This CPATH Community Building project develops a computing education community focused on introducing enterprise computing technologies into undergraduate computing education. Marist College serves as the lead institution in partnership with Illinois State University, North Carolina Central University, University of Arkansas, and Widener University. The team plans to bring together representatives from academia, industry, and non-profit sectors to develop and implement new curricula focused on skills needed to develop and maintain enterprise systems, integrate them into networks of technologically and geographically diverse systems, and design and implement applications that span a network of enterprise systems and distributed systems working together. Students should have the skills to set up and run data centers that minimize energy requirements and meet the ever increasing need for business continuity and disaster recovery. The project includes participation by a wide range of experts to develop cost effective undergraduate curricula based on nonproprietary standards that address essential computing technology principles encountered in predominantly large system environments.
The intellectual merit of the project lies in strong collaborative team and committed industry partners. The enterprise computing focus is innovative and important for the nation but also challenging both academically and practically. The project has the potential to produce new research and models in an area of emerging importance to the country.
The broader impacts of the project include the development of an educational community to share resources such as new courses and curricula. The implementation of new enterprise computing curricula could impact job prospects and capacity for students across the country through new innovative computing pathways open to a diverse student population in a range of academic disciplines.
The Enterprise Computing Community (ECC) was founded in 2008 with nine academic partners and nine industry partners. The goal of the community was to foster the study of large systems technologies in the undergraduate computer science curriculum across the US. The problem the community wanted to address was the skills shortage caused by a retiring workforce whose members design and maintain the most complex computer systems in the world – systems that US financial institutions, retailers, airlines, non-profits, government, and military organizations depend on to run their daily operations. In 2008, these systems were rarely studied at the undergraduate level, so replacement technologists with the requisite skills were not coming into the workforce. The ECC worked to highlight the problem and to form a team of experts from academia, industry, and non-profits to identify the technologies that were unique to enterprise computing, e.g. high speed transaction processing, high-volume business intelligence, enterprise resource planning systems. Once the technologies were identified, the ECC prioritized the technologies, identified new growth areas, e.g. cloud computing, business analytics, and began to develop the undergraduate course changes that were needed. The PIs completed the course curricula in 2010, presented it to the ECC community in their 2010 ECC Conference at Marist College, and made the curricula available to colleges across the US through the ECC website. Intellectual Merit: Over the grant period (2008 – 2012), the ECC community grew to over 1000 technologists (industry, faculty, and students) from more than 190 companies and 80 universities. Through annual online forums and on-ground conferences, they engaged in a lively cross-disciplinary exchange with input from industry leaders and academic professionals (computer science, information technology, business, and engineering departments) as well as current undergraduates and and recently graduates. The community agreed to: Drive an all-out effort in 2009 and 2010 to survey undergraduate curriculum for enterprise computing content. Hold online and on-ground workshops with academia, industry, and government participants to identify their most pressing skills needs. Create an enterprise computing curriculum and make it available to all ECC members: Six undergraduate courses were developed and the material made available to all ECC universities. These courses are also now offered to working professionals through the Institute for Data Center Professionals at Marist College www.idcp.org/ Draw attention to the problem, by bringing world-renowned keynote speakers to annual ECC Conferences to highlight the many applications of enterprise computing, e.g., Jeff Nick (Senior VP and CTO, EMC Corp.), Deputy Commissioner James Onalfo (CIO of NYPD and the NYPD Real Time Crime Center), Nicholas Donofrio (IBM Fellow and Retired Executive VP for Innovation & Technology), and Dr. David Ferrucci (lead researcher on the Watson Jeopardy! machine) Gain corporate sponsorships from industry leaders, including IBM Corp. CA Technologies, Red Hat, Verizon, State Farm Insurance, to supplement the NSF funding for the conferences. Foster ECC Conferences at other locations. Lead PI Roger Norton was the keynote speaker at the ECC Conference at the University of Canberra in Australia in May 2012. That conference was modeled after the ECC Conference held at Marist each June. Broader Impact: Through the efforts of the ECC, current enterprise computing skills requirements and opportunity areas were identified each year at the annual forums and conferences. In addition to traditional enterprise computing technologies, the time period between 2008 and 2012 saw cloud computing and analytics rise in importance. These topics were also addressed by keynote speakers at the conferences, for example, Dr. Irving Wladawsky-Burger (IBM Research), Steve Wiggins, Executive VP and CIO of BlueCross BlueShield of South Carolina, and Chris O'Malley, Executive VP Cloud Products & Solutions Business Line, (CA Technologies). Indeed the IS 2010 Curriculum Guidelines for Undergraduate Degree Programs in Information Systems http://aisel.aisnet.org/cais/vol26/iss1/18/ recognized the need for greater study in enterprise computing by updating their IS 2002 Guidelines to include a recommendation for a course in Enterprise Architecture as one of seven core courses for the IS majors and minors. The IS 2010 is a joint effort by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the Association for Information Systems (AIS). Online and on-ground student and industry panel discussions gave current undergraduate students a chance to learn about career and research opportunities in enterprise computing and gave industry technologists an opportunity to learn about the interests that attract today’s students to computer technology. The Principal Investigators plan to continue the ECC Community after the grant period and to seek additional funding and sponsorship. In July 2012, Marist College applied to New York State for funding to build a New York State Cloud Computing and Analytics Center. The PIs also collaborated on an April 2012 NSF CE-21 grant proposal to introduce computing principles and computational thinking much earlier in the high school curriculum.
