I would like at the very beginning to tackle a quite “ambiguous” topic down there, namely; “business Informatics major at the GUC”...
BINF-Bus.Inf.-BI…etc all stands for the same acronym...That is: Business Informatics major in the GUC...
So what is actually business informatics all about, at the very beginning I would like to approach what people (outers in general and GUCians in specific) do actually think Business informatics is?
1. An ordinary management major with extra amount of CS, which would definitely add value for my management oriented career (Of course anything u learn in ur life would add value in a way or another…any way)
2. A blend of courses which is not any how related to each other, this blend would definitely lead to an unclear/failing career path. (Well that’s the most offending one here...)
3. An ordinary management faculty…
4. A faculty which allows you – at the very end – to work in the field of software development plus having the managerial experience which add a competitive value for the development of your career path smoothly (in other words: the people who have this point of view about BI mainly encourages the idea of being a student in that field in order to have good managerial experience instead of taking that experience in the form of MBA “Master of Business Administration” after being graduated from an ordinary CS/IS faculty).
Well, to some extent the 4th point is the most valid among all these (I am not saying it’s valid, I am just giving it a ranking among the above mentioned points…). However, unfortunately all of these points missed the main outcome of being a Business Informatics student. In the following lines I shall clarify (By the wish of ALLAH) what is Business Informatics is about, my points shall be as follows:
Well, the whole thing could be simply be mentioned in that sentence:
“Aligning IT with business objectives”
So, what does that simply mean? I’ll try to make that as simple as possible:
Any organization – independent from its size – have certain goals and objectives. In order to reach these goals and objectives, It simply tends to have different business functions, each with certain group of processes that is executed by these functions. Business functions (or Departments) usually constitutes: finance , Sales & Marketing, Operations and Human resources functions. Research and Development, procurement, Communication and Organizational performance are other functions which may exist based on the nature/size of the organization. So where is the problem?
Each of these business functions – is to a certain extent- dependant on some/all of the other functions. for example: If company ‘X’ needs to do a project for client ‘Y’, ‘X’’s HR Dpt. would allocate required resources for the project, ‘X’’s finance would allocate estimate budget based on the number/skills of the resources, ‘X’’s Operations would arrange required transportation for resources from and to client ‘Y’ site, X’s Procurement Dpt. would buy required tools to accomplish the project…and so on.
As it is obvious, These departments needs continuous information exchange among each other. Here comes the role of business informatics guy. In the following lines I shall discuss in detail what is expected from a BI student to do in such scenario:
…To be continued later
