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Paper (refereed) Student-Faculty

Recommended Citation: Figueroa, R and D W Johnson. Information Literacy and IT Competency in the Information Age: A Critical Overview of Corporate IT Education Sourcing. In The Proceedings of the Information Systems Education Conference 2000, v 17 (Philadelphia): §904.

Information Literacy and IT Competency in the Information Age: A Critical Overview of Corporate IT Education Sourcing

Refereed

Robert Figueroa    [a1] [a2]
College of Business, Computer Information Systems Department
Florida Gulf Coast University    [u1] [u2]
Fort Myers, Florida, USA    [c1] [c2]

David W. Johnson    [a1] [a2]
College of Business, Computer Information Systems Department
Florida Gulf Coast University    [u1] [u2]
Fort Myers, Florida, USA    [c1] [c2]

Many companies desiring or compelled to join the information revolution are wondering whether they possess the wherewithal to accomplish the feat. Beyond the purely technical issues there exists the broader challenge of adapting their organizations to new business and information paradigms. A similar challenge faces firms that have already made the transition, because constant change seems an inescapable fact of life in the information age. This paper briefly examines (from a "macro" perspective) current education and training sources-including degree-based programs, corporate universities, and training vendors-designed to help companies attain (and maintain) this crucial information technology (IT) competency. Our purpose is to assess the relative effectiveness of these alternatives, especially in terms of a core determinant of organizational IT competency at the employee level: information literacy. This refers to a mixture of IT knowledge, skills, perceptions and values that determines an individual's IT perspective. In our scheme it is composed of two fundamental areas, which we call technical literacy and business literacy. This framework leads us to identify inherent weaknesses (and some strengths) in the various IT education approaches. We also conclude that the IT education and training scene as a whole suffers from fragmentation and inconsistency. Our evaluation argues for a more integrated and cooperative approach involving the major players in the IT education market, one that in fact may just be starting to emerge.

Keywords: business education, corporate universities, information literacy, IT competency, IT education, IT training industry

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