Teaching MIS Concepts to MBA Students: A Critical Success Factor Approach

Teaching the required MIS course in the MBA curriculum has become an increasingly demanding task. As the accrediting agencies have placed more emphasis on the MIS context of the course as opposed to its computer and end-user software literacy aspects, the instructor of the MIS course becomes overwhelmed by the breadth of the material that must be covered in reasonable depth. An even more important challenge facing the MIS instructor remains to convince students that MIS technology needs to be understood before it can be applied, and that a background in spreadsheet and database management software running on personal computers does not serve as an MIS background in a world where information technology is increasingly regarded as a company’s most important strategic weapon. A pedagogical aid that we have found to be exceedingly successful in meeting this challenge is a term project to interview a high-level manager in the student’s organization to ascertain whether or not the manager is being supported with the right information to monitor his or her critical success factors. This paper presents the project and the theoretical background for it, as well as some findings from the students’ interviews during four consecutive academic terms