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Ability to Experiment
Q1-2 How Will MIS Affect Me? 45
“I’ve never done this before.”
“I don’t know how to do it.”
“But will it work?”
“Is it too weird for the market?”
Fear of failure: the fear that paralyzes so many good people and so many good ideas. In the days
when business was stable, when new ideas were just different verses of the same song, professionals
could allow themselves to be limited by fear of failure.
Let’s look at an example of the application of social networking to the oil change business. Is
there a legitimate application of social networking there? If so, has anyone ever done it? Is there
anyone in the world who can tell you what to do? How to proceed? No. As Reich says, professionals
in the 21st century need to be able to experiment.
Successful experimentation is not throwing buckets of money at every crazy idea that enters
your head. Instead, experimentation is making a reasoned analysis of an opportunity, envision-
ing potential solutions, evaluating those possibilities, and developing the most promising ones,
consistent with the resources you have.
In this course, you will be asked to use products with which you have no familiarity. Those
products might be Microsoft Excel or Access, or they might be features and functions of Black-
board that you have not used. Or you may be asked to collaborate using OneDrive or SharePoint
or Google Drive. Will your instructor explain and show every feature of those products that you’ll
need? You should hope not. You should hope your instructor will leave it up to you to experiment,
to envision new possibilities on your own, and to experiment with those possibilities, consistent
with the time you have available.
Jobs
Employment is another factor that makes the Introduction to MIS course vitally important to
you. Accenture, a technology consulting and outsourcing company, conducted a survey of
college graduates in 2014. It found that 69 percent of 2014 college graduates say they will
need additional training or education before they get their desired job. Further, 46 percent
of recent graduates were working in jobs that did not require their degree or were otherwise
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underemployed. But this is not the case in job categories related to information systems.
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Spence and Hlatshwayo studied employment in the United States from 1990 to 2008. They
defined a tradable job as one that was not dependent on a particular location; this distinction is
important because such jobs can be outsourced overseas. As shown in Figure 1-5, computer sys-
tems design and related services had the strongest growth of any job type in that category. The
number of jobs dipped substantially after the dot-com bust in 2000; since 2003, however, job
growth has not only recovered but accelerated dramatically. While this category includes techni-
cal positions such as computer programmer and database administrator, it includes nontechni-
cal sales, support, and business management jobs as well. By the way, because Figure 1-5 shows
tradable jobs, it puts an end to the myth that all the good computer jobs have gone overseas.
According to their data analysis, sourced from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, that simply has
not happened.
The data in Figure 1-5 stops at 2009 and, unfortunately, Spence and Hlatshwayo have not
updated their study. However, Figure 1-6 shows the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics recent job
projections for business managers, computer and information technology, and other business
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occupations for the years 2012 to 2022. Growth rates of all information systems–related jobs are
above the 11 percent average for all occupations.
Information systems and computer technology provide job and wage benefits beyond just IS
professionals. Acemoglu and Autor published an impressive empirical study of jobs and wages