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What the new IT manager needs to know

The information systems field has changed dramatically in the past 10 years. The education many IT managers received was weighted toward computer science, but now they are finding that their companies need something different. Companies need the IT team to find ways to use technology for business advantage, a very different kind of task. What's needed is a different approach to IT, a different way of thinking. Information systems Professor Robert St. Louis is the faculty director of the W. P. Carey School's new Online MSIM program. The program is designed to prepare managers to identify the next wave of technology innovation, and pick out those aspects that will make their companies succeed. St. Louis talks about the courses students in this new program will take. It's a Top 10 list of what the new IT manager needs to know.

2011-08-02

The information systems field has changed dramatically in the past 10 years. The education many IT managers received was weighted toward computer science, but now they are finding that their companies need something different. Companies need the IT team to find ways to use technology for business advantage, a very different kind of task. What's needed is a different approach to IT, a different way of thinking. Information systems Professor Robert St. Louis is the faculty director of the W. P. Carey School's new Online MSIM. The program is designed to prepare managers to identify the next wave of technology innovation, and pick out those aspects that will make their companies succeed. St. Louis talks about the courses students in this new program will take: It's a Top 10 list of what the new IT manager needs to know. July, 2011 [podcast id="1"] Questions and answers   This podcast is brought to you by KnowIT, discovering new ways to use technology for competitive advantage. KnowIT is produced by the department of information systems at the W. P. Carey School of Business. KnowIT: The information systems field has changed dramatically in the past ten years. The education many IT managers received was weighted toward computer science. Now these managers are finding out that their companies need something different. Companies want their IT people to find ways to use technology for business advantage — a very different kind of task. Here's Information Systems Professor Robert St Louis from the W. P. Carey School of Business. KnowIT:When people look at the difference between executive education and technical education, in technical education what you're trying to do is to let people understand how to do something very well. So you're talking about a very well-defined process, and you're saying, what's the best way to manage that very well-defined process? The problem with using technology to add value to organizations is you're looking at unstructured problems. What we try to do in our program is get people to be able to ask the right questions so that they can see how to deal with an unstructured problem. KnowIT:So what's needed is a different approach to IT; a different way of thinking. St. Louis: You have to move the thinking away from focusing on what the technology is to focusing on what the problem is. You have to teach them to ask the right questions to truly understand the problem. The world is full of examples where people simply didn't ask the right question, and, as a result of that, they weren't able to make the right decision. KnowIT: As the rate of technological innovation accelerates, businesses that do not use technology to its fullest will fall behind. St. Louis: Virtually anybody who's in the computer industry says there's going to be more change in the next 25 years than there was in the last 100 years. Over the next 25 years, things that have been on the drawing board for years are going to become realities. Consider Google's experiment with cars that drive themselves. We've been seeing this sort of thing in science fiction, but it's a reality now — they're actually approved for use in Nevada. You're going to see self-driving cars on the road in the near future. And this is true in every industry. You can't come at this with the old mindset; you have to come at this with a very different mindset in terms of saying 'what's going to be possible in the future, and how are we going to use it?' Even more importantly, 'how are we going to be the first to do it?' Because the firms that are going to be successful are the firms that recognize trends and act on them before they're generally recognized as being trends. KnowIT: St. Louis is the faculty director of the W.P. Carey School's new online MSIM program — the same curriculum and faculty as the Master of Science and Information Management program offered on the W.P. Carey campus. The program is designed to prepare managers to identify the next wave of technology innovation and pick out those aspects that will make their companies succeed. St. Louis: What we want to try to do in the program is to get people into that mindset to always be looking for opportunities — not to be blinded by what's happened in the past, but to understand what's coming down the road with respect to technology and to be able to see how to use that in order to improve the organizations. KnowIT: St. Louis says that most people have been exposed to pieces of information technology but they have gaps in their knowledge. St. Louis: So what we try to do is to arrange a series of 10 courses all of which focus around the theme of using information to add — or using information technology — to add value to businesses. KnowIT: St. Louis said that the courses are five weeks long. They're taken one at a time, build on each other and culminate in a project