Bridging the Industry-University Gap through Action Research

INTRODUCTION

Virtually every university in the US and overseas has seen a significant increase in demand for information technology (IT) courses and programs in the last 10 years (Greenspan, 1999; Monaghan, 1998; Ross, 1998). At the source of this demand is an ever-growing need for qualified IT professionals in most companies, whether the companies are in technology industries or not (Alexander,1999; Andel, 1999; Trunk, 2000; Wilde, 1999).
Given the practical motivation above, one would expect university IT courses to be closely aligned with the industry’s basic needs. Nevertheless, the gap between industry and academia in the field of IT (King, 1998; Kock et al., 2002; Richter, 1999) seems to be widening rather than contracting, which is evidenced by some symptoms: (a) students complaining about their lack of “real-world” IT experience when they graduate; (b) industry representatives pointing out that universities do not prepare students for the challenges and complexity of corporate IT management; and (c) faculty teaching topics that are related to their research yet far removed from the daily reality faced by IT professionals.
One way of addressing the problematic situation above is to establish industry-university partnerships. Such partnerships, particularly those involving research universities, have been commonplace for quite some time, and are arguably on the rise (Burnham, 1997; Wheaton, 1998). Irrespective of economic sector or industry, the vast majority of industry-university partnerships are of the research partnership type, which predominantly involves applied firm-specific research. In this type of partnership, funding from the industry partner is received in exchange for “intellectual horsepower” in the form of research services and technology transfer (Hollingsworth,1998; Meyer-Krahmer, 1998).
A much less common type of industry-university partnership is what we refer here to as a course partnership, which gravitates around a regular university course (or set of courses) rather than a research project or program. In these types of partnerships, the industry partner agrees to sponsor one or more courses in which the students are expected to apply concepts and theory learned in class to the solution of some of the industry partner’s key problems. Students benefit from the direct contact with the industry they are likely to join after they graduate as well as professional relationships they are able to establish during the course.
This article discusses a course partnership involving a large engineering and professional services company, and a public university, both headquartered in Philadelphia. An action research study of the course partnership is used as a basis.
Like typical action research studies (Checkland, 1991;Lau, 1997; Peters & Robinson, 1984; Winter, 1989; Wood-Harper, 1985), ours aimed at providing a service to the research clients (Jonsonn, 1991; Rapoport, 1970; Sommer, 1994) while at the same time performing an exploratory investigation of the effect of Web-based collaboration technologies on course partnerships. The research clients in question were the students and the industry partner. Also, in line with a subclass of action research, namely participatory action research (Elden & Chisholm,1993; Greenwood et al., 1993; McTaggart, 1991; Whyte,1991), one of the research clients, the industry partner, participated actively in the compilation and analysis of the exploratory research data, as well as in the interpretation of the findings.

BACKGROUND

Our study was centered on a different and arguably promising approach to implementing course partnerships that was recently proposed to address the problems outlined previously (Kock et al., 2000, 2002, 2003). The approach involves conducting certain courses, particularly senior undergraduate and graduate courses, in close partnership with companies. Such courses are designed so that the concepts and theory discussed in class are applied in team course projects geared at solving immediate problems at the company partner. Other fundamental characteristics of these course partnerships are:
• All team projects are conducted in one single organization. Letting student teams identify organizations they would want to work with, based on criteria defined by the instructor, usually leads to different student teams conducting projects in different organizations, and thus to significant discrepancies in project complexity, project scope, and organizational support across different student teams. These problems can have a negative impact on learning, and are considerably reduced when all team projects are conducted in one single organization.
• Potential projects are identified in advance. The identification of a potential project by student teams can take up to 5 weeks of a 14-week course. One may argue that this is acceptable, as long as concepts and theory are covered in the classroom during those initial 5 weeks. However, in addition to identifying a project, a student team also needs to learn about the organizational culture, key people, and specific business processes they will be dealing with. This can easily take up another 5 weeks, leaving little time for other key project activities (e.g., business process redesign and IT implementation). The solution to this problem is to identify potential projects in advance, prior to the formal start of the course, and distribute them among student teams in the first week of the course.
• Top management personally sponsors the course partnership. Often, when students are asked to come up with their own company-sponsored course projects, the individuals who sponsor the projects are not senior managers. As a result, a project sponsor may be reluctant or lack the authority to approve organizational changes or purchases of hardware and software necessary for a project to be effectively completed. These difficulties are mitigated when top management directly sponsors team projects.
It is important to note that course partnerships with these characteristics require a considerable amount of extra time and effort from the students and instructor, well beyond what is usually expected in traditional courses. In addition to applying the concepts and theory learned in class, students would also have to learn “on-the-fly” how to effectively deal with issues that are found in real-world projects (e.g., organizational culture and politics). The instructor, on the other hand, has to also take on project management, industry-university liaison, and inter-organizational team facilitation responsibilities, in addition to traditional course delivery and student mentoring duties.

