Naked CIO: Put more business in IT education

What can be done to better train students for the IT workplace? The Naked CIO has some suggestions.

After reading a recent CIO Jury on whether universities are preparing youth properly for IT challenges, I began to think about why higher education is not effective. It wasn't long before I realised IT education has become too academic.

University programmes are research and theory-based - and thus not practically applicable to modern business and challenges. As a result we are preparing a new generation of computer engineers but not IT professionals.

Understanding technology in a modern organisation has less to do with technical know-how and more with management and methodology practices. Know-how also varies greatly depending on the environment and discipline - and the generalist education is woefully inept at preparing young minds to apply technical skills in specialised environments.

The ultimate education question is: how do you prepare young technology minds to be a good fit into progressive organisations? Moreover, how do institutions provide the technical knowledge while ensuring their students can apply this within a practical business environment?

Firstly, as IT is as much an applied art as it is a science, the practical elements that prepare students in other disciplines are absent in IT education. Secondly, businesses that would ultimately benefit from better graduates are not involved enough in developing and guiding curriculum to develop better grads.

I recently sat on a search committee for a practical educational programme that is looking for an IT-specific course to advance IT in the business sector the programme caters to. The programme is a novel way to educate students on how IT impacts that particular industry. However, these students are not interested in IT but rather benefit from knowing how it is applied in their industry.

What was extremely prevalent in this process was that those qualified to teach IT bring little or no understanding of IT processes and challenges within businesses. There are mostly career academics who look at IT from an 'academic versus business' perspective.

A prime example of the differences between practical and academic concepts is in the area of data management. An organisation looks at data as knowledge. More specifically it has to understand the context and relationship of data to one another in order for it to become knowledge and thus useful within a business. Academic theory, on the other hand, looks at data as a construct that is defined by distinct rules.

The two approaches garner very different results with respect to the same data set.

So what's the answer?

We need more professors who bring business experience into the classroom.

It is more difficult to apply academic theory to businesses than it is to apply business understanding within the academic environment. This is where we need to work to change the attitudes and curriculum to support the modern business needs of IT within organisations.