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In some of our external communications, we use phrases such as “Beyond IT” or“Beyond Business as Usual ”. In talking to our SIS community, I often ask to look for ways in which we could “Go Beyond” the usual or the ordinary. I like the concept and spirit of “going beyond”. Here are some practical examples to illustrate ways in which I believe SIS should strive to go beyond the conventional and the status quo.
Beyond standard levels of commitment
We assume that all of our SIS community members go beyond standard (and especially minimal) levels of commitment. SIS is a high energy, high commitment type of environment. We have to be. How else can we
• bridge the world of academic foundations and scholarship, and the world of business settings, problems, and impact;
• produce students who have expanded career options as well as competitive advantage in the careers they choose. In addition, students who have very strong capacity to realise and execute their innovative ideas, and can make change happen in whatever profession they choose to pursue;
• nurture faculty who must excel in the academic realms of research, projects and teaching, and can also take time to learn about the complexities and implications of real-world industry problems;
• create the unique type of curriculum materials that we need for every level of our educational efforts, from bachelors, to masters, to professional education, and to Ph.D.;
• deal with the extra workload and complexity that is necessarily involved in creating and working with real software applications, systems and solutions across educational, project and research settings;
• accomplish what we manage to accomplish (e.g. since our establishment in 2003) across the realms of research output, educational innovation, real-world collaborative projects between our students and industry, outreach and service for business and the larger societal community; and
• grow as we have in terms of faculty, staff and students.
In short, SIS seeks out and requires people who are passionate about possibilities related to SIS research and education, imaginative, and highly committed to the SIS vision and to their own work. SIS people need to be doggedly persistent and hardworking in order to overcome obstacles related to challenges and to get things done.
This is not the place for those who may be innately talented, but who have lacklustre motivation or passion for what SIS is committed to doing or for their work.
Beyond conventional means of faculty evaluation: It goes beyond “just papers and citations” and “just teaching evaluations”
Both our research track and practice track faculty have to be strong across the full portfolio of their scholarship, teaching and service. However, there is a different relative importance for these two tracks. Research track faculty have to be very good in scholarship, and still be strong in teaching and service.
Practice track faculty have to be very good in teaching, and still strong in practice oriented scholarship and service. At the same time, we allow some flexibility within each of these tracks, when a faculty member is truly outstanding on one of these dimensions, and still adequate and positively inclined towards the others.
Like any good research-oriented university, we are proud when our faculty have their works published in those academic outlets that are internationally recognised as being of very high quality and prestige.
At the same time, I do not automatically equate the placement of a publication in an “alpha venue” as significant work, nor do I automatically assume that work in the credible but lesser tier outlets is of minor significance.
I actually discourage our faculty from talking about their work primarily in terms of where it is published. Rather, as previously discussed above in the fourth item, Ideas and Knowledge Really Can Change the World, we strongly encourage our faculty to talk to one another in the corridors and in informal meeting places about the substance of their work, why they are excited about it, as well as why they and other colleagues and reviewers believe (or fail to believe) it is important or good work.
The critical point here is that at SIS, we are earnestly trying to foster an environment where our faculty and visitors care about the substance of the work they do, and want to talk to one another in ways that can influence and improve the quality of their ideas and efforts. While it can not be totally avoided in any university, we do our best within the school to consciously minimise the occurrence of a culture where faculty spend the preponderance of their informal conversation time either commenting about the placement of their publications, or obsessing about their inability to gain acceptance in a particular venue, with little or no discussion on the content of the work per se.
My desire is to help nurture an environment where all faculty, especially assistant and associate professors, have the courage, capability and peer support to pursue problems that they think are inherently interesting and important, and sometimes just outright cool and fun.
The consideration of which journal or outlet will publish the effort, although a relevant and important concern, should not be the very first question asked. Nor should the desire to publish in a particular journal be the primary reason for pursuing research topics or problems that the faculty member is really not interested in, or does not think is important.
There is a similar issue with respect to evaluating faculty teaching effectiveness through student teaching evaluations. There are some well-known “tricks-of-the-trade” for increasing student teaching evaluations.
For example, do not be too hard on students. Do not go too deep or too fast. Do not confront their ideas or critique their efforts too strongly.
