The Ameritech Information Systems Major
In academic year 1993-94 and part of 1994-95, the department developed and presented a
state-of-the-art version of its undergraduate major in Computer Information Systems for selected
programmer/analysts of Ameritech Corporation, as part of the program called Developing
Application Ready Engineers (DARE). This was a national training program for the communications
corporation. Due to the fact that this industry tended to hire programmers 15 to 20 years ago who
had not completed more than two years of college, there was a wonderful opportunity to serve an
external customer. That is, the company wanted the opportunity for college credit for the
employees, and they had their own design for a training program which would total 36 semester
hours of instruction. Since the corporation on the national level was providing supplemental funding
for this program in addition to the training funds which local units possessed, there were sufficient
resources to do a strictly high quality program.
The technical objective of the training program was to take the best and brightest of the company's
IS employees, several of whom had never worked with anything other than a terminal connected to
a mainframe system, and turn them into experts in a client/server environment using the latest
integrated Computer Aided Software Engineering (CASE) product. A fully integrated CASE
product enables the experienced programmer/analyst to restructure the code of a bad information
system and/or redesign an information system from the starting point of doing a business analysis, to
defining the entire data structure, to linking this structure into a database management system, to
setting up an almost automatic generation and updating of the programming code needed to run the
company's many business applications (e.g., payroll, billing, accounting systems, etc.).
The social objective of the training program was to provide these veteran employees with the best
opportunities to help their company and to either retain their jobs or get new ones in an era of
drastic cutbacks.
The college computer lab received free the CASE software which the faculty were themselves
learning to use -- commercial cost in six figures -- and this would be incorporated in the on-campus
curriculum. The software with which the faculty rapidly became expert included many other
packages as well, including Power Point for presentations, Power Builder for building data base
systems, Visual Basic for rapid prototyping, and others. All of these similarly became immediately
available to the students both in terms of availability in the computer lab, and, more importantly, in
the sense that the faculty were now at home in teaching these.
Students' representatives, instructors, and supporting administrators met during and after each
semester (average of once a month), and evolved the planned curriculum for each next semester, as
well as making major changes in course delivery, subject matter, practice projects, etc., during
each semester.
Between the second and third semesters, the group determined that now that they had mastered
what is probably the only fully integrated CASE product to be in use without major bugs,
something very few companies had done, the technology had advanced so far into the use of rapid
prototyping that CASE products were already receding into the background and the content for the
third semester had to be changed entirely.
The Department of Management & Information Systems
College of Business Administration
Graduate School of Management
Kent State University
Kent, OH 44242-0001
(330) 672-2750
