded flexibility. The next level for research is in identifying the influence between different facets, strategy selection, and development of guidelines for models of learning organizations

A Framework for Analyzing Business/Information System Alignment Requirements.

International audienceIn order to provide a competitive advantage to the enterprise, the business strategy and processes and its information system (IS) need to be aligned. Achieving strategic alignment continues to be a major concern for business executives and becomes more difficult to handle in an evolving environment. The literature provides conceptual frameworks dividing a company representation in independent and exchanging layers and aiming at the strategic alignment. In this paper, we describe eight among these works. Aiming a better understanding of the Business/IS alignment requirements, we propose an analysis framework, in which we position the studied approaches, and we bring out the most important results related to the forces and weaknesses of these approaches

Towards a Generic Context Model for BPM

International audienceThis paper introduces a new context modeling approach for the business process management field. The proposed approach aims at identifying and formalizing the contextual knowledge relevant to business processes in order to be able to adapt business processes according to the context. This approach has the particularity to be generic and extensible; it can be integrated with many business process modeling approaches. It is based on ontologies and has two layers, i.e. generic layer and specific layer. Throughout the paper we compare the proposed approach with the related work in order to clearly demonstrate why we propose this approach