2017 EDSIG Proceedings - Abstract Presentation
Information Systems Strategy capstone course dedicated to storage technology
Doncho Petkov
Eastern Connecticut State University
Abstract
The IS 2010 model curriculum specifies a capstone course on IS Strategy, Management and Acquisition. The capstone course on Information Systems and Business Strategy within the BIS program at Eastern Connecticut State University is aligned with it. The author decided around 2007 to look for ways to make it more relevant to recent technology developments. That coincided with the ISECON 2007 conference attendance of presentations about the EMC Academic Alliance and the storage technology course at Penn State University. A week-long training for the author was provided by EMC soon. The existing staffing constraints within our program did not allow the offering of a new course. Thus was born the idea to introduce storage technology in the IS strategy capstone in spring of 2008. Other universities face similar constraints in their curriculum while the IT industry faces shortages for storage experts (and other specialized areas) and that is the motivation for this presentation. The purpose of this talk is to share the experiences of the author associated with providing this course for ten years with respect to its content, delivery and assessment as well as with the EMC academic alliance.
The IS strategy formulation process we follow is influenced by the ideas of Jerry Luftman while the content on IS management topics is based on the book by Pearlson, Saunders and Galetta titled Managing & Using Information Systems. The latter has also a useful chapter on Architecture and IS Infrastructure. The second half of the course is dedicated to Storage Technologies following a book written by EMC staff. The combination of storage technologies and IS Strategy in a 3 credit capstone course led to the need to reduce the coverage of several IS management topics and of details of Network Attached Storage, Storage Area Networks and Content Addressable Storage but the course covers in its storage part RAID systems, backup and recovery, security and data center management.
The Dell EMC academic alliance web site is a useful forum for sharing experience with other instructors. EMC provided also very good instructor resources. These are focused on the principles and not specifically on EMC products. The wealth of information on recent developments in storage technologies helps instructors keep up with the developments in one of the most dynamic areas of the IT industry. The academic alliance is also an important resource to the students on job trends and other issues.
The culminating experience for the students is the team project on IT storage strategy. Its project assessment uses a rubric that relates the program goals to the goals of this capstone course. The students develop also a research paper that is a review of the state of the art on a topic from a list of 35 areas chosen in consultation with the instructor. Thus the students get exposure to the areas of IS management that could not be covered in lectures due to time constraints.
The past experience of combining technical content on storage technologies with relevant IS strategic management topics made the IS strategy course probably more time demanding for the instructor in the early years but that was fully compensated by the improved practical relevance of the course.
Recommended Citation: Petkov, D., (2017). Information Systems Strategy capstone course dedicated to storage technology. Proceedings of the EDSIG Conference, (2017) n.4463, Austin, Texas