Communications - July 2008

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.

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 21^st 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