Management Information Systems, a bit of history

In the early days of business applications programming, there was little interaction between programmers and other IT staff with the rest of the business units. The business people didn’t understand IT and IT folks didn’t understand the business process.

Business people wanted programmers to come up with the ultimate solution for their problems and programmers had hard time explaining to management what is possible and what is not, technically, possible. This created a gray area between management and IT.

The solution was to design a course of study where both IT and Management courses are taught. The idea was to turn-out future managers who start their carriers in IT and move up the corporate ladder to take managerial occupations. These managers will have backgrounds in both IT and business which will help bridge the gap in communications between the two units.

Today, increasing numbers of companies are requiring their IT managers to have business skills since IT is increasingly becoming an integral part of the business process.