IST students were sent an email recently announcing a new job posting system and the dismantling of ISTechTRAK. Despite the awkward name, ISTechTRAK worked fairly well and played an indirect role in landing each of my internships. It also had room for improvement, which I won’t address here nor speculation on its replacement. My interest was piqued by the opaqueness of the message.

The turnover of the system is an excellent learning opportunity for the College of IST to offer its students, but it appears missed. Many IST graduates accept full-time work performing implementations and upgrades of software (some with the exact purpose of ISTechTRAK). Whereas low-level, physical implementation is becoming standardized, the planning and requirement gathering phases generate the most effort and difficulty. They are the work.

Releasing a simplified case study on the ISTechTRAK lifecycle would benefit nearly everyone enrolled. Why is it changing? What was incomplete in ISTechTRAK? How is it being improved? Are there measurable gains? Such information need not be public, but students are a major component of the IST organization and represent the primary benefactors of its dissemination. What the College of IST lacks and needs is transparency.

The obvious vehicle for improvement is IST2U (another lapse of naming judgment), which is essentially IST news from various sources repurposed in blog format. The service itself has been interated several times during my attendance, but like many things without explanation. I’m not asking for full disclosure, let’s start with cyclic news about the internal happenings of IST. There’s a lot of meat to be shared, but some of us are starving at the table.

Tags: ISTechTRAK IST2U SDLC transparency organization

Categories: Opinion, Suggestions