Rudy Hirschheim
Ourso College of Business & Center for Computation and Technology Louisiana State University
Presentation to LSE Department of Information Systems 10 July 2006
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Is there a future?
Emasculation
"With dollars and people moving from corporate IS units to business units (and even further out to IT industry firms), central IS units (not just hardware) have been downsized. Corporate IS groups that once hired hundreds of people are today mere shadows of their former selves - sometimes only five or six people. (Markus 1999, p.184)
Press Reports
Wall Street Journal article suggesting if you are in IT, you need to find another job Bradburys Silicon.com article IT Department Headed for Extinction?
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Seems they hire 5+ year experienced people from consulting companies and /or vendors
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(1.) Are You Still Seeing a Fall Off in Student Majors or Has It Begun to Level Off or Even Increase?
WSU: The official count as of yesterday is 170 official majors. I suspect we'll be above 200 next year. We dipped to 90 I believe a couple years ago. Our business school now has more people trying to get in than it has the last four years (more than we can accommodate), so we're going to start doing a new enrollment management process to limit majors. While in our heyday we were in the high 400's (in terms of MIS majors), I suspect with enrollment management (and filtering on GPA) we'll target maximum growth at about 250 MIS majors. UVA: We saw a fall off of approximately 50% of our IT concentrators from our highs in 2000 to this year. The fall off does appear to have leveled off this year. LSU: IS student numbers at LSU continue to fall, although as a proportion, the decrease is pretty small now. We are currently at about 25% of what we were in the dotcom era. There is a feeling that the decrease has bottomed-out, but we're not sure when/if we'll see an upswing.
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(1.) Are You Still Seeing a Fall Off in Student Majors or Has It Begun to Level Off or Even Increase?
UCF: Our majors have dropped from 700 in 2002 to 300 this year. We have bottomed out but we see no increase as yet. Our MS/MIS program is down from 100 to 86 students. IU: Yes, we saw a significant drop -- in 2000 or so, we'd graduate 250 CIS majors; this year, slightly less than 100. I am hopeful that we are stabilizing, but the jury is still out. UGA: We are still seeing some fall off, but there is a topping up process within the Bschool. Those who can't get their major of choice are being sent to MIS, but it turns out that these students don't seem to care to much and are doing quite well and staying in the major. UH: Our incoming class of majors is the smallest in recent years (60) and approximately 15% of peak (400) our peak year.
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(2.) Roughly What Proportion of Your Students are Getting ISrelated Jobs?
WSU: Things are much better than 2 years ago. We are seeing SIGNIFICANT recruitment and internship opportunities. The companies are back in strength. Anybody good can get a job. LSU: No, demand is soft. Fortunately, there aren't many students we have to find jobs for... that is the good news. The bad news is that we're not seeing an upswing in demand. UCF: About 80% of our MIS graduates are working in MIS. The good students have multiple offers. Yes, demand began picking up about 6 months ago. IU: The job market is improving; the problem is, I fear, that we do not currently or in the near-term have enough students to deliver.
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(2.) Roughly What Proportion of Your Students are Getting ISrelated Jobs?
UVA: Roughly 90% of our IT concentrators got at least one job offer last year. The average number of offers per IT concentrator was 2.2. The average reported salary for IT concentrators was $46,393. UVA: We do seem to be experiencing a slight increase in recruiting at the undergraduate level this year, and a significant increase in job postings directed at the graduate students. UGA: We see an increase in demand, but I have no numbers. Recruiters are more active and good students get multiple offers. UH: Most of our most recent group of majors to graduate got IT related jobs. Typical salaries for those with no previous experience is in the low to mid 40's. Several students got multiple offers, with many of the turned down offers coming from programming body shops.
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(3.) What, If Anything, Have You Done to Increase the Numbers of Majors and has the Innovation Worked?
WSU:
(a.) We have put one of our best teachers in our intro section (b.) We changed our MIS club (student MIS social organization) to a Mu Iota Sigma Professional student organization, which will have officers selected by faculty (who will then be given scholarships). The idea here is to pick the best and brightest who can serve to communicate the MIS to the other students and make us more visible to the student body. In addition, in association with Mu Iota Sigma we're going to have the MIS Honor Roll (top students in our discipline). For both the officers and honor roll, we're going to publicize those people internally in our BSchool (bulletin board pictures, visiting classrooms, etc.). (c.) We took one of our most popular teachers and put him in charge of Mu Iota Sigma (d.) We also have plans for a MIS new-board on a central walkway in the b-school. The idea here is flat panels with rotating MIS content (here's jim bob working in a MIS career at Boeing..., here's the upcoming course offerings, here's where our recent grads got jobs), photos of item "b." above, photo's of faculty, faculty research, etc... The concept here is visibility to students.