that applies everything students have learned to a real issue in a real company. St. Louis: The first course that we offer is strategy. The idea is you have to use information technology to support the strategy or the strategic objectives of the organization. Again the idea is to get people to think not of information technology for technology's sake, but think of information technology to add value to the organization. KnowIT: The next class explores business processes. St. Louis: The way that we're going to add value is by improving the business processes. If you don't think of everything as being a process, then you're unable to see how to use information technology to improve those processes. KnowIT: The third course if data management. St. Louis: To really improve things, you have to look at the data. If you try to do things from a dogmatic or a philosophical point of view, you're going to miss all of your opportunities because you basically have blinders on. What you have to be able to do is to see what the evidence show? What does work? What does add value and what doesn't add value? Then you have to quickly abandon the things that don't add value, and, as soon as possible, you have to discover the things that do add value. KnowIT: Next students learn about business intelligence. St. Louis: You have to be able to sort out noise from signal. One of the biggest problems that organizations have is they chase fads, and chasing fads won't get you anywhere. You have to actually understand what does and doesn't add value, and you can't do that just by looking at data itself. The data itself will overwhelm you, and so you have to have some way to be able to analyze that data to figure out what really is the signal. What really does add value and what really is a fad and doesn't add value. KnowIT: Once you've collected the data and discerned the relevant trends, they next issue to address is security; the topic of the fifth course. St. Louis: What the course really focuses on is how do you train people to understand the risks associated with the data. Another big component of security is privacy. The notion that you want to collect everything that you possibly can is actually a bad idea. You have to be able to figure out what information needs to be stored, and what information needs to be safeguarded, and what information actually shouldn't be stored and shouldn't be used by the organization. KnowIT: The next class explores the IT issues involved in doing business on the web. St. Louis: Today more and more business is being done over the web. That requires a different environment. In the physical world, place is probably the most important thing, but place means absolutely nothing when you're talking about electronic commerce. Place ends up being supplemented by trust and by value congruence, and so what you have to do is explain what's necessary. It turns out that trust is an absolute prerequisite for being able to do business over the Internet. So you have to think of things in a completely different manner in order to be successful when you're doing things in a virtual environment as opposed to doing things in a face-to-face environment. KnowIT: The seventh class covers enterprise systems. St. Louis: When organizations merge, they always say the biggest problem they have is getting the information systems to communicate with each other. So what you have to do is to look at how do we fix these things so that we don't have isolations or isolated databases. You have to fix it so that not only can you have communication within the organization, but even more importantly, you have to figure out how communicate between organizations because you can't get an effective supply chain if you don't look at things from an enterprise standpoint. KnowIT: The eighth course explores how to deal with emerging technologies, and the best example of an emerging technology right now is the cloud. St. Louis: People have talked about technology as being a utility for a long time, but it's really coming to pass right now. Again, a big part of the program is to train people for future; not for the past. To do that, you have to really understand which technologies are becoming viable and are going to become viable in the future. KnowIT: Project management is the last course before students tackle the applied project. St. Louis: The biggest complaint that people make against IT is that it always comes in late and it always comes in over budget. People really have to figure out how to manage information technology projects so that they're completed both on time and within budget. It really can be done, but it takes a certain discipline to do that, and this course talks about what that discipline is. KnowIT: The applied project draws together all of the skills that were learned separately during the program. St. Louis: What we want to make sure if that everyone who comes through the program has had a least one experience with an actual organization at using information technology to add value. In this course, students pick a particular industry, explain why they picked that industry; pick a particular company explain why they picked that particular company; pick a particular process, explain how they used information technology to improve that process; and then finally, explain how they would sell it to management, that this, in fact, is a change that ought to be funded by the organization. KnowIT: At the end of the 16 months, students will understand how to use information technology to add value to organizations. If you're interested, you can learn more about the online MSIM by going to Online MSIM. For more about the department of information systems, visit KnowIT.    

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