What happens if based on convincing evidence, the faculty member or the school believes it needs to change some aspects of the course content? Suppose this type of change takes students beyond their comfort zone? Suppose for the first year or two after the change, students give all faculty involved in these restructured courses substantially lower evaluations? Does that mean the faculty are not doing as good at teaching? This is not necessarily the case.
Student teaching evaluations, including both the numeric scores and the qualitative comments are indeed important. They are useful data but the data have to be understood in context. If the only way to view the teaching quality improvement is the numeric result of the student teaching evaluations, faculty will be increasingly reluctant to push up expectations and standards for course performance. Also, they will be increasingly reluctant to make major changes in course content or delivery. This is clearly not a desirable situation.
Everyone involved in education knows there are no easy answers to evaluating the quality of faculty teaching, and it is perhaps even more challenging to evaluate the quality of student learning. Perhaps the most important thing is for all stakeholders - the Dean's office, faculty members, students, and evaluation committees - to appreciate the important differences among the student's assessment of the faculty member, the course content for a particular course, and the assessment of whether the student is learning effectively, and learning the right things.
Sometimes, it is indeed necessary to make changes in course content, delivery and experiences in an effort to change what is learnt and how it is learnt. In these transitional periods, there might well be higher variance or downward trends in how the students evaluate the teachers.
The point is that in SIS we are committed to going beyond the simple, fast and shallow indicators of faculty evaluation of research and teaching. This is not simple or straightforward. It gets highly judgmental, even with the best attempts to support and supplement the evaluation efforts with all appropriate data. Nonetheless, given the type of environment and culture we are creating, it is essential for us to go beyond the simple and standard ways of thinking and practice per faculty evaluations.
Beyond conventional means of student evaluation: It goes beyond “just grades”
SIS has been able to increase its undergraduate intake from an initial cohort of 93 freshmen in 2003 to a target cohort size of 213 freshmen in 2007, and a larger target of 250 freshmen in 2008. The reason is that industry leaders from many sectors of the economy have been asking for more and more of the graduates of our BSc (IS Management) programme.
Employers in industry are telling us that our SIS graduates are very solid performers, willing to work very hard and capable of dealing with complex and unstructured situations that are interesting or messy combinations of business and IT issues.
They note that our students are especially versatile in that they can deal with business personnel, processes, functions, as well as the various aspects of designing, creating, implementing and managing IT enabled business solutions. Somehow, our SIS students seem to be especially adept at contributing to the content and management of complex and highly pressurizing and strategic projects involving cross functional teams representing both business issues and IT solutions.
Industry players increasingly realise that our SIS educational programmes are very demanding and time intensive, and that we put our students through many novel and tough design and problem solving experiences.
We are increasingly successful in getting industry employers to realise that when it comes to evaluating our SIS students for internships or employment, they should not be too concerned if their GPAs are a few decimal points lower or higher. Rather, they should look at what our students have accomplished, at the design and problem solving examples in their course and project “portfolios of experience", and also pay close attention to how students document their capabilities with respect to our SIS Learning Outcomes.
The ultimate proof of the recognition of the intensive and challenging nature of the programme is that even when private industry and individuals have given scholarships to SIS, the sponsors have always agreed to our recommendation that eligibility should not be based on grade point alone. As they know how we educate our students, they have also agreed that the minimum grade point cut-off for qualification for these different private industry scholarships should not be impractically high. An important reason for this is that we do not want our students to shy away from taking on more challenging, higher risk and more time intensive assignments and projects, even if it means ending up with a somewhat lower GPA due to the inherent challenges of a particular project or course. There is also the reality that our SIS students have to manage the challenges of doing several IS and non-IS courses in parallel. We do not want them to shy away from the programme because of the effort required for the IS courses that might impact their GPA in their non-IS courses.
In essence, because of the strength and quality of the programme, industry employers support our view that it is not “just about grades”. It is about capability, problem-solving ability, imagination, passion and attitude.
We continuously reinforce the message to companies we deal with that if an SIS student can demonstrate a high degree of motivation, has an impressive portfolio of projects and examples to show, interesting experiences to discuss, and can thoughtfully walk the industry interviewer through his or her Learning Outcomes assessment, then the employer should not be too concerned about the details of GPA (assuming the GPA is not really poor!).
