"Out of Sight, Out of Mind": The Case for Academic MIS Standardization

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“So Adam, what exactly do you do for a living?”

If you’re in my field – management information systems and specifically business-oriented IT consulting – that question almost certainly invokes a great deal of dread.  It’s not that you’re embarrassed of your work or that all business technologists have entered into a secretive covenant to remain mum on the nature of our jobs.  No, rather simply, you dread explaining the role of an IT auditor to a person who thinks that all “computer people” write code or fix malfunctioning hard drives; you have before, perhaps, found yourself twisted into semantic pretzels attempting to explain why companies are willing to shell out hundreds of thousands of dollars for largely intangible projects with names such as “Independent Verification and Validation” – which probably just sounds like a bunch of confusing, valueless $350/hour paper shuffling to the person on the other end of the conversation.

In other words, you are irritated because you frequently encounter a problem that accountants, bankers, and economists seldom do – explaining the very nature of your profession to a public that remains largely unaware of its role and significance.

There are several causes to this recurring problem.  In the grand scheme of things, information systems is a relatively new field; while the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) traces its roots back to 1887, the Information Systems Audit and Control Association (ISACA) was only founded in 1967.  Generations of adults alive today came of age in a world in which bank transactions, library cataloging,  accounts receivable aging, and customer credit ratings were all performed entirely without the assistance of information systems.  Furthermore, the nature of much of our work is highly specialized and generally out of public view.  However, given the increasingly pervasive role of IT in daily life – quick! try to think of a business or organization that doesn’t use IT in some manner – the profundity of these misconceptions is startling.

Is this is a serious problem, or just a mild annoyance for technologists forced to constantly explain their work?  Evidence from corporate America would suggest the former.  The view that IT is nothing more than a troublesome cost center to be minimized, not nurtured – perhaps best exemplified through Nicholas Carr’s now famous Harvard Business Review article IT Doesn’t Matter – remains shockingly widespread in C-suites across the country.  Of the fifteen largest Fortune 1000 corporations, only eight (53%) have a CIO or VP of IT sitting on the Executive Committee with equal stature to a COO or CFO.  CIO magazine’s 2009 State of the CIO survey indicates that only 44% of CIOs working at companies with more than $1 billion in revenue report directly to the CEO.  According to a recent poll by ChangeWave, more than 20% of corporations surveyed planned on reducing IT investments over the next fiscal year – in spite of IT’s tried and proven track record of driving efficiencies and reducing operating costs.

After all, when you believe that IT is only responsible for repairing broken motherboards and testing code – well, that and burning through copious amounts of cash with little ROI to show in return - why take it seriously?  Even worse than those who reject the value of IT are the corporate directors and executives – many of whom climbed the corporate ladder decades before the information revolution – who do not even claim to understand the nature and role of IT in the business.

It is incumbent on the MIS profession to aggressively tackle the problem of low name recognition  and under-appreciation over the next 10 years.  As the younger tech-savvy generations (those born after 1979) rise into maturity and corporate leadership, a significant portion of the problem will resolve itself.  However, significant change needs to occur at our nation’s universities and community colleges before we can expect to see a widespread change in public perception of IT.  I am a case in point.  When I matriculated at the University of Florida in 2005, I selected Computer Science as my major.  I fully expected to graduate and become a Programmer or Systems Analyst.  It was not until my Sophomore year that I even became aware of the field of MIS and switched over to UF’s MIS program in the College of Business Administration.  And I’m no tech-neophyte; I was already using my first computer in 1991 at the ripe old age of four.  How many of today’s talented, technically astute undergraduate students are bypassing a career in MIS/IT purely out of lack of knowledge about our field and what MIS careers entail?  While it is impossible to know this number with certainty, I have no doubt that it would drop the jaws of many i-School deans and administrators.

There is a very fundamental (and very easy) way in which universities can and must help our field overcome the “out of sight, out of mind” problem – standardization.  There is already minimal variance in the curriculum taught in MIS programs across the country.  Based on the wild variance in naming, however, you would never assume this to be so:

University	Name of MIS Program
University of Florida	Information Systems & Operations Management (until 2009 Decision and Information Sciences)
Georgia State University	Computer Information Systems
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign	Library and Information Sciences (with an “Information Systems” specialization)

Here you have three public universities with a total of four titles in circulation for what is essentially the same degree; and not one of them utilizes the most well-known title of “Management Information Systems.”  Is it any wonder that many of us cringe at the prospect of explaining our job roles to strangers when we can't even agree on the name of our academic degree?

Within ten years, a widespread standardization program coordinated among our nation’s universities would have a tremendous, indelible effect on the name recognition and appreciation of the MIS field.  Such a standardization program might encompass the following steps:

1.      Universal name standardization of all degrees in the field.  The most common-sense approach would be standardization around the name “Management Information Systems.”

2.      Standardization of the colleges/schools within universities that offer the degree.  Examples such as Carnegie Mellon’s Heinz College – a public policy school offering a degree (Master of Information Systems Management, MISM) that assuredly has nothing to do with public policy – must become a thing of the past.  There seem to be two equally acceptable solutions:  assigning this academic realm to business schools (perhaps resulting in the rewarding of an MBA-IS or a MISM-type degree a la Carnegie Mellon); or alternately, assigning it to independent “i-Schools” such as the extremely successful University of California at Berkeley model.

3.      Effective and near-universal partnership of MIS programs nationwide, perhaps through an expansion of the existing i-School initiative or the formation of a new organization.  This organization would play a role similar to the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB), albeit on a more micro-level.

4.      The mobilization of a more aggressive professional presence at the nation’s universities by organizations such as the Association of Information Technology Professionals (AITP) and ISACA.  It is imperative that these organizations target not only upperclassmen who have already chosen MIS as a career route, but also underclassmen who – like me in 2005 – are often clueless about the field.

Perhaps it would be an exhibition of extreme naiveté to assume that MIS will ever enjoy the widespread name recognition of fields such as Marketing, Accounting, and Economics.  However, it is not too hard to believe that an aggressive and coordinated effort – such as the one outlined here – will produce tremendously beneficial effects for the field going forward.

Note:  The opinions expressed in this and all Bizteck articles are exclusively those of the author and do not express any implicit or explicit endorsement by any of his current or previous employers.