IMPLEMENTING A COURSE PARTNERSHIP: TEMPLE UNIVERSITY AND DAY & ZIMMERMANN, INC.

The course partnership idea discussed previously has been implemented through a collaboration between Temple University, a large public university located approximately two miles from downtown Philadelphia, and Day & Zimmermann, Inc., a US$ 1.5 billion engineering and professional services company headquartered in downtown Philadelphia. The course was a pilot version of CIS650 -Process Design and Information Technology, a newly developed course in Temple’s Computer and Information Science Department dealing with process analysis and redesign issues.
The course instructor (the author of this article) initiated the course partnership by sending a letter to one of the senior executives at Day & Zimmermann. In the letter, the course instructor inquired if the company would be interested in partnering with Temple University, providing details about the partnership. The partnership was approved after an initial meeting involving the course instructor and senior managers at the company.
The course project required students to analyze and redesign five of Day & Zimmermann’s business processes using the concepts, theory and techniques taught in class. The course partnership and related project had direct support from Day & Zimmermann’s Chief Information Officer (CIO) from the outset. A senior manager at Day & Zimmermann, who reported directly to the CIO, was assigned the responsibility of managing the project together with the course instructor. The project involved, directly and indirectly, over 30 Day & Zimmermann employees and 26 Temple students.
The students were split into five process redesign teams, which periodically met with key Day & Zimmermann employees at the company’s headquarters in downtown Philadelphia. Each team analyzed and redesigned one process, generated three reports, and delivered an oral presentation to Day & Zimmermann management at the end of the course. The first report generated by each team contained a detailed description of the process targeted; the second a detailed description of the redesigned process and the rationale behind the redesign decisions; and the third a detailed analysis of IT solutions to enable the new (redesigned) process.

WEB SITE REMOVES OBSTACLES TO PARTICIPATION

Before the course partnership was started, two main obstacles had to be dealt with. First, Day & Zimmermann employees were expected to actively participate in the process redesign efforts. In order to do so, they had to understand the concepts and theory used by the students. Yet, most of the Day & Zimmermann employees likely to be involved in this project could not come to Temple to audit the course together with the students. Also, given that Temple students and Day & Zimmermann employees were not co-located, a great deal of their interaction would have to occur by means other than face-to-face meetings. The solution to overcome these two obstacles was the development of a password-protected Web site, which allowed Day & Zimmermann employees to access all the course material online. The Web site also supported interaction between them and Temple students through shared document areas, multimedia components, and discussion boards.

WAS THE COURSE PARTNERSHIP SUCCESSFUL?

The partnership was considered a success by Day & Zimmermann management and employees, as well as by Temple students. Managers emphasized the anytime/ anyplace collaboration between Day & Zimmermann employees and Temple students enabled by the Web site as one of the key elements that made the course partnership a very successful collaborative effort.
Temple students emphasized the real-world experience as one of the most positive aspects of the course. Following is a representative comment by a student extracted from one of the anonymous course evaluation forms completed at the end of the course:
“The learning experience was very rich. The group project gave us hands on experience in applying the redesign techniques we learned in the course. It was a great experience to work with upper level IT management!”
Table 1 shows the average scores for several question/statements asked from the students in connection with the course. The question/statements were part of a standard course and faculty evaluation, and were answered anonymously.
Several students pointed out that the course required considerably more time and effort from them than most traditional university courses they had taken before. In spite of that, their anonymous evaluations of the course were very positive, as it can be seen in Table 1. The average answer to the question/statement “Overall, this is one of the best courses I have had at Temple” was 3.53, on a 0-to-4 scale. The average answer to the question/ statement “Overall, I have learned a great deal from this course” was 3.41, also on a 0-to-4 scale.
An added benefit for Day & Zimmermann was the ability to identify young talent based on observation of business-relevant action (as opposed to the traditional analysis of resumes). Day & Zimmermann were able to observe a group of 26 students in action over a two-month period and identify several students whom they would like to consider hiring. This is not as easy to accomplish with other approaches for identifying new graduates for hiring, of which internships are perhaps the most popular. There are two key reasons for this. First, the number of interns that could be hired for a two-month period by an organization would typically be considerably smaller, thus significantly reducing the number of students that Day & Zimmermann managers would be able to observe in action during that period of time. Second, the tasks that the interns would be assigned to would not usually be nearly as complex and strategically relevant as those carried out in this course.

