The TIES Strategy: Information and Decision Sciences Faculty Articulate New Directions for Curriculum and Research

Executive Advisory Board for Curriculum and IDSc Faculty Major Forces in the Change

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Since the heyday of e-commerce and the DotCom firms, the IS jobs market and the demand for IT capital in the American business economy have fallen sharply. As a result of this, many leading business schools have seen their MBA and Undergraduate IS concentration enrollments plummet, and waning interest on the part of leading firms to recruit their graduates.

The Carlson School of Management, which offers an Information Systems and Technology Portfolio, a Consulting Enterprise and an Undergraduate IS Concentration has not been immune to these trends in the market, despite its top 5 ranking for IS at the MBA and Undergraduate levels. These changes in the market have challenged the faculty to rethink "relevance" in the curriculum that the Information Systems and Decision Sciences Department offers, from the point of view of students whose continuing interest is to do as well as they can in the job market.

Every six weeks or so, the MISRC hosts meetings of the Information and Decision Science (IDSc) Department's Executive Advisory Board for Curriculum (EABC). The model for this board during the past several years was established by Jennifer Samson (Guidant Corporation), Les Wanninger (past Information Industry Initiative Director and MISRC Co-Director) and Rob Kauffman (past Co-Director and current MISRC Director). Their shared vision was to operate the EABC with external leadership—in particular, an external chair—to ensure that its agenda would be industry-led, in lieu of university-led. The idea was to make the advisory influence of the board direct and immediate, so that it would be a greater force in influencing IDSc faculty to make positive, market-responsive changes in their individual courses.

Through the work of EABC Chair, Mike McFarlane (Cargill Inc.), with vigorous input from other EABC members (representing the Twin Cities firms Guidant, 3M, Supervalu, General Mills, IBM, Syntegra, Cargill, Minnesota Life, Unisys, Thomson West, Marsh Risk Consulting, Mayo Foundation, and Hexaware). The IDSc Department has largely realized the envisioned positive impacts. During the past couple years, the EABC encouraged the IDSc faculty to broaden the department's curriculum to more fully address issues of integration across the business disciplines through technology, the role of enterprise systems and the importance of outsourcing and offshoring, business intelligence and technology in supply chain management contexts. The results have been dramatic.

On the basis of the EABC discussions, consultation and fact-finding by IDSc faculty on the activities of other business school IS departments around the United States , the IDSc Department debated a repositioning of its curriculum. It worked towards articulating a strategy that would provide a new basis for making strong contributions to the Carlson School 's teaching mission and the Twin Cities business community, as well as capture the essence of the portfolio of research and teaching activities that faculty are undertaking.

This strategy is called "TIES."

TIES means "technology, information, economics and strategy," which characterizes the essential building blocks of the research and teaching capabilities of the IDSc Department's faculty.

• "Technology" reflects their knowledge of infrastructure, software development, decision support systems, and emerging technologies. It also points to the Design Science and Computer Science disciplines that underlie some of the department's leading research.


• "Information" emphasizes information as an endowment or as a commodity for using in managerial decision making. It's intended to capture the Decision Science, Behavioral Science and Cognitive Science disciplines where we have significant faculty capabilities.


• "Economics" points to the economic issues, and the need for managers to understand firm, industry, market and economy levels of analysis involving IT, technology standards, emerging technologies, and shifting bases for competition. Its referent disciplines are Managerial Economics and Management Science, where we also have built considerable faculty strength in the past 10 years.


• Finally, "Strategy" captures the interest associated with organizational, strategic and behavior issues that relate to the use of IT by individuals, groups, strategic business units, and firms, in pursuit of high performance business operations. The referent disciplines are Organizational Theory, where some of the IDSc Department's traditional faculty strengths lie, as well as Strategy and Microeconomics.

TIES is intended to represent the linkages that our IS curriculum and faculty research have with the various business disciplines, including Strategy, Finance, Healthcare, Marketing, Operations, Accounting and Human Resources.

The TIES approach in the IDSc Department's teaching mission today is reflected in a series of relatively new courses that enable students to obtain in-depth knowledge and access to important managerial perspectives about critical issues. Today, with encouragement from the EABC and the curricular innovations of the IDSc faculty, the IDSc Department is rolling out a new generation of courses that are intended to flesh out the TIES strategy in the Carlson School of Management's MBA and Undergraduate Programs.

The following courses are now a part of our new curriculum at the MBA and Undergraduate levels: Business Intelligence (Gedas Adomavicius), Auctions and Electronic Markets (Alok Gupta), Enterprise Systems (Norm Chervany), Business Process Excellence (Weidong Xia), Information Security (Alok Gupta), Information-Based Goods (Fred Riggins), and Accounting and Auditing Information Systems (Steve Parente). These courses compliment our existing TIES offerings, including Knowledge Management (Paul Johnson), Financial Information Systems and Technology (Rob Kauffman), Managerial Decision Making (Shawn Curley), and Decision Support Systems (Shawn Curley).

In addition, the TIES strategy is also well represented in the research that is showcased in the MISRC Working Paper series by the IDSc Department faculty. Our TIES research explores leading issues in data mining and recommender systems, firm strategy IT infrastructures, digital wireless technologies, technology forecasting, Internet auctions, knowledge management, technology adoption and diffusion, technology and strategic pricing. The faculty and IDSc doctoral students are also studying business technology problems in Supply Chain Management, Marketing and Operations, Decisionmaking, Risk Management, Strategy and Healthcare. The work reveals a range of interesting theoretical perspectives and methodologies as well, including survey research, massive quasi-experimental and traditional experimental methods, analytical and mathematical modeling, biostatistics and econometrics, interpretative and non-positivist approaches, and other empirical methods. The levels of analysis represented in the research range from individual decision makers, to groups and teams, to business processes and projects, to firms and industries.

See the following URLs for additional information on the Information and Decision Science Departments' MBA and Undergraduate Programs and curriculum, as well as the MISRC Working Papers series: http://misrc.umn.edu/courses/sponsorship/ and http://misrc.umn.edu/workingpapers/.