I have been both a computer specialist and a manager. I agree with your general consensus that both are needed. Even when specialists exist, a manager cannot abandon his or her responsibility to the specialst. When you hire people for your group you cannot say "this is the job of the Human Resources specialist". When you think about what your area should do to contribute to this business you cannot say "this is the job of the Strategic Planning Department".
Your postings showed the importance of routine communications between IT and other departments. Dominican has a number of groups such as the Academic IT Committee to facilitate this communication.
You gave an example of younger people training older people in use of technology in the workplace. When PCs first came out, a survey was taken of CEOs about how they learned to use the new technology. Over 50% said they learned from their children.
Anthony gave an example of a 1988 systems for loans. It is not an easy business decision to decide when to upgrade a very old system that is working. Many old system contain complex business rules that are buried in the code. As a result, they can be unexpectedly expensive to replace. Sometimes a solution of wrapping the old system with a better user interface is used. In any case, be very wary when someone tells you it would be "easy" to replace old systems. Jarod mentioned that American Airlines used the wrapper approach.
Tameria raised the issue of health care providers working around the clock because systems are always available. You have that issue as a student because Canvas is always available. This is something that we as human beings and managers need to address.
Several of your contributed article links to the discussion. This is helpful. Please continue to provide links in future discussions.
You commented that it is important to study both technical and business aspects of Management Information Systems. Executives who know both sides can do a better job than one who knows only one. There is an advantage to being well rounded. Systems Executive that understand accounting will know the differences between capital expenditures and operating expenses and how this impact deciding which systems to put in the cloud.
One comment identified MBA as aspiring business leaders. This is accurate. I would like to add that you could also consider working in government or a non-profit organization.
You mentioned that employees should understand how to use systems. I would like to add that management should understand the potential of MIS and decide where to invest. This involves not only using current systems but having a good vision of what systems can do and matching future systems investments to the future needs of the business.
You discussed systems at Dominican and that Dominican relies heavily on MIS. Dominican uses Canvas on the Amazon Cloud. Dominican servers are not used. Dominican runs student e-mail on Microsoft Computers. Dominican license Jenzabar to handle registration, grades, and other applications. Dominican did not have to develop this software. When I started my career, most systems were developed and run in-house. There have been huge changes in technology and the business environment since then and I have had to replace my technical knowledge about every five years. What changes do you expect in the next twenty five years and how do you think you will get the new knowledge required to deal with those changes?
You talked about Pharmacy systems and the dangers they could pose if not properly tested. Software and other problems have been responsible for killing patients with radiation overdoses. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25. When you are thinking about taking short cuts to get products to market or trying to do work without the appropriate skills on the project team, you should read this article.
You made a good point about needing to understand and evaluate data before making a decision. I want to apply this to the remaining problems in this course. For example, if you are dealing with a zero percent loan, you should be suspicious of a total cost that is greatly different from the purchase price. If the Federal Tax number is larger than the gross pay, something is wrong. Finally, here is a hint for later in the course. If you maximize costs instead of minimizing them you will still see numbers on a spreadsheet but they will tell you to take a business action that does not make sense. You do need to understand data before making a decision and the first step in that understanding is to determine if the data is reasonable.
You mention that information systems in a car could be unnerving. Imagine an insurance company adjusting your auto insurance premium in real time based on where and how fast you are driving. I would certain charge extra for driving on the Dan Ryan Expressway.
Several people mentioned SAP. SAP is an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) System. ERP Systems are very complex and can introduce major changes to business processes. If you are interested in learning more about ERP before we get there in the course, here is a link. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterprise_resource_planning
Finally there were a few postings about Medical Tablets. These use Electronic Medical Records (EMR). To get an idea of how complex the "simple" issue of sharing EMRs between different providers see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_Level_7.