Martin Kemp
MSc ITMOC, 2004
Country of origin: France
Employer: CSC
Having just completed a European management degree in France in which I had already taken several IT-related courses, I wished to further develop my knowledge of IT as a subject - especially the impact that IT has in organisations and businesses - rather than just IT as a technology.
The ITMOC programme was an obvious choice. It was the only course to propose such a view of IT. It mixes both technical courses (ITO 15 Analysis and Design, ITO14 Introduction to programming) and organisational sciences related ones (ITO4 System methodologies, ITO 1 Interpretations of Information Technology and Organisations, etc.).
Before ITMOC, I had just graduated from a 4-year European Management degree in which I spent 2 years studying in Germany at the FH Reutlingen and 2 years in France at Reims Management School. I had also taken 2 work placements as part of this course. The first was a 6-month internship at IBM Germany as a marketing assistant in Stuttgart. The second was another 6-month internship at Allianz Asset Management as an assistant Fund Manager in Paris.
For me, ITMOC is about studying the impact of IT on organisation and business rather than just as a technology. ITMOC allows you to understand how IT affects people, systems and projects. ITMOC provide a strong insight in how organisations have embraced IT in the recent decades and how it has influenced them both in positive (efficiency gains) and negative ways (IT failures, control issues).
On graduating from ITMOC I was offered a job as a business analyst with Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC), an IT services organisation. My role focused on analysing areas of the organisation which suffer performance issues and implementing service improvement programs in order to streamline processes. Typical service improvement programs included, the implementation of ITIL-compliant processes for incident and problem management, the development of web-based centralised Knowledge Tools for employees to use as a central repository to store both technical support documentation and organisation-related procedural documentation.
Since joinging CSC I have held several roles and am now Transition and Transformation Solution Manager, responsible for development of new business proposals for large IT Outsourcing Transitition and Transformation programmes ($10m to $35m).
ITMOC has really helped me understand how one can use IT as a powerful tool to help organisations in streamlining their businesses and processes. More importantly ITMOC has helped me realise how IT affects people and process in organisations and ultimately can lead to costly failures if not implemented correctly, especially if the 'people aspects' are neglected.
