Available online at ScienceDirect. Procedia Economics and Finance 20 ( 2015 )

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1 Available online at ScienceDirect Procedia Economics and Finance 20 ( 2015 ) th International Conference on Globalization and Higher Education in Economics and Business Administration, GEBA 2013 Information systems analysts and designers.academic/research supply vs market demand Marin Fotache a, *, Georgiana Olaru a, Viorel Iacoban a a Al. I. Cuza University, B-dul Carol 1 nr.22, Iasi, , Romania Abstract Although capital in professional profile of Information Systems graduates, Analysis and Design is underrepresented in Information Systems leading journals and often taught by theorists without any link to the business practice. This paper briefly examines the lack of reality touch in Information Systems research and emphasizes the peril of hiring business professors based mainly on abstract research. The place of Analysis and Design in Information Systems curricula is discussed. Also a number of common questions for Analysis/Design courses teaching and content are revealed. The market demands are pointed out with reference to two recent surveys (performed in USA and Romania) of Information Systems graduates/professionals focused on topics to be covered and skills to be developed by the Analysis/Design related courses The The Authors. Authors. Published Published by by Elsevier Elsevier B.V. B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license Selection ( and peer-review under responsibility of the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, Alexandru Ioan Cuza University Peer-review of under Iasi. responsibility of the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iasi. Keywords: Information Systems (IS) IS research ; IS curricula ; IS professionals ; IS Analysis and Design 1. Introduction: Rigor versus relevance in Information Systems teaching and research Part of the business studies and research, Information Systems (IS) domain inherits many of their doubts and critics but also has its own problems. Common to almost all economics and business research there is a growing research schizophrenia. Desperately seeking to improve international rankings, universities focus more and more on research and less and less on teaching. Consequently, as Bennis and O Toole [1] pointed out, business schools hire * Corresponding author. address: fotache@uaic.ro The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license ( Peer-review under responsibility of the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iasi. doi: /s (15)

2 Marin Fotache et al. / Procedia Economics and Finance 20 ( 2015 ) teachers based mostly on research which increasingly is out of touch of reality. After being hired, faculty members must teach students how to face day-to-day practical problems. We argue that, compared to hard scientists, researchers in economics and business must have deeper concerns about the relevance of their work simply because economics and business must deal with real problems and phenomena. With some exceptions [1] [2], currently researchers do not deal with such unpleasant questions keeping mum about the subject. To their credit IS academics and researchers have raised many times the problem of richness and relevance for their area of interest [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [11] [10] [12]. Self-examination is a general trait of IS community, because from its inception IS domain has manifested a depressing identity crisis [14] [16] [15]. The question of rigor and relevance is particularly important for areas like Information Systems Analysis and Design (IS A&D). Moreover, the relation of IS A&D with other IT domains such as software engineering, business processes, and enterprise architectures is not clear and widely accepted at all. From its inception IS A&D has been practical oriented. In the database area, for example, the founding fathers such as E.F. Codd, R. Boyce, and R. Fagin were researchers (actually many of them were mathematicians) and their seminal papers were strongly formalized. On the contrary, many central figures in IS A&D, such as Rumbaugh, Booch, and Jacobson were primary practitioners and their work was not too mathematized (that partially explain the popularity among professionals). Not being prone to much mathematical formalism IS A&D is not on hard researchers taste. Publishing IS A&D articles in leading IS journals MIS Quarterly, Information Research, Journal of MIS is extremely difficult [32], despite the broader audience of this sort of papers. Topics like Rational Unified Process, UML, Business Process Model Notations are not hot/hard enough to draw editors attention in the cold world of IS science. Publishing an article about business ethics or corporate social responsibility has been easier than publishing a good article on UML or BPMN. Nevertheless, IS A&D is a hugely important topic for all IS graduates and professionals, being acknowledged in all ACM/AIS Computing Curricula guidelines. 2. Analysis and design in ACM/AIS Information Systems curricula guidelines Part of its perpetual identity crisis remembered in previous section, IS domain and academic programmes have experienced very heterogeneous approaches. On the most general level, there are two different IS academic and research communities [17]. On the next levels of analysis, worldwide IS programmes display a huge heterogeneity of: denominations - Management/Business/Computer Information Systems, Business Informatics organizing institutions - business schools, technical universities, computer science departments technical versus business orientation research versus practice focus levels undergraduate, master, doctoral length number of semesters structure/content [13]. Since 1970s the most important bodies in computing and information systems com-munities, Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and Association for Information Systems (AIS), have jointly proposed guidelines for IS programmes curricula [13]. The guidelines are targeted separately for undergraduate programmes and master programmes. The frequency for each guideline is about ten years. As expected the proposed curricula has changed over time due to technological changes, business demand and research/academic accomplishments. But IS A&D topics have been central in all guidelines as IS graduates have a privileged position in dealing with business processes and transactions. Figure 1 shows the main courses proposed in IS2010 undergraduate curriculum (the most recent guidelines for undergraduate IS programmes) and their relation to the career tracks of the IS graduates. Also in the most recent model curriculum for IS master programmes MSIS2006 [19] - Analysis, Modelling, and Design is one the four technical pillars and Systems analyst/designer, Systems integrator, Business analyst are stated as typical jobs for an IS master graduate. The distribution of topics among the five pillars of MSIS2006 model

