Introduction & Careers in BIS
in BUS 110
What are Business Information Systems? What are the responsibilities and requirements of a career in BIS?
Students in an introductory Business Information Systems (BIS) course often ask what a career in BIS looks like. Often, they assume the career involves programming with little human interaction and creativity. That BIS is a technical and uninspiring field could not be further from the truth. Spanning from that of the entry-level internship to Chief Information Officer, BIS job descriptions typically require candidates to be able to collaborate, and communicate, analyze, and gather needs and requirements. As such, BIS workers are constantly interacting with other people both inside and outside the organization, coming up with creative solutions to business problems.
What BIS Careers Look Like
In class, you were presented the task of matching the responsibilities and qualification of four popular BIS job positions.
Job Responsibilities
Job Qualifications
Evidently, a career in business information systems is full of action, problem-solving, and teamwork. It is a rapidly growing field that offers secure positions for individuals with a minimum of a bachelor’s degree in an IT-related field. From engineering to support, there are a number of specializations that deal with the different components of information, technology, and business. Individuals with solid technical skills as well as an aptitude for gathering information and interpreting data are likely to find success in this industry. Work in the BIS field is exciting, fun, and fast-paced; there is always a new team to work with, new technology to learn about, and projects move quickly leaving opportunities for new endeavors. It is the objective of information systems and business professionals to bridge the knowledge gap between business users and technologists. This is achieved by balancing the primary three actors of business:
- Business users – individuals who interact in a business process
- Business processes – goal-oriented activities conducted by a business
- Information technology – technological tools used to facilitate business activities
These three parts of the BIS world must interact in concert to best realize business objectives. Ultimately, it is the job of the BIS professional to ensure that a balance is maintained, and the interaction is enhanced for all the actors and the business at whole.
Professional Growth
**Preparing: **When preparing to become a BIS professional, students focus generally on the types of systems that exist, what those systems offer to businesses, best practices for implementation, and the advantages and disadvantages of each. Students also learn how to work with business users and discovers what their systems needs are and how they are best be served by information systems. In summary, business information systems professionals focusing on solving problems in businesses using information systems.
**Starting Out: **When starting a BIS career, individuals frequently work on teams that connect businesspersons with the appropriate system solution for their situation. Usually the organizations they work for adopt a set of best practices that create consistency across project teams. Through the user of these best practices, BIS professionals determine what options are available, consider the advantages and disadvantages of each, design a personalized solution to the business, and develop a plan on how best to implement the systems, including rollout phases and training.
**Maturing: **Maturing BIS professionals become comfortable working in teams. This is necessary because the projects are often large and have many interconnected components. As a result, mature BIS professionals typically choose to specialize, sharpen their skills in specific work, to best contribute their expertise to the larger system. Specializations include system analysts, software developers, database administrators, and project managers.
Conclusion
BIS as a career is attractive to many individuals because of the characteristics above. However, it is inherently rewarding to be in a career that works to make people’s lives easier. BIS professionals design systems that help businesspersons make better decisions (decision support systems), lead organizations (executive dashboards), keep track of materials (supply chain management systems) and customers (customer relationship management systems). Furthermore, given the important role of information in modern organizations, BIS professionals record, monitor, and analyze data to learn how the business can improve (business information systems). In turn, professional work to design these systems to be more usable, intuitive, efficient, and informative. This course will discuss these topics and allow you to experience many of them. It follows somewhat a linear narrative of what it means and is like to be an BIS professional, rather than simply telling you about it.