Teaching Business Information Systems in 2020s: Pitfalls, Challenges

and Some Methodological Ideas for Testing

Matthias Hofstetter

, Thomas Gees

, Reinhard Riedl

and Adamantios Koumpis

Institut Digital Enabling, Berner Fachhochschule, Department Wirtschaft, Bern, Switzerland

Keywords: Business Information Systems, Management Information Systems, Experiential Teaching Methods, Digital

Skills.

Abstract: In the paper we present experiences from the organisation and running of a Business Information Systems

course for undergraduate students at the Berner Fachhochschule. Aspects related to the teaching style, the

content and the process that have been defined for use are presented and discussed, while the rationale for our

decisions is also outlined. An experiential approach is fostered that allows students to capitalise on their

individual preferences and learning paths, combined with the idea of supporting the acquisition of digital

skills that will allow better use in their current or future working environments.

1 INTRODUCTION

At the Business School of the Berner Fachhochschule

there is a new ambitious programme with the

codename B2020 aiming to introduce a number of

changes in the structure and organisation of the

curricula, not only in terms of how these are

implemented but also during their early-design and

conceptualisation phases. From our side we had the

good luck to afford such an experimentation; as the

planning for the new module coincided with an

internal restructure in our Department, we had the

opportunity to reconsider the teaching of the Business

Information System module on a zero basis. In the

following we present our ideas and motivation and

also some first experiences.

2 THE QUEST FOR

SENSE-MAKING IN TEACHING

2.1 The Textbook

It is not uncommon that people are resistant to

changes, and adopt them only when it is late enough.

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This approach has also its positive aspects, as one

may adopt changes that have proven their value,

leaving out the case of wasting efforts in

experimentation. We have been teaching for many

years courses on Business Information Systems – or

as the same course appears in some institutions as

Management Information Systems – and to both

undergraduate and postgraduate and MBA levels.

A core question that has been tantalizing lecturers

was about which textbook to use and, once one made

their mind, how to use it. For sure there are best

sellers and ‘killer’ books in this area – the most

famous should be the Laudon and Laudon book now

in its 16th edition (Laudon, 2019). To not appear

disrespectful or ignoring the contribution that K. C.

Laudon has made to the field, his first book that

appeared in 1974 was rather a breakthrough offering

what was at that time unexpected, namely a study of

the use of computers in government (Laudon, 1974).

However, how seriously can someone consider the

case of using a more than 650 pages textbook to

students of generation Z that – as we are told

‘demonstrate limited attention spans’ exhibit a

‘tremendous reliance upon technology’, ‘blur the

physical and virtual worlds’ – and are often used to

‘communicate in symbols and shortcuts’ (Cook, 2019)?

510

Hofstetter, M., Gees, T., Riedl, R. and Koumpis, A.

Teaching Business Information Systems in 2020s: Pitfalls, Challenges and Some Methodological Ideas for Testing.

DOI: 10.5220/0009790805100517

In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU 2020) - Volume 1, pages 510-517

ISBN: 978-989-758-417-6

Especially for the book of the Laudons, a mistake

that the authors made was to consider their textbook

as of ephemeral nature, making new editions every

now and then. This helps the business, of course, as

one may see that there is an incredible amount of

‘resources’ apart from the book that includes amongst

others an Instructor's Resource Manual, a Hands-on

MIS Application Data Files, Learning Tracks and

Lecture Notes, PowerPoint Presentations and also the

Annotated PowerPoint Presentations, a Test Bank,

Video Case Instructions and also some ‘Blackboard

course cartridges’. One may wonder what the

lecturer’s job will be – possibly to help students cope

with all the various resources, while seriously running

the risk of replacing the human lecturers with robots

or Alexa boxes in the near future.

As mentioned above, young(er) people have

learned and are now possibly irreversibly used not to

spend much time in reading long texts. They may also

not care much about typologies - why bother

distinguishing between an executive support system

or a decision support system? So all in all we

considered that the best thing we could do was to

abandon the idea of using a textbook.

2.2 Style Matters

2.2.1 Discussion-based

Our idea was to follow a discussion-based style

throughout the entire course. Discussion-based means

that the arrangement of the desks in the class shall not

be the usual one with the desks set up into straight

lines or in a large circle but have no desks at all - the

students will thus have no ‘defense line’ to ‘protect’

them and help them to not be engaged in the

discussions.

