Next week the courses of the seventh edition of the postgraduate course in Organisational Information Systems and Management of Information Technology Companies, of the Faculty of Economics and Administration (FCEA) of the University of the Republic, will begin. This year there will be 26 students, in addition to the 120 who have already taken the course in previous editions; for the second year in a row the places have been filled. "It is a professionally oriented postgraduate course, closely linked to what is happening in the productive sector," said Gabriel Budiño, the academic coordinator.
The postgraduate course, which came about as a result of a proposal by the Uruguayan Chamber of Information Technology (Cuti), aims to train professionals specialised in information technology and also in management, and aspires to enable graduates to develop technological applications to provide competitive advantages to companies in different fields. Budiño explained that nowadays it is "very difficult to differentiate between a technology company and a health, sports or marketing company; the penetration of IT [information technology] is so high that it is very difficult to talk about the IT sector". At the same time, the development of these technologies in recent years has meant that "a lot of other professionals" have had to deal with the subject "without necessarily being technology experts. For example, banks had to transform themselves to incorporate new tools, and today they have the challenge of adapting their processes and making them more technological, so you have people who work in finance, security, auditing or risk management who have to know a lot more about technology applied to processes," the coordinator explained.
While eight years ago the spirit that led to the creation of the diploma was to provide training for a technology sector that was growing and would need professionals, today the focus is different. "To grow, the productive sector in general has to have a strong injection of technology, and it has to have professionals who know how to combine expertise in processes, in management, who know how to understand technology and apply it to their original discipline," said Budiño. Thus, the course brings together people from different backgrounds: in addition to accountants and management graduates, there are chemists, notaries and lawyers, "but not because they want to do something else: they want to do the same thing but supported by the use of technology". At the same time, there is also a profile of technology professionals who require training in business models: "Companies that own disruptive innovations have failed because they lacked the ability to partner with profitable business models," he explained.
Undergraduate and postgraduate
The core faculty has two other courses in the pipeline, apart from the diploma: the Bachelor's degree in Information Systems Management, which was designed between 2012 and 2017 and which will be run by the FCEA in conjunction with the Faculty of Engineering (Fing), and the master's degree in the area. The team's goal, Budiño said, is to be able to open both courses in 2020.
In relation to the degree, Budiño clarified that although the syllabus has already been approved, the faculties are currently "in the process of budgeting for it and finding funds". "It is a degree that will interest many people, that will be massive, and as it is an undergraduate degree it must be free and open, so we have to get specific funding," said the professor, who added that it will involve many new courses, which do not currently exist in either the FCEA or the Fing, and that in some cases will have teachers from the two university services.
Regarding the master's degree, the academic coordinator explained that a process of reformulating the postgraduate programme and designing an additional year, with an important component in research methodology, is currently underway. "In order to create a master's degree, there must be a critical mass, tutors, defined topics for research," and during these editions of the postgraduate course, "the development of areas such as project management, transactional systems, business models, which were not so developed, has been growing at the FCEA. Now we are in a position to add a year and do theses on topics closely linked to what is happening in the country," he said. Budiño also clarified that although the goal is to open the option of a master's degree next year, the academic evaluation process at the FCEA has just begun.
Expanding
The opening activity of this year's postgraduate course was a talk with professionals involved in this intersection between technology and management. Mario Tucci, director of CUTI and professor of the diploma, said that it is estimated that 100,000 jobs will be created in Latin America in this area. Guillermo Varela, president of the Chamber of the Digital Economy of Uruguay, was also present and said that now "all companies are IT companies", so that "you can be discussing with doctors about electronic medical records", finance or transport.
Source: La Diaria
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