3 234 Marin Fotache et al. / Procedia Economics and Finance 20 ( 2015 ) curriculum is debatable. For example, to us, Business Process Management can easily be included in Analysis, Modelling and Design pillar (not only because BPMN diagrams are quite similar to activity diagrams in UML) whereas topics related to database implementation and database administration seem closer to IT Infrastructure pillar. It is also true that conceptual and logical data modelling are at the core of analysis and design, but also enterprise data model seems better places in the Enterprise Models strand. Fig. 1. Structure of ACM/AIS IS2010 undergraduate curriculum [18] The centrality of Analysis and Design in IS programmes is out of the question. The importance of the topic could also be emphasized by the fact that, according to many authors and professionals, the majority of system failures can be attributed to problems that arise during the systems analysis and design phases [6][32]. Comparing to other computing programs (e.g. Computer Science, Software Engineering) [20], IS A&D courses could be a strategic advantage for IS graduates. But this requires a good coupling with business courses (e.g. Accounting, Financial Management, Management) and also a proper real-world business experience. 3. Teaching analysis and design Being a pillar of IS graduates knowledge and skills, teaching IS A&D has been subject of journal papers, conferences and workshops mixing IS A&D with IS education. For example in 1982 IzaGoroff [21] argued for using real world projects in IS A&D course, decrying the bias towards theoretical issues. Ten years later Olfman and Bostrom [22] focused on the facilitator and com-municator role of an IS analyst and designer and urged for the use of CASE tools in teaching IS A&D. CASE tools had been a popular topic in both academia and research for more than a decade [23] but now it is widely considered a typical hype in IS/IT community and business. Ramiller [24] proposed narrative and drama in interactive virtual projects when teaching IS A&D and mixing field projects and text-based projects and achieving some of the advantages of both. After 2000 the main themes of teaching IS A&D courses have moved to object orientation, UML and agile methods [25] [26] [27] [28]. Brewer and Lorenz [25] advocated for object-oriented development paradigm to be part