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(3.) What, If Anything, Have You Done To Increase The Numbers Of Majors And Has The Innovation Worked?
LSU: We have done a lot of talking!!! We are trying to change the direction of the program more towards project management, security, and networks. We've talked about adding a course on 'Sourcing' but frankly our changes have been very, very modest. We've also talked about dramatically changing the program towards 'business processes'. With the rise in BPO, it seems that we in IS are best positioned to understand business processes, and given that most (all) are ITenabled, we are the natural field to teach/research this area. UCF: We have changed our curriculum adding an ERP Implementation (SAP) and a Data Mining classes but it's too soon to tell if that has had an effect. We also have begun to promote MIS as a major in the required College of Business MIS course. This has helped slightly. UVA: We are in the process of rolling out a new set of IT courses that are designed to be more interdisciplinary in nature, and offered in a more flexible (easy to access) structure. - COMM 420 - Project Management (all Commerce students, required of IT) - COMM 421 - Financial Systems Engineering (finance) - COMM 422 - Database Management (IT) - COMM 423 - E-Commerce (marketing) - COMM 424 - Innovation & Technology (all Commerce students) - COMM 427 - IT Project Practicum (IT) - COMM 428 - Data Communications (IT) This curriculum is designed to prepare IT concentrators for job types 3, 4, & 5 in the IT Job Pyramid (from a recent Business Week)..Early indications are that these changes will result in at least a slight increase in IT concentrators.
Rudy Hirschheim, 2006
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(3.) What, If Anything, Have You Done to Increase the Numbers of Majors and has the Innovation Worked?
IU: After a significant analysis of recruiting, student perceptions, etc etc. I significantly revised the requirements for our CIS major, largely to make it "easier" for students to double major, e.g., Accounting-CIS. This is rather popular with Kelley undergrads. I also introduced a new "business info systems" co-major. This is really a minor (we don't have minors) consisting of 4 core IS courses. My goal here is to service the other majors, e.g., Marketing, and increase enrollment in core courses. I need to minimize preps for faculty. Both changes were implemented this year so it is a bit too early to assess. UGA: We have tended to try offering service courses for other areas (e.g. accounting) OU: The new interdisciplinary (open to all business undergraduates as well as MIS) courses we have introduced are: -- E-Business (focusing on the net-enabled extended enterprise) -- Project/Relationship management -- Technology Management (similar to the Innovation and Technology at UVA) -- Business Data Modeling (an Excel based course focusing on building models used in finance, accounting, supply chain, etc.) UH: We are preparing a marketing campaign to convince students that there are jobs and that they pay well. We are following up with students that dropped out of our introductory course to find out why. We are bringing in speakers to talk to the intro class about careers in information systems. We may conduct focus groups of students in the introductory class that have not yet selected majors. We are looking for ways to demonstrate that IT careers are "cool" and "fun."
Rudy Hirschheim, 2006
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(4.) Is The Problem One of Supply (Too Few Students) or Demand (Too Few Jobs) And, How Serious is the Problem Identified?
UVA: The primary problem seems to have been perceived demand. That is, students have a perception that there won't be many IT-related jobs available when they graduate (due to offshoring, post dot com era, downsizing of IT, etc.). I am concerned that the smaller number of IT concentrators will result in a supply problem, causing recruiters to look elsewhere, and a downward spiral effect. LSU: The problem is VERY real.. it isn't a myth. What worries me is that many CIOs, or at least the CIOs of the big companies, don't seem too concerned about where their talent comes from. Most seem to hire (when they need to hire) from consulting firms. They let the Accentures of the world 'train' talent, which they then 'buy' later on an 'as needed basis. IT organizations seem too quick to turn activities over to third party providers, particularly offshore providers. This may likely come back and bite them in the proverbial ass, but by then, they will have all moved on leaving the mess for someone else to clear up! UCF: I think the problem is the perceived lack of employment opportunities. IU: Too few students. OU: we are experiencing a pickup in companies hiring ... We have more jobs than qualified MIS majors right now. The problem we are facing is dispelling the widespread view (in some cases, perpetuated by our colleagues in other departments) held by business undergraduates (and, perhaps, their parents) that there are no jobs when in fact there are very good jobs available.
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Copyright 2005 Computer Information Systems Department, Georgia State University. All rights reserved.
