On the Road to ITIL: Certification in an Australian undergraduate degree

The decline in the popularity of Information Systems courses in Australian and overseas has required educators in the discipline to look for more relevant content in a rapidly changing environment. Certification has been seen as an opportunity for IS courses to deliver both broad\ud theoretical concepts and at the same time provide students with industry-recognised practical skills. For a university offering these clip-on options it is sometimes a compromise between theory and practice but it provides an edge in a growing competitive market in the Australasian region. The Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) has gained substantial grounding in organisations in recent years for managing IT services as they try to better utilize\ud and manage resources to match them to business requirements. This paper discusses how the ITIL framework has been integrated into an Information Systems undergraduate curriculum in an Australian university. A certification model is discussed that allows students to gain an ITIL Foundations Certificate after completing a course. The paper reports on the success of the program which has led to positive employment outcomes and perceptions of industry relevance of courses.\ud Presented at The Information Systems Education Conference 2008, Phoenix, Arizona, USA, 6-9 Nov 200