Vviewpoints
DOI: 10.1145/1364782.1364792
Point/Counterpoint
Technology Curriculum
for the Early 21st Century
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
change
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.
