IS2010: Looking Through the Windshield or at the Rear-View Mirror?

Curriculum committees provide a valuable service to the academic community. They analyze, evaluate, organize and summarize the best practices of institutions from all over the world. In the rapidly changing world of IS, model curriculums take so long to develop that by the time they are applied, they simply can’t keep pace with change. In this paper we describe some of the insights yielded by a ground-up redesign of our existing, already successful undergraduate MIS program. The design team employed an “outward-in” approach, starting with key stakeholders, and then used this to re-imagine the curriculum. They also contrasted what they heard from stakeholders with the IS2010 model curriculum and found a contrast between the “low-value” skills emphasized in that document with the “high-value” skills that were being demanded. This paper introduces some of these ideas and challenges future curriculum committees to examine the merit and consider incorporating these ideas into future curriculum.