IS EDUCATIONIS 2010 is ready and available for your use!
Authors: H. Topi
Year: 2010

THE ACM EDUCATION BOARD has approved IS 2010, the newest edition of the Information Systems undergraduate model curriculum, and the AIS Council has included it in the agenda of its December 2009 meeting with a motion to approve it. The members of the Joint ACM/AIS Task Force are delighted to be able to present the fi nal, approved version of the model curriculum to the IS community hoping that IS 2010 will be widely used and highly useful for IS programs around the world. It is also an excellent time to thank the entire IS community for your participation in this important project – we received your feedback on the wiki, by email, at the numerous conference panels related to this effort and in person in various settings. This has been a true community effort, and it would not have been possible to achieve this outcome without the continuous interaction between the community and the task force. Thank you very much! As co-chairs, Joe Valacich and I also want to thank the members of the task force — Kate Kaiser (Marquette University), Jay Nunamaker (University of Arizona), Janice Sipior (Villanova University), GJ de Vreede (University of Nebraska at Omaha), and Ryan Wright (University of San Francisco) — for their very important contributions to the project. Ryan Wright deserves a special recognition for his particularly strong commitment and tireless dedication to the project! The leadership organizations of both AIS and ACM have provided very important guidance throughout the process, which we greatly appreciate. The report will be available through both ACM (on the Education Board curriculum website) and AIS (through the Communications of the AIS), and we encourage everybody to study it carefully and apply it to your local context in the way that best serves your needs. Here are a few good reasons why you might want to do that. First, IS 2010 has a completely revised, carefully considered set of new outcome expectations defi ned as High-Level IS Capabilities and more detailed IS Specifi c Knowledge and Skills, Foundational Knowledge & Skills, and Domain Fundamentals. We are confi dent that even if you do not use the proposed course structure, you will fi nd the new outcome expectations useful when you analyze and revise your own programs. Second, IS 2010 has been designed to allow its application to a number of domains (including, but not exclusively, business). The task force believes that the core capabilities that IS programs develop in their students are applicable to a number of real-world domains in addition to business such as health care, government, law, and non-profi t organizations. Therefore, IS 2010 is not restricted to any specifi c domain, although it strongly emphasizes the nature of IS as a discipline that integrates computing with a specifi c application domain. Third, IS 2010 is signifi cantly more fl exible than its predecessors. It is the fi rst IS model curriculum that separates core courses from electives, and it introduces the concept of a career tracks, including a comprehensive set of examples. The core is relatively small (only seven courses), and it includes two new broad topics: Enterprise Architecture and IT Project Management. Programming/Application Development is not a required component of the core any more. The new curriculum structure can be used whether you have fi ve or fi fteen courses available for the IS major. We also believe that its applicability around the world in different national and regional contexts is signifi cantly better than with the earlier IS model curricula.