4 Marin Fotache et al. / Procedia Economics and Finance 20 ( 2015 ) of all technical courses in IS programmes so that analysts are able to create informative models based on OO principles. To Jones [29], today s IT/IS students may have a proper theoretical knowledge of the IS development lifecycle, but generally they are not in contact with software development core practices. So he rallies to the opinion that students must do systems development from day one in an IS A&D course. On the contrary, due to domain dynamics, Ramnath and Dathan [30] propose including in IS A&D courses some theoretical issues like as object-oriented design principles (such as the Liskov Substitution Principle), the design process (indicating how and where the rules are applied), modelling, design and architectural patterns, language features, and refactoring. To Satzinger et al. [27] the main trends that drive change and scope broadening of IS A&D courses are: growing popularity of object-oriented techniques shortening of the life cycle emergence of the iterative approach increasing adoption of the general agile approach and specific agile development methodologies (extreme Programming, Scrum, Crystal) rising importance of UML outsourcing trend leading to global distribution of IS A&D work the rate of change in the technical and business environments. The authors conclude that a single course addressing IS A&D topics (the case in many IS programmes) is not enough. To previous trends one can also add the changes in IS and application architectures: Service Oriented Architectures, Web services, REST, etc. The panel session at the Americas Conference on Information Systems (AMCIS) 2007 conference raised questions (some of them remain open questions) for each faculty member who teaches IS A&D topics [27]: How to combine structured, iterative, and agile approaches? Can agile principles be included in the same course even though there are some fundamental differences with the structured and the iterative? To give up or not to give up data flow diagrams (DFDs)? Should use cases be the basic approach to the specification of functional requirements? To present (or not) data modelling along with object-oriented techniques? What UML diagrams to be covered? How do we reconcile object-oriented development with relational systems? What is the role of business process modelling and design in IS A&D? Can IS A&D be taught effectively without considering the details of technical design? We also could also raise some (more general) questions: Should be compulsory that IS A&D students take courses in Accounting, Financial management, Management and Marketing? How much databases, OO programming, Business Processes should know an IS A&D teacher? Must the teachers/instructors work with the industry or have a minimal practical experience? If spread on multiple courses, IS A&D topics should be linearly taught or iteratively (deepening each topic in courses succession)? As pointed out in previous sections, IS A&D is rather an applied domain with no much room for mathematics not being spoiled in scientific literature. Compared with other areas of IS research (semantic web, information retrieval, databases) in IS A&D literature probably the most quoted are the books, not the articles. Bajaj et al. [32] talk about the mismatch between teaching and research in IS discipline (which is, we may argue, a special case of the mismatch between teaching and research in business studies and economics), focusing on IS A&D. So they urge IS A&D teachers to research what they teach. From our experiences as students, IT professionals and faculty members, we confirm that teaching IS A&D without a proper business background (in terms of processes, transactions, architectures) is doubtful. Unfortunately teachers have no incentives for dealing with practical problems. Even in business schools the tenure is based mainly on research (in top journals) which is increasingly out of business reality.

5 236 Marin Fotache et al. / Procedia Economics and Finance 20 ( 2015 ) Analysis and design in Romania. Academia versus market demands Compared with USA, Romanian IS programmes are rather young. It is true that before 1990 some IS topics were taught at Cybernetics programme within Academia de StudiiEconomice (Academy of Economics and Business Studies) in Bucuresti. But both Cybernetics and Business Informatics (established after 1990) programmes were closer to Computer Science than to IS. The Romanian cybernetic shadow created many problems in the 1990s [33] but in recent years, due to the IT market demands, IS is a full-fledged domain of study and research. The main academic centres with IS undergraduate and graduate programmes are Bucuresti (Academia de StudiiEconomice), Cluj-Napoca (Universitatea Babes-Bolyai), Iasi (UniversitateaAl.I.Cuza), and Timisoara (Universitatea de Vest). Whereas in many parts of Europe, IS departments have recently experienced cloudy times [13], currently in Romania the IS domain is prosper in terms of students enrolment and market demand. In classical sense all the topics related to IS analysis and design are covered in courses with the same names. For example, at Al.I.Cuza University of Iasi, Faculty of Economics and Business Administration offers two IS programmes. The undergraduate Business Informatics (Informaticaeconomica) curriculum contains two compulsory courses, IS Analysis and IS Design (as some American professors suggested in previous section). The curriculum of Information Systems for Business (Sistemeinformationalepentruafaceri) master programme has a compulsory course - Object-Oriented Analysis and Design and an elective course Advanced Analysis and Design. In a broader sense, topics of analysis and design are also covered in courses like: Databases I (database design using normalization) undergraduate Object-Oriented Programming undergraduate Databases II (database logical models (E-R, UML) - master Advanced Database (data patterns) - master Information Architecture - master Client/server and web (multi-tier) applications master. With some minor difference in terms of course denominations and sequences, this is the case for similar almost all Romanian IS programmes. Romanian IT market has some specific traits which evolved in time. Services were treated as Cinderella before After 1990 most of Romanian industry passed away. The main source for IT investments have been multinational companies in banking, insurance and manufacturing which implemented IT solutions they had at their headquarters. Since mid-2000s for most of Romanian IT industry the main customers were Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) and public institutions (hospitals, public administration, government agencies) that implemented software solutions for various administrative tasks. In recent years, Romania has increasingly become a target for more complex projects where call-center activity is combined or replaced with projects concerning software development and various services. Consequently, Romanian market demands more and more IS professionals, not only programmers and systems and database administrators but also IS analysts and designers, business analysts etc. 5. Employers and professionals views on analysis and design in academia. Two studies Previous sections lead us to argue that in IS domain there are three main types of gaps (and sometimes mismatches): between research and practice, between research and academia, and between practice and academia. IS professors are always squeezed between the esoterical, inaccessible world of research (for getting and keeping tenure) and the concrete world of practitioners, of real-world projects the IS graduates must face in their daily professional life. On one side each year she/he must publish a number of articles to justify the professor status. On the other side, she/he must face the danger summarized by C. G. Jones: IT majors graduate with a theoretical knowledge of the phases and activities in the system development lifecycle but lack the skills required to build useful applications for today s marketplace [29]. The following two subsections briefly cover a study in USA [31] and another addressed to Romania IT professionals for assessing the IS A&D courses requirements and performances.

