Authors:
Olga Lucía Giraldo
;
Olga Lucero Vega
and
Juan Erasmo Gómez
Affiliation:
Universidad de los Andes, Colombia
Keyword(s):
Business process, Business Process Management - BPM, Business Process Management System - BPMS, Business Process Modeling Notation - BPMN, Virtual learning environment, Serious games, IT Management.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Computer-Supported Education
;
e-Learning
;
Information Technologies Supporting Learning
;
Virtual Learning Environments
;
Web-Based Learning, Wikis and Blogs
Abstract:
There is growing evidence about organizational need of aligning business and IT (Gartner, Inc., 2009). This alignment requires special IT managerial skills for understanding business and identifying core processes. Results show that IT governance frameworks can improve the alignment of IT and business. Companies aligning IT with the business and governing IT have higher profits than their competitors, experience shorter time to market, attain better value from their IT investment, have better access to shared data, have less risk of failure of mission-critical systems, have better top management satisfaction of IT -80%-, and have lower IT costs- 25% (Ross, et al., 2006).
Nowadays students are trained on general managerial skills in management programs but knowledge about IT governance and tool support is confined to the CxO level, and is not part of undergraduate education. Moreover education of IT governance tools is not feasible for undergraduate students because it involves work
ing with real companies that are not willing to risk their IT investment, or their results on undergraduate student projects.
The MIT Sloan School of Management Center for Information Systems Research –CISR proposed a framework of IT Governance that begins by defining an Operating Model a company must implant. The key dimensions of this model are the level of integration and standardization of business processes (Ross, et al., 2006).
In this paper we present an ICT supported learning environment to train undergraduate students in IT managerial skills and IT governance tools. With this environment so student can experience how their decisions have an impact on the organizational life cycle and their effectiveness.
The main contribution of this work is proposing alternatives to surpass barriers for developing IT managerial skills in IT undergraduate students. Starting with the time barrier, strategic IT decisions have mostly long term impacts; trial and error decision making that is not possible for in real situations; and last, but not least, students bringing into play decisions that expose business continuity without catastrophic consequences.
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