ICIS 2011 Panel Report: Are We on the Wrong Track and Do MIS Curricula Need to Be Reengineered?

David Gefen, Arik Ragowsky, Ephraim R. McLean, M. Lynne Markus, Suzanne Rivard, Matti Rossi
2012 Communications of the Association for Information Systems  
The discipline of MIS has been going through extensive soul searching in recent years. Part of that soul searching deals with the question of whether we are teaching our students the right material considering the emerging apparent rift, caused in part by new technologies, between what the industry needs and what we teach. This article summarizes a panel on this topic held at the 32 nd meeting of the International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS) in Shanghai 2011. The objective of the
more » ... nel was to contrast what industry tells us they need and we do not give them, as presented by Gefen and Ragowsky based on several years of CIO roundtables and interviews, with a "balanced head" perspective presented by some of the most respected leaders in our field. The panel attracted an audience of approximately 160 attendees who took an active role in the discussion. Rather surprisingly, disagreements among the panelists were not as pronounced as might have been expected, and the audience mostly supported the antagonist position. We present this summary to our colleagues in MIS in the hope of eliciting a continued discussion on this crucial issue.
doi:10.17705/1cais.03011 fatcat:tnew5sfyizhjpjt7ov5l4npdu4