6 Marin Fotache et al. / Procedia Economics and Finance 20 ( 2015 ) An USA case study First case study presents the results of a survey conducted in 2013 by two teachers from Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, Anne Powell and Susan E. Yager. The survey was answered by 100 people, alumni of the university or their colleagues that utilize their knowledge about IS A&D. The survey asked about the importance of skills and tools, the frequency of use of development practices and methodologies, and the size and industry of their organization. Regarding the necessary skills that an employee from their organization should have (see figure 2), two skills were considered critically important: working in teams and working with end-users (means of 4.83 (of 5) and 4.57, respectively). Of particular interest were three skills of considerable importance that all were rated as either Somewhat Important or Definitely Important by at least 90% of the respondents: identifying problems in current systems (93%), identifying and assessing risks (90%), and requirements gathering techniques (93%). Fig. 2. IS A&D skills (USA) [31] When asked about the methodologies used by their organization for the development of new projects (see figure 3), the most common approach was reported the hybrid, customized, or proprietary in-house methodologies (42 of 86 respondents indicated they use this approach over 50% of the time). Structured/traditional, object oriented, and Rapid/Agile methodologies were each used over 50% of the time by about a third of respondents. Only 10% of respondents indicated that they used no methodologies over 50% of the time. Fig. 3. IS A&D development methodologies (USA) [31] As for the type of tools that an employee should know how to use (figure 4), the responses show that three of the four documentation tools, and 12 of the other 15 tools were judged to be of considerable importance. Only the ability to create user and technical documentation was rated as either Somewhat Important or Definitely Important by 90% of the respondents. From the remaining tools, top two were rated as important, critical path of tasks (81% of respondents) and project scope statement (80%).

7 238 Marin Fotache et al. / Procedia Economics and Finance 20 ( 2015 ) A Romanian case study Fig. 4. IS A&D tools (USA) [31] We realized this study in 2013, as a part of a larger research scope. The main target of the survey was to identify a profile of the IS A&D activities in IT projects developed in Romania and also, drawing a profile of the Romanian analyst/designer. The survey main topics were: types of IT projects developed, methodologies and tools used in IS A&D, analyst/designer profile (educational and professional background, demographic structure), main issues encountered when recruiting for analysts/designers, and the opinion of the professionals regarding the university curriculum and IS A&D teaching. The survey was taken by 139 people, between the 5th of February 2013 and the 7th of March Most of the respondents are alumni of Business Informatics program in Al.I.Cuza University of Iasi. A series of questions in survey focused on the methodologies used in IT projects (figure 5). 37% of the projects described were developed using SCRUM methodology, followed at a significant distance by Waterfall and Incremental. 12% of the projects were developed without using a specific methodology. Fig.5. Methodologies used in the IT projects (Romania) Compared to the USA case study, where the in-house and the structured traditional methodologies were most encountered, we can see that the IT projects developed in Romania use mostly SCRUM or other agile methodologies. The percentage of those that do not use any methodology is similar though: 10% in USA, respectively 12% in Romania.

