I work in the IT industry, and from what I can surmise, IT is a different beast than alot of other industries out there. But it’s not really all of IT that is strange. IT help desks can be managed the same way as more traditional help desks, and networking and infrastrcture is much more stable and measureable than other parts. But what I do, which is software development, management is a crap shoot at best, and alot of the traditional business rules can not b easily applied.
Take the finanace class. It taught us how to calculate payback rates, ROI, and other good tools for doing cost-based analysis. But all of those depend on having farily easily obtianable facts on the costs and expenses. I worked at a company who stated that initial estimates for IT project would be done in 2 days, and they were accurate within +- 100%. It wasn’t until 50% of the analysis was done that their policy would give a estimate within 20%. If you are paying for IT people to do that analysis, you might spend alot of money just to determine that you can’t afford to do your project.
The key here is not the complexities of IT projec estimation, it’s that traditional business functions do not smoothly translate to what is a non-traditional business area, and UOP does not have any way to deal with that. The GEN 480 class wants us to solve the business problem of a company but requires financial informaiton. My team members all work for companies so large that the financial picture we do have access to contains so many other factors that it would be impossible to identify the impact our problem has on the bottom line. Once again, UOP does not attempt to account for that. My instructor explained how one past group had been successful at evaluating a large company, but when pressed for more information admitted that one of the team members had been a high-level manager in the organization. So they succeded on luck, and nothing else.
I think that from UOP’s perspective, if you are a small business owner, or management in a small business, they you may have good luck using your company to help in their assignments. But if you company is large, or if like me, the majority of costs involved in the project is labor and therefore not information the company will release to you, you are at a distinct disadvantage in working throught the curriculum. You also are less able to immediately apply the concepts that they are trying to teach.
I asked my finance instructor (both of them) if they could provide me some additional help on how to apply these concepts to the IT side of the house. Neither one could, so I was left with no more information to apply to my business and career than when I started the curriculum. Same for the research class. My project was to evaluate cost savings of using open-source operating systems instead of windows. Becuase one is free and one is not, the project was to simple. Expanded to try to deal with productivity impact, and ran into the road block of no one wanting to provide HR or payroll information.
I think UOP needs to address the fact that students from non-standard businesses are not going to be capable of directly applying the instruction to their jobs, and that they are also getting ignored from the curriculum perspective. But that would mean increased money, academic time, and higher quality standards. I don’t seem doing that.
