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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.

Change management is an important process enabling the definition of a successful enterprise strategy and operations—especially in a turbulent environment. A number of methodologies are available for change management; however none of those is designed specifically for fractal systems. Taking into consideration self-similarity; self-organization, goal-orientation, and dynamics and vitality of fractal systems, change management in such systems obviously requires organizational procedures that take account of the distinct properties of fractal systems. The purpose of this research is to define a change management methodology that would allow administering change management in fractal systems in general and apply it to a specific change situation when the primary object of the change is an information system of a fractal enterprise.

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.

Inter-institutional networks become more and more important for today’s organizations. Despite mostly business-oriented organizations recognizing the possibilities that come with these networks, academic and educational systems are a typical example of inter-institutional network, and viewing these institutions as elements of a single network would yield positive results for all the parties. However, there is almost no research on the educational system as an inter-institutional network, especially in information system development education. The purpose of this chapter is to consider the education system as an inter-institutional network and to define the feedbacks existing within it in order to improve the network’s overall performance. Besides this the purpose is to find the data sets required for feedbacks analysis and appropriate methods for data analysis.

Business process modelling has long been important both for IS development and organization performance optimization. In addition, as demonstrated by practical experience derived from cooperation with organizations it is necessary to design an approach allowing the translation of business processes modelled in a particular perspective to other perspectives – which is not always possible under the existing modelling approaches. This paper brings together business process modelling perspectives that have found their reflection in various existing enterprise architectures. The existing business process modelling perspectives are grouped based on the underlying semantic meaning and analysed from the following viewpoints – the modelling scale and possible values and interrelation between different business process modelling perspectives.