We considered that this would also help the

lecturer engage better into the discussions with the

student as being one of them - with the only additional

power to moderate the discussion or choose the

subjects to be discussed in the class. But even to this,

the idea is that during the course the students shall be

able to ‘emancipate’ themselves and co-structure the

course in terms of both content and form. Especially

for the seating arrangements we were prepared for the

need to explain our decision or possibly also account

for our choice. We know that in the academic

environment and especially for matters related to

pedagogic or didactic aspects, the best is to have a list

of academic references to ground one’s arguments.

To this we can recommend amongst others

(Fernandes, 2011), (Gremmen, 2016), (Marx, 1999)

and (Sommer, 1977). As one may see, the idea is not

at all new or ‘revolutionary’ – sometimes less is more.

2.2.2. Empathy

We experience that lots of time is wasted in a course

till the students develop a feeling of trust with the

lecturer. Sometimes, to keep the class order is as

demanding as keeping the world order – or herding

cats (O'Hagan, 2000). We considered that the role of

empathy would be, under certain circumstances, a

catalyst for the success of our experiment.

For the scope of our work, we considered both

kinds of empathy in the human experience (Gerace,

2013):

 Emotional empathy, also called affective

empathy or primitive empathy, as the subjective

state resulting from emotional contagion. It is our

automatic drive to respond appropriately to

another’s emotions. This kind of empathy

happens automatically, and often unconsciously.

It has also been referred to as the vicarious

sharing of emotions.

 Cognitive empathy as the largely conscious drive

to recognise accurately and understand another’s

emotional state. Sometimes we call this kind of

empathy ‘perspective taking’.

One may now consider what this has to do with

teaching in general and teaching of Business

Information Systems. The WEF listed Emotional

Intelligence as one of the most important skills

employers require from their employees in 2020

(Beckford, 2018).

As people with highly developed Emotional

Intelligence have the qualities needed to succeed in

our modern workplaces, we consider it as essential to

have our students exposed to this experience, offering

them the opportunity to acquire such a skill that might

prove useful throughout their future professional

career. Apart from this, we all recognise that people

with highly developed Emotional Intelligence can

handle pressure healthily, they understand and

cooperate with others, they are good listeners, they

are more open to feedback, they are empathetic, they

set an example for others to follow and they make

more thoughtful and thorough decisions.

2.2.3 Narratives, Storytelling and Social

Media

What does storytelling have to do with teaching of

Business Information System is a good question to

ask. Participation, learning and the construction of

knowledge and understanding evolves on multiple

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511

time scales (Lemke, 2000) in communities – and a

class is an instance of such a community. Within the

class context, every utterance and episode of

interaction arises from, draws upon, and is responsive

to previous experiences, but also constitutes future

situations, and contexts for learning and knowledge

construction.

When we study participation over longer stretches

of time – as it is the case of an one or two-semester

spanning course, what is significant in relation to

moment-by-moment interaction is not necessarily

relevant in the same way when we examine changing

participation in changing practices over several years

(Lave & Wenger, 1991). An important question

concerns how we take time and temporality into

account when examining students’ participation. One

theoretical solution to this methodological question

can be found in the concept of trajectories of

participation. In the branches of psychology, a

trajectory refers to a path in and across settings which

can be identified and described retrospectively, and

participation is often combined with trajectories to

describe the processes and results of having taken part

in activities over time (Rasmussen, 2012; Ludvigsen,

Rasmussen, Krange, Moen & Middleton, 2011).

For the case of teaching Business Information

System the trajectory is about helping the students

build an understanding of what business information

systems actually are. So it is not only about ERPs or

CRMs or similar – and it is not at all about software.

And such a trajectory can take the form of a narrative.

The preoccupation with “narrative” in social and

human sciences, beginning from the middle of the

twentieth century, can be seen as partaking in a

general philosophical reaction against objectivist or

positivist philosophies, that saw the relation of the

human being to the world in terms of basic

correspondences, with sensory input (empiricism) or

a priori idealistic constructions (rationalism).

