Abstract

Internships are an essential component of the Information Systems (IS) degree program as they use practical scenarios to facilitate the understanding of theoretical concepts. Additional internships are crucial because they offer professional development opportunities and enhance communication, teamwork, problem-solving, and time management skills. Internships provide vital networking opportunities within the IS industry, allowing students to explore or choose diverse career trajectories by practicing and examining day-to-day responsibilities across various roles. Internships help build resumes with tangible work experience, enhancing students' competitiveness for the post-graduation job market; this is vital as employers often prioritize candidates with practical internship backgrounds. While internships benefit students, setting up internship programs within the IS department is challenging. Creating internship programs that seamlessly integrate with the academic curriculum can be difficult because academic course objectives and internship requirements may need to be more easily aligned. Furthermore, supervision and mentorship to ensure adequate support and guidance may be required from academic advisors (faculty) and the hosting organizations. In addition, securing suitable internship opportunities for students often requires the department or the school to build relationships with industry partners. Faculty may be burdened with managing the expectations of both students and hosting organizations, assessing student performance, and managing logistical considerations. Against this backdrop, we conducted action research (Mathiassen et al., 2003), where we were deeply immersed in creating a sustainable IS internship program to address the following research question: How do IS departments seamlessly integrate internships into their capstone courses? Using the Capability Maturity Model (CMM) as a framework in our action research, we assess and improve the processes within the IS department to create an internship program. Initially developed by the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) at Carnegie Mellon University, the CMM was primarily focused on software development processes. However, its concepts have been adapted and extended to various domains beyond software engineering. The CMM consists of five maturity levels, each representing a different level of process maturity: level 1, initial, where processes are ad hoc and chaotic. Success depends more on individual efforts than on standardized processes. Level 2 is managed, where basic project management processes are established, and processes are repeatable and documented. Level 3 is defined, where processes are well-defined and are used across the organization, focusing on continuous improvement. Levels 4 and 5 are quantitatively managed and optimized, where processes are constantly monitored and improved based on quantitative feedback. We developed and implemented a level 3 CMM internship program for our research. The study contributes to IS pedagogy by providing a framework to establish a sustainable IS internship program. References Mathiassen, L., and Pourkomeylian, P. 2003. “Managing knowledge in a software organization,” Journal of Knowledge Management (7:2), pp. 63-80.

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