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The IT consulting model: innovative methods for industry partnerships

Published: 20 October 2005 Publication History

Abstract

The School of Information Sciences and Technology (IST) at The Pennsylvania State University has recently launched a unique Information Technology Consulting Track within the curriculum of the school. This innovative three-course curricular track was the result of numerous strategic consultations and partnerships with a number of corporations.To-date, activities associated with the IT Consulting Track have generated over $3 million in corporate donations of hardware, software, and monies. Accenture has recently signed on as the official corporate sponsor of the IT Consulting Track.This paper explores this model of real-world IT consulting education which relies heavily on fostering and maintaining many close corporate relationships. This model of corporate curricular engagement is unique nationally in that it requires close communication and coordination between professors, corporate services, Office of Development, and career services representatives. The School of Information Sciences and Technology at The Pennsylvania State University is the first school in the nation to formally tackle IT consulting education at the undergraduate level. For Accenture, this program represents the first curricular sponsorship of an academic program that the company has conducted.A discussion of the rationale and composition of the IT Consulting Track is also presented. The faculty involved with the IT Consulting Track have also conducted preliminary action research related to the consulting model. A description of the research and findings round out the paper.

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  • (2011)Collaboration between Academia and IndustryOnline Courses and ICT in Education10.4018/978-1-60960-150-8.ch014(177-188)Online publication date: 2011
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  • (2009)Developing the Enterprise Architect PerspectiveEncyclopedia of Information Science and Technology, Second Edition10.4018/978-1-60566-026-4.ch172(1085-1091)Online publication date: 2009
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  1. The IT consulting model: innovative methods for industry partnerships

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    SIGITE '05: Proceedings of the 6th conference on Information technology education
    October 2005
    402 pages
    ISBN:1595932526
    DOI:10.1145/1095714
    • General Chair:
    • Rob Friedman
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 20 October 2005

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    1. information technology consulting
    2. innovative curricula
    3. project teams

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    View all
    • (2011)Collaboration between Academia and IndustryOnline Courses and ICT in Education10.4018/978-1-60960-150-8.ch014(177-188)Online publication date: 2011
    • (2009)A Successful Failure to Collaborate on Storage Technology EducationInternational Journal of Information and Communication Technology Education10.4018/jicte.20090410065:4(57-67)Online publication date: 1-Oct-2009
    • (2009)Developing the Enterprise Architect PerspectiveEncyclopedia of Information Science and Technology, Second Edition10.4018/978-1-60566-026-4.ch172(1085-1091)Online publication date: 2009
    • (2008)Enterprise systems educationProceedings of the 2008 ACM SIGMIS CPR conference on Computer personnel doctoral consortium and research10.1145/1355238.1355269(119-126)Online publication date: 3-Apr-2008

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