Language — and especially extended discourse

— is not just a tool, but also the ‘life-world’ in which

we live and construct our realities (to the role of

language we shall elaborate later in the next

subsection). Thus for Ricœur (1990), personal

identity is essentially the elaboration of a personal

narrative of the self and of the other: narratives draw

together disparate elements of experience and social

positions of the self into a concordant ‘plot’, with a

temporal span. Structuralism, particularly in

linguistics, also had a predilection for narrative; such

a narrative turn also found its correlates in

psychoanalysis (Lacan, 1966; Bettelheim, 1975) —

after all, what does the patient on the divan do other

than produce a self-narrative? — and in social theory

(Foucault, 1971). In the transition from theory to

practice as teaching in itself is about, narrative

approaches have been applied in sociology and

anthropology in order to elicit broad range of ‘voices’

of social categories (e.g. in feminist studies; studies

of ethnic minorities), with a view to combating

inequality (e.g. Hymes, 1996). In organisation

science, group narratives of sectors of an organisation

have been elicited, as a means of understanding

problems with IT integration (Brown, 1998).

Narrative research has also inspired the

development of digital tools for their expression and

sharing. The term ‘Digital Storytelling’ refers to the

practice of using computer-based tools to tell stories,

even by combining several multimedia like photos,

audio, video and graphics.

The interest in users storytelling is witnessed also

by the initiative of Facebook to create personalized

video of each user highlighting the most significant

events in their life since joining the social network in

the form of lookbacks. A similar project has been

developed by Intel (museumofme) that uses

Facebook resources (photos, friends, posts) to create

a video of users’ stories. These initiatives show the

way in the evolution of storytelling, but they build the

video automatically and do not allow users to choose

the events to include in the story.

2.2.4 Role of Language for Student

Engagement

As already mentioned, our plan was to free the course

from the dependence on a textbook. To this, we aimed

to build a repository of ‘stories’ that had relevance to

the area of business information systems. These

didn’t limit to scientific bibliography or academic

literature but, mainly if not primarily, included case

studies and opinion articles. For this we have used the

open access online archive of the business magazine

brand eins (www.brandeins.de), but we encourage the

students to build their own resources repositories.

This is not a trivial task and forms a tangible outcome

for the students as by the end of the course they may

have achieved to have designed and operated their

own ‘business information system’ that may vary

greatly in the degree of technology employment and

in its structure, but may serve the common purpose to

support students throughout the semester for all their

learning needs.

A first aim for exposing students to read stories is

to make them develop an understanding for the field

with questions like:

 Why do companies actually need business

information systems?

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 What should one understand about a business

information system (apart from supporting

accounting and bookkeeping operations)?

 How is knowledge transferred amongst

employees by using the business information

system as backbone?

 How can a company build value from its business

information system? (Or is it only an ‘empty

phrase’ with no real meaning and if yes, then how

can someone make sense out of it and truly build

value?)

 Bureaucracy – how much is it supported by the

introduction of business information systems?

And help get ‘cemented’ into Bureaucracy 2.0?

The idea from the story-telling part is to extract

meaning out of them. Is there something that one

should care about before introducing a new

information system? Is there something that went

wrong in Company X and we should explore more?

One may see here that many textbooks offer

plenty of use cases or case studies. But as we all

know, these are most of the times presented in a

didactic perspective –like: a company in business

sector X and with a corporate profile Y faces

problems with delayed production, loss of customers

base, an unexpected and unexplainable increase of

defect products, etc. and a the introduction of a new

business information system, a new module to the

existing business information system or an App as

extension to a legacy system comes to the rescue. And

though we are all aware that the Harvard Business

School Cases are world renowned for their extensive

and thorough exploration of strategic issues, the

question is how these world-renowned cases will be

useful to our students?

Stories have to be personal and related to the

student’s personal experience sphere. To our luck,

most of our students are also working in parallel to

their studies, so they have a plethora of own

experiences. Or, alternatively, stories have to be

accessible in a form that allows the students to get

close to the surrounding environment and the overall

context that let it happen. The question is how to

organize this unexploited and yet unstructured wealth

of information.

It is to this aim that we consider the role of

language as essential as the students will be able to

reproduce their own experiences and the sense they

make out of them in written or spoken form. Once a

student may decide for a topic they may then start to

specialize on it. To this we may need to elaborate

more in the following section by means of presenting

our didactic concept.

