Question 1: Why part of core:

As a manager or entrepreneur, you might be starting up a new business.  Imagine trying to do this if you did not have an understanding of what information systems can and should do for your business. Also, imagine you are running a business and do not understand the need for systems security, risk management, project management, or disaster recovery. You need the basic knowledge to recognize the risks and start the process of addressing them.

Question 2: Computer specialists.

1. Why do I think that systems are too important to be left solely to business managers and business school graduates? After all, in today's environment, you can implement a new system in the cloud without the involvement of specialists from the Information Technology department. Systems should be built with a team of business managers, system users, and computer specialists. Here is a small table to explore what happens if either "side" of the team is eliminated:

2. Computer specialists do not exist just to fix glitches and printer problems and consult on office productivity programs. In some jobs, this may be all that you see a computer specialist doing. You might even think that the role of IT at Dominican is limited to these tasks. Computer specialists must also be involved in planning, analysis, design and installation of new systems and making major changes to existing systems. Computer specialists must determine how new systems will integrate with existing systems and in many cases do the programming work to cause that integration to occur. A recent example at Dominican would be the integration between the registration system (Jenzabar) and the learning management system (Canvas). Jenzabar runs on a server at Dominican and Canvas runs in the cloud - mostly on Amazon Web Services. Computer specialists must be actively involved in disaster recovery planning including evaluating the trade-offs between cost, risk, and recovery time.

3. It was mentioned in the Discussion that computer systems should increase revenue and/or reduce cost. Yes -- most of them should. Some computer systems need to exist for strategic reasons. Microsoft Windows 10 will probably loose money over the long term because (I predict) it will become almost a free good like the Apple OSX Operating System. However, Windows 10 will help lock customers into Microsoft Products and make them more likely to use the Microsoft Cloud (Azure), make is easy to license and use Microsoft Office and other Microsoft Products. Sometimes (not always), questions like "Do we have to do this to stay in business?, Will this make us more competitive? Will this let us get into a new a potentially very profitable business?" are more important to address than how much will costs be decreased or revenue increases.

The first banks that built ATM systems would not have been able to cost justify them on revenue vs. expense at least in the short term (5 years). They had to be thinking about what business(es) they would be in over the long term. In case you are interested in more detail, see this article including the fact that customers did not even want the system.

Be careful when lowering costs that you do not take actions that drive too many customers away and sacrifice the future of the company. As managers, you should also be looking for how technology can make big changes in your business. Think of Neflix changing from mailing DVDs to streaming videos and Dell Computer making machines to order very quickly based on customer choices.

4. Several Discussion postings mentioned Outages (system down time), explained how expensive they were, and how they were unacceptable. I agree that outages are expensive and painful. Twice (different airlines), I have been delayed by over 12 hours because computers that calculate how much fuel to put on the plane and how to load it went down. There are other outages that are more expensive than this and you will read about some of them in a later Discussion. I can also agree that outages are "unacceptable". Unacceptable enough to spend large sums of money to try to avoid the most "unacceptable" one. However, no matter how much is spent, there are still going to be outages. The money spent might be able to reduce frequency and length but outages will still occur. The community college is Dallas probably had a good disaster recovery plan. However, when a police robot blew up their sever and server room, there was (and at this moment) continues to be an outage.

A management statement that something is "unacceptable" does not mean it won't happen and that you don't need a plan to deal with it.

5. More on Computer specialists: I have been both a compute specialist and a manager at various times in my career. If a computer system is being designed or implemented for your department, DO NOT decide you "don't have time" to work on it. As you saw in the Discussion, computer specialits will probably not understand your business or your department and therefore will implement something that could be painful to use. Become actively involved with the design decisions, training plans, and implementation schedules.