I developed the original Management of Information Systems curriculum at UMKC during the 1993-4 academic year. This curriculum was designed in consultation with an advisory board of Chief Information Officers (CIOs) from most of Kansas City's largest companies. In brief, the CIOs wanted a curriculum to give people in the technical world the ability to think about business strategically. The first courses were offered in 1994-5. The curriculum was aimed at technically-trained people who wanted to add management techniques to their skill set.
About 1997, I noticed that it seemed as if only about half of the students in the program were the sort of people it was aimed at: students who had undergraduate degrees in engineering, computer science, or information systems. We were also attracting a number of students with virtually no computer skills at all. The curriculum was a disservice to this latter sort of person. To check my hunch, I conducted a survey, and found nearly half the students were what we originally envisioned. But, unfortunately, about a quarter had no job experience and zero or one previous courses in technology, and the emphasis area had little value for them. About a quarter had some experience or training beyond one course but short of a major in the field.
I tried for several years to initiate changes in our advising procedures to warn off people for whom the curriculum was inappropriate. Around 2000, I concluded that approach was insufficient, and I began searching for a curriculum that would somehow serve each of these student groups. I concluded that we could do this in two ways. First, we changed our design courses to include both strategic material and object-oriented tactical material. Object-oriented methods are new enough for now that even those with degrees in the field are generally not trained in it. Second, we changed our introductory course (BIS 502) to teach web publishing and Visual Basic. (Experienced programmers can waive that course.) Subsequent courses build on that by including assignments and classroom examples that use Visual Basic for Applications. In fall 2001, we introduced this major change in the curriculum. The curriculum continues to emphasize management principles, but we began to use the Unified Modeling Language (UML) as our illustrative tool for documenting requirements and design, and we use Microsoft Office to illustrate systems construction. Prerequisite material on Visual Basic is now taught in BIS 502. In our database management course, I have replaced entity-relationship diagrams with UML class diagrams. Students use IBM's Rational Rose tool to develop class diagrams.
As I revise this statement in 2011, I realize that it is time once again to revise our MIS curriculum. It is time to reduce hands-on skills and move towards a stronger focus on knowledge management, requirements analysis, proposal evaluation, and vendor relationships. We will start working on this in connection with the rollout over the next three years of our new MBA (see below).
In the past ten years, the Management of Information Systems curriculum has evolved.
As an active contributor to this evolution, I have worked to support changing the curriculum to
prepare students for the ever-changing workplace of using and managing information technology.
In the 2009-2010 academic year, another smaller group tried again.
Miraculously, the group achieved consensus, and produced a recommendation
that was approved by the faculty (another miracle).
That recommendation will be phased in starting in fall of 2011.
Details of the new program can be found at
http://umkc.edu/newblochmba.
Back to Roger Pick's
Teaching Portfolio
Master of Business Administration
In the 2005-2006 academic year, I was chair of our "Graduate Subcommittee of the AACSB Committee."
As our MBA enrollments have been losing market share during my entire time at UMKC,
I decided to approach this chairmanship proactively.
It turns out that there is no consensus among my colleagues about the nature of our
problem or even whether or not there is a problem.
Nonetheless, we spent a lot of time and collected a lot of data.
There were a number of problems that we agreed were problems.
I did not want all of this fact-finding effort to be lost.
Determined that there should be some sort of tangible product, I wrote
a report that
recommended a series of specific studies
and recommendations for administrative action in those cases where we had a consensus.
Those recommendations were not acted upon.
Contact me at
pick@acm.org; or
Bloch Business School, University of Missouri - Kansas City,
5110 Cherry Street, Kansas City, MO, 64110-2499 US; or
(816) 235-2336.
Last Updated: 25 April 2011
© Copyright 2003-2011 Roger Alan Pick.