now have. This trend will accelerate resulting in fewer programming jobs for
our students. Should we continue to
produce more programmers?
In addition to the basics like data
communications, database management, and enterprise applications,
21st-century IS programs should focus
on business analytics, supply-chain
optimization, technology performance
management, business process modeling, full-view business intelligence,
sourcing, and large amounts of technology management skills—in short, many
of the items on the list of practitioner
knowledge and skills.
CS programs can enable IS programs. The knowledge and skills areas
proposed by the Joint Task Force should
be extended to link to the knowledge
and skills on the IS side. Clearly, the
programs need to be coordinated—if
we want to produce marketable human
products.f The figure here suggests how
this might work. The Joint Task Force
f. Most CS and IS programs exist on islands in
most universities. They seldom coordinate curricula and generally have relatively little contact.
knowledge and skills areas appear on
the left and the practitioner knowledge
and skills appear on the right side of the
figure. In the middle are some “bridges”
that might shrink the gap between the
two areas. These bridges might become
required for both CS and IS curricula and
help CS programs become more relevant
and IS programs more grounded in the
enabling technology that supports business processes and transactions.
The essence of these suggestions is
that CS and IS curriculum must dramatically change if we are to help our students
compete. What was technologically significant 10 years ago is not nearly as significant today: hardly anyone needs to know
how to program in multiple languages
or craft complex, elegant algorithms that
demonstrate alternative paths to the same
computational objective. We know more
about what software needs to do today
than we did a decade ago—and you know
what? There’s less to do and support. This
is the effect standards and commoditization have on an industry.
Our job as educators is to prepare students for the technology world-to-be, not
the-one-that-was. A simple way to design
new CS and IS curriculum is to observe
what practitioners do today, project
what they’ll do tomorrow, and then
identify the requisite enabling technologies (which will lead to new CS curriculum) and applied technologies and best
practices (which will lead to new IS curriculum). I have attempted to energize
this process by contrasting the Joint
Task Force and practitioner knowledge
and skills areas. I believe strongly in rel-evance-driven education and training,
but also realize that not everyone believes education and training are closely
related or that universities are responsible for preparing students for successful careers. Many believe the creation
and communication of selected knowledge—regardless of its relevance to
practice or professional careers—is the
primary role of the modern university.
Differences of opinion are usually
healthy, so let the debate begin.
Stephen J. Andriole ( stephen.andriole@villanova.edu)
is the Thomas G. Labrecque Professor of Business at
Villanova University where he conducts applied research
in business-technology convergence.
© 2008 ACM 0001-0782/08/0700 $5.00
Counterpoint: Eric Roberts
AS I READ Stephen Andriole’s critique of computing education, I was
reminded of the classic
South Asian folk tale of
the blind men and the elephant. You
know the story: six blind men each try
to describe an elephant after touching only a part of it. The trunk is like a
snake, the tail is like a rope, the ear is
like a fan, and so on. Each description
contains a kernel of truth, but none
comes close to capturing the reality of
the elephant as a whole.
Andriole’s characterization of computing in the early 21st century suffers
from much the same failing in that it
attempts to generalize observations
derived from one part of the field to the
entire discipline. He begins by observing, correctly, that the last few years
have seen increasing “standardization
of software packages as the primary
platform on which large enterprises
compute and communicate.” But enterprise software is only part of the
computing elephant. Computing is integral to many sectors of the modern
economy: entertainment, education,
science, engineering, medicine, economics, and many more. In most of
those sectors, software is far from being a commodity product. Innovation
in these areas continues to depend on
developing new algorithms and writing
the software necessary to make those
algorithms real.
As an example, software development remains vital in the video game
industry, which accounts for more than
$10 billion a year in revenue. This sector is looking for people with an entirely
different set of skills than those Andriole enumerates in his survey of “
professionals” in the field—a category that he
restricts largely to senior management
concerned with enterprise-level information technology. That the hiring
criteria of a CIO for a Fortune 500 company would differ from those of a video
the Blind men and the elephant