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IT Job Prospects
U.S. careers in Information Technology (IT) have continuously had better-than-average job security. Unemployment of IT workers (now at 5.23%) is still below national average (5.8%) for 2002. The employment growth of computer professionals was among the leaders as the economy climbed up its heated growth in the late 1990s; but it did not lead the economy down. In the first quarter of 2003, for example, unemployment of electrical engineers rose to 7.0% while computer and system analysts dropped to 4.9%. In December of 2001, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released their 2000-2010 employment projections, forecasting that eight of the ten fastest growing occupations would be computer-related, commonly referred to as information technology occupations. These jobs included software engineers, support specialists, network analysts, database administrators and systems analysts. BLS is still relying on these projections; their 2002-2003 edition of the Occupational Outlook Handbook forecasts much greater growth than average for most computerrelated careers. It shouldnt be surprising that BLS is sticking to its guns. The new decade is still young, and the BLS forecast for the 1990s correctly predicted much faster growth for eight of its top 11 growth jobs.
IT Sector Economy
When business heats up, information systems are the first to boil. It is likely that information strategy and electronic commerce will enable leading businesses to be first out of an economic downturn. For example, analysts at Standard & Poors estimate that worldwide e-commerce will exceed $1.6 trillion in 2003, up more than 52% from 2002. In their August issue, Business Week reports that the first half of 2003 saw corporate technology spending grow by 4%, forecasting a total of 6% in 2004, and close to 10% in 2005. Emerging from the recession, corporations are becoming more profitable and their technology spending is increasing. Based on these data, Business Week argues that the information technology industry is ideally positioned for strong growth. There is tremendous growth in new and innovative products such as smart phones, web services, wireless networks, and digital televisions. The number of US households with broadband connections now exceeds 20 million. We will soon need a workforce to build business information systems that take strategic advantage of these widespread new technologies. The effects continue to be worldwide. The OECD Observer in May 2003 reported that the most recent data reaffirmed global ministerial support for information technology growth as a core strategy for national economic productivity and leadership. The report went on to say In fact, the shrewd advice would be for policymakers to double their efforts to help firms seize the benefits of IT.
Richard Baskerville Professor and Chairman Computer Information Systems Department Robinson College of Business Georgia State University
http://www2.cis.gsu.edu/cis/about/shortage.asp
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So what?
What do we really know? Not much There are (at least) three possible scenarios Scenario 1:
Im OK, your OK. We simply look at the historical trend line, assuming that it is a good predictor of the future
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Dot.com effect
IS student numbers
late 90s
2005
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Scenario 2: IS is a Commodity*
Nicholas Carr is right IT Doesnt Matter But havent we heard all of this before? cf. Dearden, etc. IS is a commodity is old hat, it is just another attack on the fieldold wine in new bottlesnothing new here
* What exactly is a commodity? Is a commodity an 'input' or an 'output'? Also what is the relationship between 'commodity' and 'economies of scale'..... answer: nothing. But a more interesting issue is not what is or is not a 'commodity' but the act of 'commoditization, i.e. rationalization (see scenario 3). That is, how does an organization 'commoditize' its business processes? In a sense, that is what organizations do when they implement ERP. This also drives BPO. Rudy Hirschheim, 2006
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Scenario 3: Continued
IT as Enabler of Offshoring
IT is clearly an enabler that has opened up the opportunity for offshoring, and not just IS workit will expand to include many/most/all business processes
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But there is a key difference: IS is so ingrained/ embedded in all business processes it is hard to see it going away but it is changing Need to focus on business processes or the IT enabling of business processesthe good news is that we do this already with ERP, BPR, BPO, etc.
* But have they forgotten about us?
Rudy Hirschheim, 2006
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What about IT innovation? Will this too be the dominated by Chindia? Most researchers (in the West) believe IT innovation will continue to come from the West. But is this true?
Consider the book by Ashutosh Shashabalaya Rising Elephant (2005) Jeffrey Gartens [Yale Business School Dean] BusinessWeek article (Jan.31, 2005) The High-Tech Threat from China Lyytinen and Tilson claim that Korea and Japan are at least 6 years ahead of the US in the wireless innovation area
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Broad IS Challenges
IS governance how to manage the increasingly complex set of relationships and vendors who provide IT products and services domestic and offshore vendors, SBU IS units, corporate IS units, contractors, and customer desires IS alignment how to align IS strategy with business strategy Process outsourcing which processes to outsource? Commodity vs. strategic processes IS succession where does the next generation of IS leaders come from when most IS is outsourced?
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