2.3 About the Didactic Concept

Students need to build, as result of the teaching

process, their own individual mental models (Jones,

2011) that reflect the basic notions they were

communicated during the course, and how

relationships between them were suggested by the

tutors. This necessitates from our side the need to

define a basic didactic concept that is based on a

structure like the one presented in Table 1 below.

We are sure that there are many ways to approach

this issue – what was important from our side was to

have the flexibility to stay at a level that is preferred

by each individual tutor. Some of us prefer to teach

higher level content and come up with less abstract or

practical concepts, which are then reflected into

specific competences that need to be developed by the

students, while other tutors prefer to stay at a very

practical level. To this we firmly believe what a

colleague of us once said: “flight altitude depends on

the state of knowledge”. The latter relates to the

knowledge that exists in general for a field but also to

the knowledge ‘possessed’ by the tutor and the

knowledge that is aimed to be communicated and

promoted to the students.

Table 1: Example of didactic concepts related to the

teaching of business information systems.

Content Interconnected

through concepts

Combined with

competences

Below in Tables 2 and 3 we present two content

listings planned for a 6-week course structure (a

normal undergraduate course takes 14 semester

weeks). As it is easy to see, there is a rather wide

degree of differentiation between the two of them.

However, and as long as the content is tightly coupled

with concepts that are reflected into specific

competences, the coherence of the teaching process is

ensured. This means that we have the opportunity to

assess

not only the acceptance of a teaching element

Table 2: Example of content related to the teaching of

business information systems.

Conten

About processes and business process essentials.

Corporate and Organisational Information Management

strategies. Typology of BIS systems. Design and

implementation issues.

Knowledge Management aspects of BIS usage. BIS and the

users / user experience aspects.

BIS economies and BIS economics: costing, pricing,

udgeting, financing and valuation aspects.

The corporate BIS as corporate asset and collective

intellectual capital.

Culture(s) and future of BIS.

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513

Table 3: Example of alternate content related to the teaching

of business information systems.

Conten

Implementation failures.

Total system vs modular system implementation;

Customization.

Cost budgeting in ERP systems; Intangible and hidden factors.

The value of reengineering;

Vendor best practices vs firm competitive advantage.

ERP risk; Installation options and comparative advantages;

External sources of ERP.

ERP installation project management; ERP Implementation

and maintenance; Training.

by the students, but also to improve it given the state

of the art in the field, good practice from other

colleagues within our institution or also work together

with colleagues in other institutions and countries to

co-create value for the particular teaching subject.

2.3.1 A Word on Assessment

The role of the assessment is, as expected, key.

Adapting and applying learning practices to new

audiences is not as easy or straightforward as it may

seem. Sometimes too much is nothing and too little is

good. The degree of experience of the tutor does not

also guarantee a good learning experience for the

students. In this context, assessing, sharing and

validating good practices and learning experiences is

something that needs to be done in a continuous

fashion and with some type of what we call ‘seamless

collection of data’. This does not need to take the

form of formal evaluations that usually take place

when it is too late but build on informal exchanges

with the students from the start of the course and

during the warm-up phases. It is for this reasons that

we firmly believe that a discussion-based style for the

entire course with a circular arrangement of the desks

is important as it promotes a spirit of welcoming the

exchange of ideas.

Having in mind the trends towards combining

education and entertainment, one may now wonder

how much of each these two ingredients should be

apparent when teaching business information

systems. For example, for the second example in

Table 3, the first content item is about

‘Implementation failures’. There one may build a

rather boring 2-hour course of all possible things that

can go wrong during a business information system

implementation – or try to find relevant scenes from

movies on YouTube and show them during the class.

In this case, the students might discuss them together

and come up to conclusions that will be co-created

during the course. It will be less boring and also more

fun. One may, however, only judge the efficacy of the

approach by the individual learning paths that the

students will build and follow in the weeks after. To

this, short tests that take the form of quizzes can help

the students see if they have achieved the expected

level of competence. Regarding the latter, we are

aware that several institutions use the differentiator,

namely a tool to formulate and organise learning

goals, offered as a moodle plugin and based on the

Differentiator by Ian Byrd, which is based on

Bloom’s Taxonomy (Anderson, 2000).

