Brains for IT: how colleges are meeting the demand for information-technology education. (Information Technology).

Indiana's colleges and universities are responding in a variety of creative ways to meet the fast-changing technological demands of business, consumers and government. Some have created new majors, some are cross-pollinating among departments, injecting high doses of information technology into traditionally low-tech curriculum. And one is answering the call to train for careers in the burgeoning computer security area, post 9/11. Here's a sampling of what seven of them are concentrating on now.

Indiana State University is the first state institution to have a four-year degree in information technology, says Nicholas Farha, visiting associate professor in the Department of Electronics and Computer Technology. "The IT program is cross-discipline in three different departments," he says. His department, Computer Science, and the MIS department within the School of Business all contribute to the curriculum to give students a well-rounded education. Students must elect one of four specialized tracks: database administration, network administration, Web development or software development.

"IT is one of the very few areas in academia that's driven by industry," says Farha. "It doesn't happen in math or biology or things like that.

It's unique to this field." The Internet has changed everything, he stresses from the way we shop to the way we bank to the way we communicate. That makes Web development one of the hottest career choices that will only grow, he says. "Some of the highest-paid people are Web-development people, and the job didn't exist 10 years ago."

The same cross-discipline approach is stressed at the University of Evansville, where the state's first bachelor's degree in Internet technology was created in 2001, allowing students to access courses from computer science, business and mass communication. In fact, it may be the only one in the country, says Robert Morse, professor of computer science and director of Internet technology. "I don't know of anyone who has a degree such as this at the undergraduate level." Forty students are now enrolled; the first student will graduate this year.

"As a liberal-arts college we want students to be exposed to many areas, go with what really excites them," says Morse. The program was intended to provide a generalist degree, but he's finding that once enrolled many students become fascinated with a particular specialty area and switch majors. Internet technology may become a minor.

Evansville's University of Southern Indiana is also knee-deep in technology expansion within its School of Business. Last fall it added an e-business major and an e-business area of interest in its business administration major. Ten students are enrolled. The program will prepare students to manage, analyze and develop commercial applications and e-business solutions to give businesses a competitive edge in the world marketplace, says its director and professor of computer information systems, Abbas Foroughi. As far as he knows, it's the only e-business degree in the state.

Foroughi says the impetus for the new program came from an Evansville Chamber of Commerce Vision 2000 report emphasizing the need for value-added, low-pollution technology jobs in the area. About 80 percent of e-business is B2B, he says, with supply-chain management one of the most exciting uses. In the past, he says, everyone in an enterprise blamed one another when there was a delay. But with today's supply-chain management from the initial order to ordering raw materials to production to shipping, it's transparent where the bottleneck is.

Integrating information technology into every corner of Ball State University's programs is the role of O'Neal Smitherman, who holds the two-year-old job of vice president for information technology and chief information officer. "We have all thought about IT careers as going into computing," he says. "But the new movement into digital technology means that students will work in all segments of technology."

The Center for Media Design opened in February as the cornerstone of Ball State's iCommunication initiative (iComm for short), funded by a four-year $20 million Lilly Endowment grant administered through the College of Communication, Information and Media. It was the largest grant in the university's history. The center will serve as a research, assessment and development hub for digital media applications. "It will be available to everyone," says Smitherman. "It allows visualization of information to improve what every discipline does."

Ball State's new Global Media Network, partnering with businesses and universities on every continent, says Smitherman, is using its digital-convergence capabilities to share coursework and conduct interactive seminars around the world. And its new Center for Testing Technologies is making a name for itself in the entertainment industry by working with the research arm of the large movie studios--including Universal, Viacom and Sony--to develop ways to protect digital media from the inappropriate downloading that's common in the record industry. An economic-development link with all this digital convergence is its business incubator to spawn new Indiana tech companies.

"When you think of Purdue, you think of engineering and technology," says Lonnie Bentley, professor of computer technology and interim department head for computer technology in the School of Technology. That's led business and government to its doors to take advantage of cutting-edge research and highly trained graduates, increasingly since 9/11.

"Information security is being driven by Homeland Security and the 9/11 incident," says Bentley. "We excel in wide-area network security. The national security agency is wanting us to start providing graduates who know how to secure and protect networks and detect hackers." That's one of the reasons the bachelor's degree in telecommunications and networking is the hottest of the four degrees offered in the School of Technology on the West Lafayette campus, with 350 of its 615 undergrads enrolled. "We could triple it if we had the resources."

Biometrics--including fingerprint, voice and retina recognition--is a growing area of importance to law enforcement. Computer forensics, learning how to retrieve information off a computer without destroying it by accident, is another.

Cary Laxer, professor and head of the Computer Science and Engineering Department at Rose-Hulman in Terre Haute, says, "We're an engineering school. That's who we train. That's who we educate."

Sixty students are enrolled in its computer-science program. A new degree program in software engineering will begin next year as a result of companies clamoring for more people to solve problems and write software, says Laxer. It will be less theoretical and more applied than the computer-science degree, and he expects about a third of the students will move to the new program.

Indiana University School of Informatics dean Michael Dunn explains "informatics": "It's more highfalutin," he says, and has become shorthand to include "someone using a computer to someone developing a computer." Informatics programs won't replace computer-science programs, says Dunn; they just provide a new way of looking at how technology applies to other areas of study.

The school was the first of its kind when it was opened in 2000 and now has 100 students each at its Indianapolis and Bloomington campuses, close to a maximum, says Dunn. Informatics allows students to learn how to apply information technology to an approved "cognate" area, such as biology, chemistry, psychology--even fine arts. It offers four undergraduate degrees, six master's degrees and is hoping to move a Ph.D. program through the approval process by the fall of 2004. Skills in bioinformatics and chemical informatics are among the most sought-after now, says Dunn, "In the long run, companies will develop because of our students. We can help by supplying an educated workforce."