I gave a talk today at the AIS Special Interest Group on Education conference on a new way of introducing business students to Information Systems.  Like many others, I argue that the traditional “Intro to Management Information Systems” course is passive, boring, usually out of date, and drives business students away from tech-oriented careers.  Instead of focusing on databases, or building toy web pages, our approach is to have students launch digital products or services using their own domain name (like jpedia.org), low-cost web hosting, open source software, and freely available web services.  Students are able to do serious stuff themselves, rather than just read about how wonderful it all is, even if they have no previous tech experience.  I’ve written about these ‘digital business’ or ‘internet business applications’ classes a bunch of times before on this blog.

After the enthusiastic reception I received at the AIS SIG-ED meeting, it’s clear to me that many profs in the field agree that customer relationships and analytics (real-time information on customers) are a new tech ‘gold mine’ for business.  While Information Systems knowledge is clearly needed to understand and manage information resources (our traditional ‘bread and butter’), and is increasingly needed to manage processes, the shift towards digitizing products, services, and the customer relationship itself is injecting technology even deeper into every business.  ‘Digital business’ is a great place for newly graduating students to develop skills that will allow them to make a unique contribution to organizations right away.

Slides from my Digital Business talk at AIS SIG-ED are available here.