3 FOCUS AND LEGACY OF THE

COURSE

The focus of such a business information systems

course is usually put on the information system part –

leaving out the term business as trivial or self-

explanatory. For us it is important to let the students

examine in all necessary depth and breadth the notion

of a business. Sometimes a business is related to a

repeated process: Uber drivers run their business in a

similar fashion like conventional taxi drivers do – or

not? But sometimes we have to also arrange a

business only once and we are done with it: leaving

our home to go to a nursing home is also a ‘business’

– it needs some type of an informal information

system to be set up.

With some students we have explored the case of

a diaper information system – so imagine that you are

having your first baby and you have to set up all

necessary processes (which we can comfortably call

business processes) that will let you better plan,

program, budget and execute all relevant actions. So

one may see that there is no need to consider the case

of a multinational company that (apart from torturing

the natives and destroying the environment in some

exotic country) introduces some plan for controlling

their costs – there is the opportunity to study the same

aspects also when considering your own diaper

information system (which no doubt also pollutes the

environment).

Teaching business information system doesn’t

need to be incomprehensibly upscaled to something

bigger for which the students may have no clue. It can

be studied in a smaller scale, letting the students

understand the dynamics of some basic notions like

the concept of information, how we acquire them and

process them and possibly store them in order to be

retrievable in the future. How we organize

information flows amongst the different units of a

company, is the same as how we organize basic

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information flows at home with the other family

members.

Do we stick to policies at home, like the

automated order of toilet paper rolls, when the

number of supplies falls below some number?

Probably not, as we are relaxed for some aspects. But

it is good for a business to not run out of essential

supplies (and toilet paper rolls) as they may risk

getting out of business. A complicated automotive

manufacturers supply chain with several supplier tiers

for contractors and subcontractors may seem more

exciting to teach – but we all know that a Späti (late

night grocery shop) or a ‘boring’ corner shop may

have an equally exciting grid of suppliers. And most

probably, as a young professional someone may not

be offered a position to re-design the suppliers

network of Volkswagen. Teaching our students to

find complexity in what appears as simple or trivial

is, we think, the highest service we can offer to them

for their future careers – there are many people out

there in positions that ‘run the show’ without having

any idea about what they are doing. And worst of all:

there is little or no hope that they will ever learn.

Learning is a simple process that may be seriously

hindered or even disabled if people fall victims of the

impostor syndrome and develop a persistent

internalized fear of being exposed as frauds. The only

way they can then manage to not lose their

professional face is to pretend and fake complexity

because they have never learned the simple basic

things that would allow them to develop a clear

understanding.

4 COMPUTER-SUPPORTED

ASPECTS

One may doubt that teaching like the one we have

been describing may not need at all the use of

computer support – this is not true. Quite the

opposite: there is plenty of space for experimentation

and learning assisted with tools that may help the

students acquire essential digital skills. Here we only

mention two of them and elaborate with some

examples:

 balsamiq is a graphical user interface website

wireframe builder application. It allows the

designer to arrange pre-built widgets using a

drag-and-drop editor. It allows students to build

relatively easy mockups and prototypes of all

possible types of information systems – so even

the aforementioned diaper information system.

Of course user interface design is not equal to

business information systems, but as we all

know, the latter can only communicate with the

end users through the user interface.

 basecamp is a web-based project management

tool with main features such as to-do lists,

milestone management, forum-like messaging,

file sharing, and time tracking. Here the idea is

not to train our students in the use of basecamp –

this is something they may learn in the future

when they actually need it. What is of

importance in the course is to have students

experimenting with the need to make the

transition from other forms of information

organization and flow to some form that brings

together several features as parts of an

application.

One may see that in work environments people

used email in the past to communicate information

and exchange files. Then people started using skype

for both – and many more use WhatsApp for the same

functions. In such a fast-moving field, why not

consider that the engineers involved in the design of

some components of a new car model should not use

Instagram? And follow on Twitter for every

communication that may have appeared in the past on

a notice board?

The technology fads are one thing – they may come

and go – some of them stay with us longer than

expected and some others that we thought would stay

for ever disappear quickly. What is important for the

students to understand is the underlying needs that

can help a company create or build value through the

supported processes and activities. Below we present

the result of a student’s project for a quite interesting

hypothetical though not at all unrealistic scenario:

imagine a company that needs to build their own Data

Science made easy system. The end users themselves

need to define the operations and the user interface.

