DEVELOPMENT OF NFORMATION
 TECHNOLOGY  PERSPECTIVE AND ITS
 INTEGRATION IN MANAGEMENT
 EDUCATION
 

The impact of Information Technology (IT) in industry, economy and society across the world is continually increasing. Managers today and tomorrow would be increasingly unable to cope with the challenges of change, complexity, and uncertainly in the absence of adequate conceptual and cognitive skills in IT. It is, therefore, extremely essential to develop the I.T. perspective which can be integrated in the management education so as to enable the management students and professionals acquire the mind-expanding and competence- enhancing IT capabilities.

Managerial needs of IT skills pertain to three broad categories of managerial personnel:

a) Information Systems Managers,

b) Functional Areas Managers, and

C) Top Level Managers.

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IT skills and competencies needed by these categories of managers differ in both kind and degree according to differential requirements of their respective domains of role performance. Integration of IT skills and competencies in the management education system needs to be guided and governed by the requirements of inculcating the differential sets of skills pertaining to the foregoing three types of managerial personnel.

The restructured and IT integrated pattern of postgraduate management education would therefore have to undergo the following changes/additions:

- Functional areas courses in production, marketing and finance etc., to be recast and expanded to include relevant IT applications (i.e., devices, software packages, methods/techniques) in the course contents of the functional areas concerned.

- Foundational. courses in certain key areas of IT to impart both theoretical and practical training towards the cultivation of relevant conceptual and application skills.

- Courses specific to Information Systems Managers education would include those dealing with hardware oriented and operating systems software-oriented topics and themes pertaining to computers and telecommunication systems.

- Courses specific to Top Level Managers to include the following, among others:

(a) Strategic Management of Information Technology.

(b) Alignment of Business and IT strategies and architectures.

(c) Strategic capabilities and options enabled by the deployment of the firm's IT resources.

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-Creation and regular upgrading of a state-of-the-art IT Laboratory for supporting the objectives of IT's integration into management in general and for providing hands on training and practical training experience, in particular.