Gaps in academia
This week in the New York Times, a Columbia University department head declares that academia has become too specialized, and he proposes some radical reforms, including interdisciplinary problem-solving departments. This, and more, is needed to advance the fields of enterprise architecture and information management.
Illustration: Last night I met a graduate student writing his Political Science thesis on globalization of the computer services industry. In a truly interdisciplinary university, he would have been required to learn about computer programming, business management, econometrics and statistics before writing this thesis. (That’s just by rearranging the subjects that universities teach now. He really needed to know more about hiring patterns in the IT industry, plus the origins of international labour statistics, and probably other topics covered anywhere but an academic library.)
This pattern is common: the universities just don’t teach key skills and knowledge needed in the fields where I have worked. If they do any useful research to advance those fields, it’s buried in a heap of overspecialized, unreadable jargon. Some topics where university-level people need education, and where the world would benefit from big-picture thinking without immediate return on investment:
- Consistent terminology and techniques in Information Management (integrating data, documents, web content, records, archives, libraries, etc.)
- Enterprise Architecture’s big picture, for both business management and computer science students.
- Practical aspects of gathering and processing Statistics.
(My apologies to any university programs that are tackling these topics more deeply than I’ve heard of. Let me know!)
I’m not sure I agree. There are many, many things that are much better learned outside a university. I wouldn’t teach enterprise architecture to business management students because the idea of universities teaching business management is absurd. Having a bunch of PhDs who have never managed anything teaching management is a nonsense and they know it. That’s why they do not teach “management”. They may teach finance or some theoretical take on organizational behaviour but they don’t teach anyone how to run anything.
We need to get away from the notion that universities equip people with practical knowledge. They can do a good job of sharpening minds and broadening perspectives but specific job skills are best learned in the workplace from people who have and use those skills in the real world.
I agree that there are some forms of knowledge that can’t be “taught”, only learned through lived experience. If someone learned Enterprise Architecture in grad school, I wouldn’t just unleash them on a large organization.
However, there is knowledge that could be better-codified and transmitted to students, such as the origins of economic and other national statistics.
There are also fields that would benefit from more thinking and writing by people paid in the research-grant model rather than the annual-profit model. This happens a bit in large governments (e.g. StatsCan does methodology research) and the odd big technology company but it’s subject to easy funding cuts.
International standards bodies do some of the conceptual development in information management. These are composed of employees often begging their companies for time & travel costs to work on standards.