So, it has to look like something that makes sense for

the users themselves. The students were able to

design the screens on paper – the same as people

would have done some fifty or hundred years before,

and at any point they felt comfortable they were able

to make the transition to use balsamiq. The transition

was not easy: balsamiq is very easy but needs time to

get familiar with. And the first designs were literally

horrible and frustrating.

To achieve a good level of mastering the tool,

students needed to spend sometimes more than 40

hours. Not all students had this time – and we

considered that teaching the students of business

information systems how to use balsamiq would be

wrong.

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515

Figure 1: The initial screen of the ‘Data Science Made

Easy’ environment.

Figure 2: What are the meaningful operations to include for

the preparation of the data processing tasks?

Figure 3: And how should the model training step take

place?

5 DISCUSSION AND

CONCLUSIONS

We all know the proverb that says: give a man a fish

and you feed him for a day - teach him how to fish and

you feed him for his life time. This was good but only

for the past times. Apart from the undeserved gender

bias that only men were worth to be fed or taught how

to fish, nowadays we should rephrase it as follows:

give a person a fish and you feed them for a day -

teach them what fishing is about and you feed them

for their life time.

Teaching business information systems – as other

courses – may become thrillingly exciting if liberated

from the cliché of following what the textbook

industry provides us with. There are of course several

risks and failure possibilities – but this is not an

excuse to use material that has been developed for

some other students. Harvard Business School Cases

may be world renowned for their extensive and

thorough exploration of strategic issues but may be of

little or no value to our students. What is important to

them is to find a narrative that will allow them to

build, during the course lifetime, the necessary levels

of self-confidence so that they will be able to interpret

needs of their business and professional environments

in a sense- and value-making way. Digital skills can

be developed sometimes more successfully by using

analog means.

Many of us use or have to use moodle for teaching

purposes. What we may not know is that Moodle's

founder and main developer Martin Dougiamas grew

up in the Australian ‘outback’, the vast, remote

interior of Australia, in the late 1970s, and had taken

lessons from the School of the Air, giving him from a

young age an insight into distance learning. While he

may be praised for his achievement and his devotion

to the free and open-source software movement, it is

a pity to a priori keep distance with students

especially when the opportunity to offer a superb

teaching and learning experience is so close to us.

As one of our anonymous reviewers mentioned in

their review, it is an open issue ‘if in academic

education we should stop asking students to develop

skills on reading long and scientific texts’, adding that

‘I do not think that students would ever be able to

write or think scientifically, if they are not asked to

practice reading and understanding such texts

(provided a good choice of such texts is made)’, and

concluding with a remark that ‘this might lead to the

banality of the absence of thought, to paraphrase

Hannah Arendt’. We have also from our side made

similar if not the same thoughts and what we see is

that there are no easy answers to give. However, there

is a need to keep alive a continuous dialogue that will

include all sides, so not only the students and the

lecturers but also other stakeholders: education policy

makers as well as companies and organisations of

both the private and the public sector that shall

eventually employ our students. Such a dialogue shall

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not give any definitive answers – for the future we

shall all be ready for continuous experimentation. To

this we shall need to develop fast reflexes and change

something that doesn’t work – but also improve

something that already works to work better.

One may possibly wonder how some potentially

superficial information from a (non scientific)

magazine can offer scientific insight to students. Here

we have two things to say: Firstly for those that are

not familiar with the brand eins magazine, it needs to

be noted that the magazine offers insightful and quite

distinctive (to not risk to name them intellectually

elitist) views to problems and phenomena of the

society, the economy and the business which can

initially trigger and continuously enrich the dialogue

on the various course topics. Each of its issues is

focused on some theme that is then elaborated with

essays and analyses. Secondly, the entire idea about

not following a textbook orthodoxy for teaching a

subject like business information systems is that the

subject on its own calls for experimentation and

offers all the opportunities to test unexplored waters.

In the end same like journalism may better get taught

with use of newspapers, business can in a similar

fashion be taught by using as content stories from the

actual frontline.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We are thankful to the comments of the two

anonymous reviewers – they have both taken the time

and effort to improve the quality of this paper and

increase its value and impact.

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