O’NEILL
Educationally, do you think today’s Computer Systems Engineering, Computer Science and Software Engineering students graduating with the necessary skills to be good architects?
MCCUSKER
No, not at all! The quality of IT architecture graduates is very low indeed, requiring many years to be trained by industry.
While they often have some coding skills they seem to have not done much work in teams, have not dealt with the nature of unstructured business and IT problems, have absolutely no understanding of IT governance and its importance and have never had any experience writing business or technical requirements or written industry-standard technical design documents.
In part, this clearly reflects the fact that this particular body of knowledge has not come together as a coherent whole and the level of skills in the universities and the research teaching in this aspect of IT are also very low. It is probably overly dominated by the IT vendors, although some organisations, such as the Open Group and the WC3 standards bodies, are making some good progress unifying the discipline.
MCCUSKER
Enterprise architects are particularly interested in organisational system cohesiveness, getting everyone working together and worrying about lost, isolated and struggling systems.
The academic used to be the fox, ready to scuttle the flock at the slightest hesitation, but now it seems to be the lazy dog, having consumed far too much from the bones of foreign chickens. Do you think that this is a fair indictment of a profession that has gone soft on academic standards?
O’NEILL
As you can imagine this is a very sensitive topic for academics so I have to tread carefully here. Academics tend to be broken into two types; teachers or researchers. I have only met one academic that I could say has a happy balance of these two.
By way of confession, I have always been a research academic. Most teaching academics lament that they don’t have enough time to “do” research but you’ll rarely hear a research academic complaining about not doing enough teaching. This, quite frankly, is because research academics are as rare as hen’s teeth (to mix our metaphors here). Essentially the commercial reality is that research doesn’t bring in the money like a couple of foreign chickens do.
Furthermore, it’s institutionalised into the way the government “rewards” universities with only about $3000 going to a university for each international, peer-reviewed publication under various DEST programs. Good academics can only get about five-10 papers out a year and when you do the sums that’s about the same as one single foreign chicken. And yes of course (with my tongue firmly planted in my cheek) this means that it’s much easier to get first-class honours now than when I did my undergraduate degree.
This is all about to change because of the Nelson Review (Education Minister Dr Brendon Nelson’s review on higher education fees)—rightly or wrongly, soon most universities will only be teaching universities. Research will be left to the Group of Eight (Go8) universities or “sandstones”—Uni of Melbourne, Sydney University, ANU etc.
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