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September 06, 2006
IS Majors Up 50 Percent!!!
I had a busy summer working on a new manuscript and doing data mining consulting. But the high professional point of the summer for me was meeting with four lecturers from UT, Austin -- the four who represent the core teaching faculty of the undergraduate IS major. They were out to Seattle to visit the Microsoft campus and we had a chance to visit over dinner. Wow! What a group.
In the last several years, they embarked on a program to increase their IS majors and it's worked. Their majors are up 50 percent since they started their program. Their secret? Marketing.
One of the members of their College of Business Advisory Council is a VP of Marketing for a Fortune 500 firm. They asked him for assistance and he suggested that they consider the problem from a marketing perspective. He suggested they ask (and answer) basic marketing questions like:
What is the target market for undergraduate IS education?
Do we have the right products for that target market?
Do we have the right messages for that target?
Is our messaging reaching the target market?
and so forth. Elota Patton headed up that project and is sending me more information that I'll share in the weeks ahead.
One item of note: They teach Introduction to MIS at the Freshman level. They were able to get this by the Curriculum Committee by transforming their old Office Skills class Introduction to MIS. Teaching the class to freshmen enables them to reach students before they select their majors! More to come!
Posted by DavidK at September 6, 2006 06:30 PM | Permalink