Right around the Chinese New Year in February 2008, I met SMU alumni, a business school graduate, who has been working in Citibank for several years. He made it a point to tell me that he was very impressed with the SIS students he had hired because they work hard, hit the ground running, and have an expanded set of business and technology capabilities to contribute to the company. In fact, he said he wanted to hire more SIS students because of their expanded capabilities, ability to get things done, and positive attitude. That is a very strong testimony to the abilities of our SIS students, and is yet another example of our claim that our educational experience really does expand the career options of our students.
Now this capability we build up in students does not come about easily or through magic. It requires dedication and hard work. We do not hide that fact.
Right around the January 2008, I received an e-mail from an SIS undergraduate sharing the concern that the courses in our BSc (IS Management) programme have a reputation for being difficult, and for not being easy for a student to get an “A”. The student thought this was a serious problem, since conventional wisdom holds that most sensible students would not want to take a course (or an entire degree programme of such courses) if it were not easy to get an “A”, and certainly not if there were any other programmes on campus where it was believed to be easier to get an “A” in their courses.
We have also verified that there have been at least some instances where students in other schools within SMU have told their friends applying to SIS, “Why are you doing that? The SIS students have to work really hard, harder then we have to.”
Actually, our own students tell us all the time that when they compare the workload of their SIS core courses with the respective core courses workload of many of their friends in other schools, they are almost always putting in a lot more time due to the complex nature of SIS projects, and our intensive focus on design and problems solving.
The results speak for themselves. When our students complete the programme, they really do have the confidence that they can solve problems and lead change efforts in complex business settings. They know they can learn-how-to-learn, as well as accomplish the other skills that are part of the SIS Learning Outcomes.
Students in the other parts of SMU like to tease their SIS peers about the hard and challenging design-oriented project work that often “goes beyond” what they experience in their own programmes. These same SMU students also have tremendous respect for the SIS students because they know what they can do and what they can accomplish. There will be more and more SMU alumni across the university like the Citibank employee (and former SMU business school alumni) mentioned above who will specifically seek out the SIS graduates as fellow employees because of their strongly developed problem solving and project management capabilities and disciplined work habits, not to mention their ability to leverage IT in the context of business settings.
When that happens, things will have come full circle. Instead of the SIS undergraduates being teased “Why did you enter SIS?”, students in other parts of SMU will be thinking “Why didn't we make the extra effort that the SIS students did during their bachelor's days?”
Beyond conventional career paths
We are proud to say there is no “conventional” or limited set of career paths for our SIS graduates.
All of the data to date support our statement that the programme expands the career options of our graduates.
Let's look at some examples. A partial list of jobs secured by our BSc (IS Management) students after graduating is shown here. The list includes the information from those of our students who have kept the SIS dean's office updated on where they are working and what they are doing.
Note the wide range of company names (literally from Accenture through to Y3 Technologies). The range of company types, ranging from giant global multinationals to entrepreneurial start-ups founded or co-founded by our students. The range of industries, from Airlines to Financial Services, Retail, Media & Entertainment, Hospitality, Infocomm Services, Public Sector, and to service-related work in Manufacturing.
Our students have gone into pure business functions (e.g. consumer marketing, strategy consulting), business-oriented technology jobs (e.g. business analyst, solutions consultant, management associate), technology-oriented business jobs (e.g. operations analyst in various parts of banking, management associate), technology service & solutions delivery (e.g. software analyst, software designer, software architect, consultant), IT-related management (e.g. IT associate, IS specialist), and finally into pure customer service work (SIA flight stewardess).
Clearly, the graduates of our BSc (IS Management) programme are not lacking for employment opportunities or for diversity of job roles and career options.
Our Ph.D. programme only started in 2006, and it takes four years to produce the first graduate. So stay tuned to follow up on the future employment of our Ph.D. students.
One thing that has been good for industry, though not something we planned on, is that several of our students took on full-time jobs prior to completing the Ph.D. programme. Given that these employers include Standard Chartered Bank and JP Morgan, I suppose we can say that even our “Ph.D. drop outs” ended up with expanded career options.
Our Master of IT in Business (Financial Services) programme was launched in 2007, and the first cohort will not graduate until August 2009. Nonetheless, we have examples where students who entered the programme from outside the financial services industry have already secured jobs within the industry.
At all levels, we are demonstrating that the SIS educational experience expands a student's career options.
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