Australian Computer SocietyTom Worthington, will launch the PAGE IT Management Program, Master of Technology (Information Technology Management) and Graduate Diploma in Information Technology Management courses at 10am Wednesday 3 December 1997 in Sydney.
This document is: http://www.acs.org.au/president/1997/pagelnch.htmDraft of 1 December 1997: This is the text of the talk. The "Slides" are also available. Suggestions and comments welcome: tom.worthington@tomw.net.au
Mr Worthington is Manager Defence Internet/Intranet Policy, with the Australian Department of Defence and President of the Australian Computer Society. Tom has served on a number of IT course accreditation committees for the ACS and Government. He is a member of the Steering Committee for the Discipline Research Strategy for Information Technology.
The Australian Computer Society is the professional association in Australia for those in the computing and information technology fields. It was established in 1966. The Society has over 14,000 members and on a per capita basis is one of the largest computer societies in the world.
I am delighted to be here today to launch the PAGE IT Management Program, Master of Technology (Information Technology Management) and Graduate Diploma in Information Technology Management, with units from the ACS Certification Program.
This is my last official appearance as President of the Australian Computer Society. My two year term ends on 31 December and Prins Ralston from the Northern Territory takes over.
We are in the midst of a revolution in the way organisations are managed. IT makes possible virtual organisations, run on-line. The efficiencies and responsiveness this makes possible for organisations are compelling. But it working this way will require new skills from managers and IT professionals.
The PAGE courses will be, in part, administered and delivered using this on-line technology and you will be getting a demonstration of this a little later on today. As much benefit of the courses may come from introducing managers and IT professionals to this way of working, as from the course content it is used to deliver.
During my two years as ACS President, a lot has changed in IT. When I started my term the Internet was something which some of us had experimented with and was just entering the popular imagination. It was not yet taken seriously by many people in business, government or academia. It is now seen as essential for organisations. But where will those organisations get people to manage this technology?
Many senior business people are about to find IT at the centre of their business deliberations, due to the Internet. We need to have managers familiar with IT, but also to have IT professionals more familiar with the needs and tools of management. IT professionals will find themselves summoned from the basement computer room to the top floor boardroom, to explain in business terms what and how this technology will help the organisation. With common knowledge, skills and attitudes, both groups can work together for the benefit of their organisation and the community.
How can we quickly and efficiently educate the large numbers of people for business, government and academia who now need to know about IT management?
The ACS has been in existence for thirty years; almost as long as computer use in Australia. The question which has been with us for just as long is :"How do you stay current in a discipline which changes every few years?".
The ACS has been active in ongoing professional IT education from the dawn of computing. For decades the ACS has defined the Core Body of Knowledge for IT professionals in Australia. The ACS has set the standard through the accreditation of undergraduate IT courses at tertiary institutions in Australia, by supplying experts for government accreditation committees and through Membership Examinations conducted here and across the South-East Asian region.
To keep IT professionals up-to-date, we introduced the Practising Computer Professional Program. More recently the ACS Certification Program was introduced. High quality tested modules from the ACS Certification Program are being used as part of the PAGE courses launched today.
Now ACS members who have completed our Certification Program modules can gain full credit for PAGE IT courses with full credit and go on to complete a Graduate Diploma or Master of Technology.
The Internet is only the latest marvel from an industry, which reinvents itself every few years. When I started in the IT business "Personal Computers" were new and not quite respectable. They rapidly took over computing, to the point where it is assumed the computer device on your desk is a PC. That might change again in the next year with the arrival of cheap Network Computers. Each revolution in the technology brings with it new possibilities for organisations and new people who need to know how to exploit those possibilities.
Let me give another example of how quickly technology goes from being a radical idea, to conventional wisdom. In March 1994 the ACS Canberra Branch launched an Internet based e-mail service for members, at National Press Club in Canberra.
We called this the "Data Highway" Launch, because most of the press (and the population) would have no idea what the Internet was. The World Wide Web was not one of the services announced, "Gopher" information services, the Wide Area Information Service, FTP and "Telnet" being then state of the art (anyone here know what a Gopher is?).
This initiative was expanded to a national ACS project and introduced thousands of senior Australian IT professionals to the Internet for the first time. Those professionals tried out their ACS Internet access at home and thought "hey, we can use this at work. The ACS, as a respected professional body, helped legitimise the Internet as a serious business tool.
On Tuesday 7 February 1995 the Australian Government Home Page, hosted by the National Library of Australia was announced (http://www.nla.gov.au/oz/gov/ozgov.html). That happened then because several of the responsible Government committee, including myself representing the Department of Defence, could point to the success of the ACS Internet project. We were able to say "we have done this before and it works" and so persuade our more sceptical colleagues.
ACS's relationship with PAGE being launched here today will have similar profound effects on Australia. IT professionals and senior managers are sceptical of the practicality of distance learning. By putting the ACS name behind PAGE with this initiative and encouraging our members to try it, we will help change the direction of all tertiary education in Australia. In a few years time, this will seem the obvious way to deliver tertiary courses, as the Internet seems an obvious business tool now. It will be the ACS and PAGE who have helped make that revolution.
The problem of IT professionals gaining postgraduate training in management is of direct professional interest to me, right now. Like many IT people I have no formal training in management or policy issues, although I am employed writing IT policy for the Department of Defence and the Australian Government. So, I enrolled in a part time post-graduate course in technology management at a university. While the course was claimed to be designed with working people in mind, it proved to be a time wasting, frustrating experience and I withdrew after a few weeks.
With my notice of withdrawal from the postgraduate course, I sent a letter to the University detailing the problems with the course. An experienced IT professional who has a full time job is probably a pretty difficult customer for a tertiary institution to please. However, I explained to that university I would not be back there, or to any university until they had courses which suited my requirements. PAGE have delivered most of my wish list, with the IT Management courses being launched here today.
Courses should be genuinely designed with the needs of part-time working people in mind:
IT management courses sould be leading the way with flexible learning. IT and good management techniques should be used to provide better courses, not just talked about in the courses.
Having professional managers with an understanding of IT is vital to Australia's future. We need to train and keep retraining out computer and telecommunications people to give Australia a chance in the global information economy. We need managers to quickly gain a deep knowledge of IT, to complement the skills of the technical specialists. We need a lot of these people and we need them now.
It is simply not feasible to educate all the people needed using old fashioned chalk-and-talk university courses. The Vocational Education (TAFE) sector have realised this and are doing a very good job with flexible delivery of IT learning at the undergraduate level. One example is the Diploma in IT (User Support) from the Canberra Institute of Technology, to be offered from first semester 1998, which has just been revised with the assistance of the ACS. Also the Australian National Training Authority (ANTA) held a National Flexible Delivery Conference October 30 to December 12, with part of the conference held on-line.
However, most Australian university IT departments have failed to take flexible learning seriously, do not have the experienced staff to do the job and have not made the investment needed in quality course material. It is time for them to wake up and start reskilling for delivering responsive courses. Once students see the high quality material produced for flexible learning they will demand a similar high quality for face-to-face courses.
It may be time to consider flexible delivery programs as a mandatory part of all tertiary IT courses. This should become one of the requirements of ACS and government accreditation committees. Those institutions not meeting the needs of students should have their accreditation cancelled and be shut down.
All Australian tertiary institutions should study the PAGE initiative launched here today. This points the way to the future, for those institutions which choose to have a future.