DOI: 10.1145/1364782.1364792
In case you missed IT, the world has changed.
Point: Stephen J. Andriole
THE FIElD OF information technology is changing and those responsible for educating the next generation of technology (information systems, computer science, and computer engineering) professionals have responded with curriculum that fails to address the depth, speed, or direction of these changes. If we want our students to enjoy productive and meaningful careers, we need to radically change the content of the curriculum of our technology majors. a
The structure of the hardware/soft-ware/services technology industry is changing—morphing quickly from a set of fragmented hardware and software activities and vendors to a hard-ware/software/service provider model dominated by a shrinking number of vendors. IBM, Microsoft, HP, Dell, Intel, Oracle, Cisco, Accenture, EDS, CSC, and a few other companies are included in this $10B+ in revenue per year group.b
a. A more extensive discussion of these issues can be found in Stephen J. Andriole, “ Business Technology Education in the Early 21st Century: The Ongoing Quest for Relevance,” Journal of Information Technology Education, September 2006. I am referring here primarily to our undergraduate educational efforts.
b. Matthew Aslett, “CBR 50 Largest IT Vendors,”
Computer Business Review, July 19, 2006.
Is it improper to profile what these companies do and reverse engineer curricula? Most of these companies have robust R&D programs, manufacture hardware and software, and solve industry problems with technology. Their activities might well provide a useful—and obviously relevant— curriculum roadmap.
Another major trend is the standardization of software packages as the primary platform on which large enterprises compute and communicate. The software necessary to connect disparate software is no longer exclusively defined as proprietary middleware; instead, it’s embedded in applications by the major vendors through interoperability standards based on Web Services and its extensions, service-oriented architecture (SOA), and event-driven architecture (EDA). Software is also installed less as more more companies rent applications from hosting vendors like Salesforce.com, Microsoft, and now even SAP. Many CIOs really want to get out of the enterprise software acquisition, deployment, or support business: the demand curve for software-as-a-service (SaaS) is steep. c
c. SaaS is growing in popularity as more companies appreciate the benefits of renting software. This avoids the in-house implementation phase and large enterprise software licensing fees. Industry analysts from the Gartner Group and Forrester Research, among others, report that by 2012 25% of all software will be rented. The decline of proprietary software will also
Relatively few vendors will produce most of the world’s mainstream software in the coming years. The standardization of software will result in a concentration of software suppliers complying with a set of expanding integration and interoperability standards incarnated in evolving (service-oriented and event-driven) architectures. Just look at the mergers and acquisitions that have occurred in the software industry over the past few years. How many business intelligence (BI) vendors are independent? How many enterprise resource planning (ERP) vendors are left? Finally, greater amounts of software will exist only on servers accessed by increasingly thin clients. “Thin clients”—which have no local processing—will replace many “fat clients”—machines with lots of software, processing power, and storage.
When we layer outsourcing trends onto software trends, we see industry turning to offshore providers to satisfy their operational support requirements rather than U.S.-educated professionals who are not receiving enough of the knowledge or skills that industry values (or is willing to pay for, compared to offshore labor rates). Today those requirements are relatively low-level operational requirements but over time offshore providers will climb the food chain to more strategic technology capabilities. It’s these latter areas that should
be accelerated by the rising adoption of open source software.
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