Programming: November 2005 Archives

Computer Science and Information Systems are fundamentally different. In Information Systems, we might be able to use a more efficient compression algorithm, but unless the business rules call for it, we don't care. IS is about management of business rules and processes, although some CS folks seem to think it's just a survey of computer science for people who can't do calculus. We actually end up doing calculus for project management to predict what our chances are of finishing a project on time. IS also covers organizational behavior.

I come from an Information Technology background. When I started talking about IT in an IS context, my professors quickly corrected me. Technology -- whatever it is -- should support business processes. Where technology can transform an organization is where IS fits in. Servers, routers, switches, and software are what you build IS implementations on. IS covers transaction support systems, management information systems, and decision support systems. IS is part of the business school; CS is part of the engineering school. IT is taught at vo-tech schools.

IS is why restaurants serve hamburgers with a pound of beef. By analyzing restaurant ordering system logs, it became apparent that giant burgers bring customers in and make more money for the restaurant chain. Computer scientists can write the DBMS that holds the data, and IT people can manage the hardware and the software, but the IS people design the system.

So when people start lumping everything together, IT/IS/CS, they are covering a lot of different areas. Some even talk about a degree in IT, which doesn't exist, at least not until Microsoft creates its own university. (Which McDonald's has.)

Everybody keeps asking me what they teach in Information Systems grad school, so I'm going to start discussing it here.

Basically, we're still learning System Development Lifecycle, in several different forms. Structured, Rapid Application Development, Extreme (Xtreme!) Programming, and finally Object-Oriented.

Object Oriented is not just a higher-level language any more. It's a whole development method with its own techniques, tools and diagrams. These diagrams, more or less, replace dataflow diagrams and entity relationship diagrams, although I think every database should have a good ERD.

Some of my classmates were still confused and/or think OO development is a fad. It slowed class up a little. A fair misunderstanding is the database side. What's an object oriented database? Well, we're not really sure yet. OO programming still uses databases -- traditional databases. From the diagrams and textbook, this wasn't clear, leading to the question, "Where does the data go if you turn the system off?"

It's still there, in a database, just like structured approach.