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Towards Narrowing a Conceptual Gap between IT Industry and UniversityThe situation when the number of the students and the popularity of the engineering education in general and IT education in particular is not increasing dramatically due to the fact that there exists an opinion that engineering education is complex and time-consuming from one side and that the graduates are not sufficiently prepared for the industry from another, requires the University to perform a series of actions that can improve the current situation. One of the areas for improvement is the quality of the study programs in the sense of their suitability to ‘customers’, namely Students and Industry. Previous research shows that the knowledge requirements monitoring system and the processes behind it can improve the quality of the study programs, e.g. the results of the Value Network Analysis demonstrate that the Monitoring System can give additional value to both the University and the Industry. Developing a monitoring system prototype requires narrowing the gap between industry and university and introduces new ways of industry-university cooperation.

There are different ways of defining business and IT alignment. On one end it is possible to look at the alignment from the strategic perspective; on another end we can go down to the small granularity manual and software functions to see how they are related via human-computer interfaces. In this paper we take a work systems perspective in addressing the alignment between business and IT. In particular, we consider service systems by describing the services at several levels of granularity where they can be instantiated in manual, semi-automatic, and automatic modes of functioning. This perspective helps to address some design challenges for flexible work systems that require intention- and situation-dependent alignment between human and artificial work to manage multiple options of heterogeneous service configurations. The proposed alignment approach is illustrated by education demand and offer correspondence monitoring services.

Nowadays, graduates have a wide range of opportunities when they are thinking about their further education and it is difficult to choose whether it would be better to go one way or another. One of the most important drivers for the final decision is whether the study program chosen can lead to a good and interesting job in the future. That means that Universities have to reflect the answer to this question in the description of the study programs, but in order to do this they have to know what the main requirements from the Industry are. This paper, building upon the previous research showing that a knowledge requirements monitoring system and the processes behind it can improve the quality of study programs, focuses on application of the monitoring system for extracting and representing industrial requirements using skill frameworks and direct and indirect course and topic rating systems.

The quality of study programs is one of the issues that are essential in the turbulent global environment universities nowadays operate in. Quality may be considered in terms of different quality standards trying to follow their guidelines formally and practically. This paper takes a different view of the quality issue with respect to the study programs in the field of engineering, namely, the quality of the study program is considered from the ecosystem perspective and value exchange between different members of the ecosystem is taken as a central object of interest in defining and supporting the high quality of the program. While analysis of value exchange and detection of changes in the value provision and request are not a natural part of the university teaching process, appropriate models and support systems can help to understand the value exchange process in the educational ecosystem. The understanding of the value exchange process, in turn, helps to identify and monitor knowledge requirements for developing high quality study programs.