8 Marin Fotache et al. / Procedia Economics and Finance 20 ( 2015 ) In terms of UML diagrams in the projects (figure 6), we can see that the most frequent are Use Case and Class diagrams, followed by Sequence and Activity diagrams. Fig. 6. Use of UML diagrams in the projects (Romania) In the USA case study, the relevance order was: use case diagrams, data flow, entity relationship, sequence, activity and the least important was considered to be the class diagram. We can see that use case diagrams are considered most relevant both by Romanian and American professionals, while class diagrams are less relevant in the USA case study. We asked our respondents to give us their opinion regarding the level of preparation the students have at graduation (figure 7). The favorable opinions are a few more than the negative ones: 64 respondents considered that the university graduates are well prepared, while 51 consider that they are poorly prepared and not ready to enter the work environment. Fig. 7. Opinions regarding the level of preparation of university graduates (Romania) Regarding the main issues encountered when recruiting fresh graduates for analyst/designers positions (figure 8), the lack of experience was indicated by the most of the respondents. We are referring here to the lack of practical experience earned through case studies. Lack of functional knowledge was also indicated as a main issue, followed closely by the fact that the graduates do not know how to use the IS A&D tools. The less indicated issue was the lack of communication skills and team work.

9 240 Marin Fotache et al. / Procedia Economics and Finance 20 ( 2015 ) Fig. 8. Issues encountered when recruiting analysts/designers (Romania) As recommendations for the universities in order to better prepare graduates (figure 9), our respondents indicated: relevant internships, a higher number of case studies taught and inviting professionals to classes as the most important measures that can be taken. Fig.9. Recommendations for the universities We can see that all these recommendations refer to practical knowledge and experience, which seems to be the biggest issue identified by our respondents. The gap between practice and academia that we identified in the literature has proven to exist also in practice. 6. Conclusions Information Systems Analysis and Design is pivotal for both the success of IT projects and the IS graduates skills and knowledge portfolio. All the ACM/AIS curricula guidelines for both undergraduate and graduate IS programmes place analysis and design as a main pillar in graduates formation. With many differences in number and/or length, European and worldwide IS programmes have a number of courses which treat analysis/design topics. Apart from IS Analysis, IS Design, there are courses with parts and chapters dedicated to IS A&D subjects, such as Business Process Management, Databases, Object-Oriented Programming, Software Engineering, etc. This paper emphasizes two main problems with IS A&D. First is the reluctance of leading IS journals to publish papers related to IS A&D for not being scientific enough in fact, the problem is that analysts and designers do not deal to much with mathematics and statistics, so IS A&D seems more an art that a science. Second, professors get their tenure based mostly on their research, and IS research (as business and economics research) is less and less connected to the reality. The problem is just a minority of professors who are excellent researchers has a proper knowledge of the business systems they model. The two studies among US and Romanian analysts and designers identified some similarities and also differences in terms of knowledge and skills required by the companies/employers. Also the Romanian study synthesizes

10 Marin Fotache et al. / Procedia Economics and Finance 20 ( 2015 ) professionals recommendations targeted to improve IS programmes performance regarding analysis and design and also prove that there is much to be done in this respect. References Bennis, W.G., O Toole, J. (2005), How Business Schools Lost Their Way, Harvard Business Review Online, May 2005 Coase, R. (2012), Saving Economics from the Economists, Harvard Business Review, Dec. 2012, p.36 Benbasat, I., Zmud, R.W. (1999), Empirical Research in Information Systems: The Practice of Relevance, MIS Quarterly, 23 (1), pp Adam, F., Fitzgerald, B. (2000), The Status of IS Field: Historical Perspective and Practical Orientation, Information Research, 5(4) Chatterjee, S. (2001), Information Systems Research and Relevance, Communications of the Association for Information Systems: Vol. 6, Article 8. Iivari, J., Parsons, J., and Hevner, A.R. 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11 242 Marin Fotache et al. / Procedia Economics and Finance 20 ( 2015 ) Ramnath, S., Dathan, B. (2008), Evolving an integrated curriculum for object-oriented analysis and design, ACM SIGCSE Bulletin, 40(1), pp Powell A., Yager, S.E. (2013), Research in progress / teaching systems analysis and design: what do students really need to know?, Proc. of the 2013 annual conference on Computers and people research (SIGMIS-CPR '13), ACM, New York, USA, pp Bajaj, A., Batra, D., Parsons, J., Siau, K. (2005), Information Technology and Systems - I Systems Analysis and Design: Should We Be Researching What We Teach?, Communications of the AIS: Vol. 15, Article 27. Fotache, M. (2006), Information Systems as Academic and Research Field in Romania: An Autopsy, Proc. of the 3rd International Workshop IE & SI, Universitatea de Vest Timisoara