MIS Practicum: Assignments
From Information Systems at Pitt Business
The assignments for the MIS Practicum are designed to walk you through the process of creating publicly distributable documents that can help establish you as an IS expert within a particular industry and specialty.
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[edit] Professional Profile (Individual)
The purpose of this assignment is to introduce you to your colleagues and give you practice describing yourself, your experience, your background, and your goals.
For a full description of the Professional Profile assignment...
[edit] Professional Development Plan (Individual)
Being an expert involves more than just knowing facts, concepts, and skills (expert knowledge). Achieving and maintaining expertise also requires that you be able to apply that knowledge (expert practice), quickly learn about new technologies, techniques and problems in your area of expertise (expert learning), participate in discussion of issues related to your area of expertise (expert dialog), have contacts and relationships with other experts (expert networking), and be known and credible within a variety of communities as an expert (expert reputation).
Becoming an expert requires a deliberate, ongoing effort to develop and maintain each of these capabilities – a professional development program. While this may include formal educational activities (classes, degrees, etc.), these activities are rarely sufficient to support a full professional development program. A true professional development program includes a wide range of educational, social, experiential, and learning activities.
For this assignment, you will develop a professional development plan.
For a full description of the Professional Development Plan assignment...
[edit] Opportunity Identification (Group)
While developing incremental improvements can require a great deal of work (and possibly even creativity), the skills needed to develop fundamentally different IT innovations are different. To make matters worse (or better, depending on your perspective), innovation opportunities rarely present themselves in a clear, straightforward fashion. Something that is a significant innovation in one industry might be completely irrelevant in another. An emerging opportunity that is novel to one firm might be widely accept in another. In addition to being able to identify opportunity, it is also important that you be able to define and “package” the opportunity in such a way that you and others can understand what it is and why it matters. Being able to identify, describe and ultimate motivate others to act on IT innovation opportunities is an important aspect of your success as a leader.
In this assignment you will begin the process of developing a high-impact IT innovation project. You will begin by identifying/defining your opportunity and outlining a plan for your efforts to engage that opportunity. This includes describing and bounding the opportunity, providing evidence that it is a potentially high-impact opportunity, indicating the types of impacts you expect your project to have (and how you will assess that impact), and describing the steps you will take to engage take advantage of opportunity.
For a full description of the Opportunity Identification assignment...
[edit] Possible Platforms (Group)
One of the biggest challenges facing IS professionals is the speed with which new technologies emerge. Equally challenging is the problem of distinguishing technologies are likely to be accepted as standard practice (a process that can take years and decades) from those that are fads that come and go (a process that can sometimes happen in weeks and months). As an IS professional you ability to investigate, describe, and critical evaluate new technologies is critical to your professional success.
For this assignment, you will identify and analyze one or more technologies that provide a potential platform for developing your innovation project.
For a full description of the Technology Platform Evaluation assignment...
[edit] Alternative Identification and Evaluation (Group)
Historically information systems were introduced primarily in organizational setting where in ways that were thought to create new capabilities or completely old ways of doing things. As a result, the focus of technology introduction efforts typically focused on optimizing outcomes (efficiency gains, cost reduction, waste elimination, etc.) in isolation. Implicit in this approach is the assumption that competition, if it matters at all, is secondary to the absolute characteristics of the new system.
However, as organizations and society have been completely saturated with IT, the number different ways that an activity or task can be performed has also increased. Competition is now a significant factor in any IT innovation project whether it arises from competing products or services in the marketplace, alternative systems within an organization’s infrastructure or informal “shadow systems” created by particular units, groups and individuals.
As you develop an IT-enabled innovation opportunity it is critical to have good understanding of the competition you face. Solid background help you maximize your impact (and avoid embarrassment). It also allows you to refine your understanding of the problem while providing examples, ideas, and data that you can leverage as you develop you own project.
For a full description of the Alternative Identification and Evaluation assignment...
[edit] Vision Casting (Group)
While much of the attention is given to the rational analysis of costs and benefits, when introducing an IT innovation into a market, organization, or group there it is just as important, if not more so, to attend to the processes by which they make sense of the innovation and the opportunities it affords. Analysis of costs and benefits assumes that the opportunity is accepted as generally reasonable, legitimate, and worth considering. However, when introducing IT innovations it is often these questions that create the biggest challenges.
For a full description of the Organizing Vision assignment...
For more information about the Organizing Vision concept see The Organizing Vision in Information Systems Innovation by E. Burton Swanson and Neil C. Ramiller (Source: Organization Science, Vol. 8, No. 5 (Sep. - Oct., 1997)).
[edit] Final Project Presentations (Group)
Moving Things Along: Facilitating Action on IT Innovation Opportunities “Organized anarchies are organizations characterized by problematic preferences, unclear technology, and fluid participation. Recent studies of universities, a familiar form of organized anarchy, suggest that such organizations can be viewed for some purposes as collections of choices looking for problems, issues and feelings looking for decision situations in which they might be aired, solutions looking for issues to which they might be an answer, and decision makers looking for work.” (A Garbage Can Model of Organizational Choice – Cohen, March, and Olsen, 1974)
The Garbage Can Model of organizational action posits that, in spite of attempts to make it appear structures and rationale, much of organization activity can be best understood as a result of random processes that somewhat arbitrarily bring together resources, problems, and decision-makers. Despite its unfortunate name (What manager will proudly announce that they think of their organization as being a garbage can?) there is ample empirical and practical evidence for that enabling organizational action requires bringing together resources, problems, and decision-makers - and that the processes involved are not always “clean”.
In the MIS Practicum project you have worked to identify and develop an IT innovation opportunity. In the earlier assignments, you did background work on the technology, competing alternatives, and the perspective of the target community (which include one or more of the key decision makers). For the final project deliverable you will package your work so that (a) it will have maximum impact on one or more relevant deliverables and (b) it is have the maximum likelihood to result in sustainable movement toward the goal of your project.
For a full description of the Final Project assignment...
For more information about the Garbage Can model of organizations see A Garbage Can Model of Organizational Choice by Michael D. Cohen, James G. March, and Johan P. Olsen Source: Administrative Science Quarterly, Vol. 17, No. 1 (Mar., 1972), pp. 1-25).