Table 1. Course evaluation scores

CONCLUSION AND LESSONS FOR FUTURE PARTNERSHIPS

The general perception at the end of the course partnership was that it had been an exciting and rewarding experience for all those involved. Students saw the course as a valuable experience that provided them with a unique view of IT management and which complemented the concepts, theory and techniques learned in the course and throughout their university program. Day & Zimmermann managers perceived the input provided by the students as very valuable and likely to lead to concrete business process improvements.
Also, a few lessons have been learned along the way that can be useful for universities and companies planning to implement similar course partnerships in the future. These lessons are summarized below.
• The course partnership should have two main co-project managers, one from academia and one from industry. As with most inter-organizational initiatives, the scope of management authority does not usually extend beyond organizational boundaries. Students will respond more quickly to requests by the instructor than to requests by a manager of the partner organization. Similarly, employees of the partner organization will respond more quickly to a request by someone who has formal authority within the organization than to a request by the instructor. Therefore, the instructor should share the responsibility of managing the project with a member of the partner organization who has enough formal authority to oversee all the team projects.
• The course partnership should include at least one purely social activity. Social activities allow for important information exchanges that would not normally occur in formal meetings. For example, prior to the final oral presentation by student teams at Day & Zimmermann, a pizza party (paid for by the company) was held in downtown Philadelphia. After the party, several people remarked that the personal knowledge they learned from informal conversations during the party was invaluable to them. The party was also seen as a “thank you” gesture by the partner organization to the students. Not only did this boost morale, but it also helped the students relax for the presentation the next day, as they got to know the people they would be presenting to at a more personal level.
• The business problems addressed through the course partnership should be “real” and of high relevance to the partner organization. Because students are involved, not professional consultants, the partner organization may be tempted to create “toy” problems to be solved through the course partnership, rather than address real and relevant business problems. The motivation for this may be the perceived risks linked to not accomplishing the goals of the project (e.g., wasted time, internal conflicts, and reluctance to engage in future organizational change efforts). The problem with this approach is that it is likely to relieve the students from any real responsibility and, at the same time, decrease the motivation for employees to get involved. A better alternative to reduce risk is to involve experienced consultants at critical points in the course partnership (the costs are relatively low since few consultant-hours are likely to be used).
• Partner organization employees should be asked to report on and make an oral presentation of their projects too. Course partnerships such as the one described here are, as the name implies, collaborative endeavors in which members of the two organizations involved should contribute evenly. Therefore, key members of the partner organization should also be asked to make presentations about their projects. This is particularly important because, in some cases, despite full dedication from the students, a project may fail to accomplish its initial goals. And, a closer examination may indicate that the failure was not the students’ fault, but that it was caused by lack of interest or commitment from the part of one or more employees. Employee reporting and presentations are useful in assessing whether this is the case, which in turn is important for appropriately grading the students’ coursework. Moreover, the requirement to report and present their projects communicates to the partner organization employees that they are equally responsible for the outcomes of the project, which is likely to increase their level of commitment and dedication to the project.
The course partnership discussed in this article went well beyond the idea of having students conduct their course projects in real organizations, which is an approach adopted by many project-based courses around the world. It seems that the close cooperation between Temple University and Day & Zimmermann that characterized the course partnership presented here was the key reason for its success. This type of cooperation requires extra time and effort from everyone involved – students, instructor, company management and employees. Yet, the positive (tangible and intangible) outcomes of the partnership seem to easily outweigh its costs.

KEY TERMS

Action Research: Type of research approach in which the researcher attempts to improve the research client, which can be an organization, while at the same time generating relevant academic knowledge.
Co-Partnership Managers: The course instructor, on the university side, and a senior manager of the client organization, who jointly manage a course partnership project.
Course Partnership: Course-based industry-university partnerships, where a course is designed so that the concepts and theory discussed in class are applied in team course projects geared at solving immediate problems at the company partner.
Industry-University Gap: Disconnect between the knowledge and skill needs of industry practitioners and the knowledge and skills imparted on students by universities.
Process: Set of interrelated activities through which an organization transforms inputs into value-added outputs. Inputs and outputs can be tangible (e.g., materials, parts) or intangible (e.g., services, information) items.
Process Redesign: Approach to organizational improvement through transformation of business processes. The term refers to business process change approaches emphasizing gradual change (e.g., total quality management) or radical change (e.g., business process reengineering).
Research Partnership: Industry-university partnership involving collaboration in applied firm-specific research. In this type of partnership, funding from the industry partner is received in exchange for “intellectual horsepower” in the form of research services and technology transfer.
Web-Based Course Partnership: A course partnership in which a Web site is developed to serve as a central communication hub and document repository for the partnership.