Training Students to Intervene in Information Systems Inherently Involves Organizational and Technology Skill Acquisition

The radical restructuring in enterprises caused by both global competition and technological innovation has created a new class of problems requiring a synthesis of organizational and technological skills. This class of problems is of central importance to all enterprises today and is critical to Small Medium Enterprises (SMEs). In this paper we explore our hypothesis that these problems exist and can be meaningfully identified and attacked by both university researchers and managers within enterprises. We further hypothesize that it is possible to design a program of training that prepares individuals to tackle these problems in real world situations by teaching both organizational and technology skills within a single program. We present case history data from four separate training programs that we have conducted along these lines in order to evaluate our hypotheses. Our data include the course structure, evaluations from students, professors, and industry partners as well as evaluations of the experiences of our students while applying their new skills in solving problems at a participating enterprises site. I. A NEW CLASS OF PROBLEMS REQUIRING A SYNTHESIS OF ORGANISATIONAL AND TECHNOLOGICAL SKILLS The pace of introduction of innovation in enterprises has never been faster. New technologies, new services, products and markets emerge with unprecedented speed. As obvious as this observation may seem to be, it has important implications for the way of doing business on one hand and for the way of correctly training people on the other hand [1]. In such a continuously changing environment, new paradigms for higher educational curricula need to be investigated and deployed [2]. We believe that the introduction of most of these innovations have, at their core, problems requiring a synthesis of organizational and technological skills. In fact the effects of the introduction of innovation are not limited to information management. They can profoundly change the organization itself. For instance, as a result of such evolution, virtual enterprises are emerging as a new industrial paradigm [3] [4] as more and more companies reduce their wholly owned activities down to a core competence and run lean. They employ outsource service providers for a large range of operations. The agility, or the continuous change of such enterprises, creates a strong requirement for integrated solutions and for people capable of managing the introduction and successful deployment of these solutions. If we are to effectively teach the practitioners who will be developing and adapting IS solutions for industry, we have determined that we must include instructional components directed at both organizational and technology skill acquisition. A. Our Working Hypothesis Based upon our early experience teaching the use of IS both in university traditional curricula and higher education courses for adult students, we concluded that in order to solve effectively enterprise problems, it was necessary to teach the students more than just the applicable technologic skills. Proficiency with the tools was necessary, but it did not guarantee that problems could be solved in real world settings. We quickly realized that the ability to function in small groups and the ability to understand common patterns in organizations were equally strong in determining the outcome of an intervention at an industry site. Proficiency with the technology alone was not sufficient. We can organize our intuitions about the interaction between organization and information processing technologies into the following hypotheses: § Problems with organizational and technology aspects can be identified and are important to both to large and medium-small enterprises now ü They will be difficult to find because they involve sensitive issues at the core of the enterprise (not to be shared with outsiders) ü Problems with both aspects can be small enough to be meaningfully attacked by a single individual § Organizational and Technology skills can be taught to individuals in a combined program ü An Active Learning Methodology will be effective ü Teaching small group interaction can be effective ü Internship is essential for motivation and context § Students trained in this way will be able to solve real problems in enterprises settings ü Students will find the practical experience satisfying and valuable ü Industrial partners will feel that the intervention of the students at their site has been a success ü Industrial partners will want to hire such students and want more interns from future training courses These three major hypotheses, together with their subsidiaries, have formed the guiding principles behind a series of training courses and interventions at enterprises sites that we have carried out during the past five years. In the remainder of this paper, we summarize the context in which these hypotheses were derived, describe our training experiences, present what we have learned about the validity of the hypotheses, and briefly describe some of our future plans. B. International Responses to these Issues Educational programs trying to integrate technical, organizational and business aspects have been in place for several years. In Germany, you will find Wirtschaftsingenieure from faculties of Engineering, i.e. graduates that have passed programs combining Economics and Engineering, and Wirtschaftsinformatiker from faculties of Economics, who have studied Economics and Informatics. The general structure of these programs is a 2-year education, which is basically common for all students, followed by a specialization in Economics for engineers or Informatics for economists. Also in Sweden, similar programs have been established since the early 1980s, mainly under the name of Systemvetenskap. At many European universities you will find programs that combine systems analysis and development with skills in organizational analysis and improvement, leading to a Bachelors or Masters degree. These integrated programs have been an early attempt to bring together skills from different disciplines. For students with a background in other areas, it is also possible to study individual courses of these programs in addition to their normal tracks. Another possibility is to complete traditional curriculum with ad-hoc post-graduated education like Master courses on selected topics [2]. C. Our Response focuses on post-graduate training courses and on SMEs The Laboratory for Informatics Engineering at the University of Trento is involved in a multi-year program of research, technology development, technology transfer, and professional training on the use of emerging information and communication technologies for supporting enterprise innovation. The main body of experiences we have gather from our work with local enterprises has been focused on Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in the private sector and with relatively large enterprises in the public sector. Our experiences on the problems related to the introduction of innovation have been collected during the years through three main channels: § applied research projects with enterprises, § internships projects in connection with a three year degree course in Engineering Informatics of the faculty of Engineering, and § internships projects in connection with higher education training courses both for unemployed people and for lifelong training of enterprises personnel. SMEs face a specific challenge as the pace of technological advancement quickens. In order to keep pace with new information-based tools for engineering design, these SMEs need new problem solving and knowledge management tools [5]. They need to analyze the new tools and methodologies, select the most appropriate, deploy the solutions and train their workforce. Larger corporations can relay on the presence of various skills within the company to create successful teams, can afford external consultants to assist the change management, and broadly based training programs, while SMEs cannot. The typical result from this lack of analysis capacity of SMEs is the focusing of their interest on particular onedimensional problems, either connected to the technological or the organizational aspect only. By collecting and monitoring SMEs proposal for research and internships projects we have been able to identify this trend. The majority of the proposed projects involved the deployment of a particular innovation (technological or organizational) that the middle management of the enterprises believed to provide a competitive edge. Most of the times the innovation required massive entrepreneurial challenges: radical re-invention of internal or external processes, managing alliances and networking strategies, issues related to organizational memory and knowledge management problems. In the course of time, we have developed original responses to these needs. II. TRAINING STUDENTS TOWARDS AN INTEGRATED ORGANIZATIONAL AND TECHNOLOGICAL CULTURE We believe that organizational and technology skills can be taught more effectively to individuals in integrated educational curricula. This type of courses help in acquiring the integrated culture needed for professional figures to tackle the class of problems described in the first section . Designing these training programs presents different challenges: contents, structures and methodologies need to be carefully analyzed and implemented. Educational strategies to address the problem of effectively linking Information Systems theory and real world issues need to be proposed, analyzed and tested. In this paper we will present and discuss contents, organization and methodologies for four types of post-degree courses for new professions for qualified/graduated unemployed people. We have started our experiences with two courses offered to post-degree students on mainly technological topics: § “Distributed databases” (DB), dealing with computer networking e