116 Computer

T H E P R O F E S S I O N

R ecently, I attended a schoolmeeting at which partici-pants discussed a proposalfor amalgamating the com-puting and information sys-

tems schools. Given my strong andunconventional views on the topic, Ikept silent then, but have since feltcompelled to draft this essay.

Central to my views is the secondarynature of the computing profession, aconcept I exposed briefly in “Jobs,Trades, Skills, and the Profession”(Computer, Sept. 2002, pp. 104, 102-103; Computers and People, Wiley,2006, pp. 128-132), where I arguedthat a distinction should be madebetween professions and trades. Manyimplications for higher educationspring from seeing computing as a sec-ondary profession.

PROFESSIONSMost professions deal with people,

directly or indirectly. Doctors, lawyers,and educators mainly deal with peopledirectly. Engineers, architects, andagronomists mostly deal with thingspeople use. In general, professions dealwith both people and the things theyuse in various and varying proportions.

The computing profession is differ-ent. Computing professionals dealwith people and their data. Data arenot things, but abstractions that rep-resent things. Data use provideshuman civilization’s foundation, andcomputers and other digital technolo-gies have merely amplified this use.

Computers are toolsPeople nowadays use computers per-

sonally, just as they use cars and lawn-mowers. Computing professionals usecomputers just as doctors use stetho-scopes and sphygmomanometers, andas mechanical engineers use lathes anddrills. The professionalism lies in theuse of the tool rather than in the toolitself. Where then does the computingprofession fit in with other professions?

Doctors now have computers ontheir desks. They enter data theygather from patients and use it—aswell as data sent to their computerover the Internet from specialists likepathologists and tomographers—todeal with the patient’s problems.

Mechanical engineers don’t usemachinery such as lathes and drillsprofessionally and directly; they workwith technicians who do this. But their

design work thoroughly depends oncomputers, as does their planning andproduction management. Computingprofessionals, on the other hand, areconcerned with facilitating other pro-fessionals’ use of data. In this sense,the profession is secondary.

Some distinctions must be made atthis point. There is, or should be, abranch of engineering that dealsspecifically with the design and manu-facture of computers and other digitalequipment. As the field is already pop-ularly called digital technology, thisprofession would best be called digitalengineering and is distinct from thecomputing profession, which concernsitself with people and their data ratherthan with digital equipment.

Software engineeringConcerned with the design and con-

struction of software, software engi-neering has been seen as distinct fromthe computing profession’s mainbody. Partly, this is because programcoding is a major part of this engi-neering branch—which I consider amistake. Program coding should beviewed as a craft or trade, and pro-gramming technicians should be qual-ified by intensive vocational training.Programmers would thus be to soft-ware engineers what electricians areto electrical engineers and mechanicsare to mechanical engineers.

Program engineering then becomesmore professional in the classicalsense. It would also become moresparse and so less justifiable as a dis-tinct branch of engineering. It couldsimply be reabsorbed into the generalcomputing profession, but this isarguably inappropriate because soft-ware engineers focus on programs,whereas computing professionalsfocus on people and their data.

A better approach would be to sub-sume software engineering in digitalengineering, somewhat as the Austral-ian Computer Society has done in set-ting up a Computer Systems and Soft-ware Engineering Board alongsideboards for Computer Science andInformation Systems.

The ComputingProfession andHigher EducationNeville Holmes, University of Tasmania

The computing profession

needs to focus on working

with other professions.

Continued on page 114

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114 Computer

ating systems” and so “I sometimesstarted a presentation by saying, ‘Howmany people use Linux versus Micro-soft?’ I’d hear geeky giggles from theaudience.”

THE UNIVERSITYWhen I studied engineering, the fac-

ulty rules required us to arrive on thefirst day with a slide rule, though aCurta calculator would be allowed ifwe could afford it. For statistics, welearned to use Odhner calculators,and for surveying we were taught touse 7-figure log tables.

Our campus had an electronic dig-ital computer, but I didn’t find outabout it until after I graduated andjoined the computing industrybecause physicists guarded it behindan impressive portal labeled School ofNatural Philosophy. On some othercampuses, the first such computer hadelectrical engineers for guardians.Thus, early computer science subjectsand courses were taught by physicistsor engineers and had a strong mathe-matical flavor.

When commercial computers be-came common, government and indus-try typically used them for billing,accounting, sales analysis, and similarcommercial applications. The largercomputer manufacturers even usedseparate architectures for commercialwork, often with only decimal arith-metic, and for scientific work, usuallywith only binary arithmetic.

Eventually, university business fac-ulties realized that their graduateswould benefit from exposure to thecommercial and administrative use ofcomputers. They aimed to be—and beseen as—independent of the scientific

Simply computingWith software engineering out of the

way, the distinction between computerscience and information systemsbecomes easier to see. Computer sci-ence is about the manipulation of data.Information systems is about usingdata to inform people. The two fieldsare closely related, as indicated by theirpopular collapse under cover of thatugly initialism, IT, so often used toqualify terms such as industry, profes-sion, and worker. I have even seen thephrase IT technology used, reminiscentof Microsoft’s NT Technology—Google gives almost a million hits forit. Simply computing says it all.

Governments and the media nowa-days seem to prefer the initialism ICTfor Information and CommunicationTechnologies, once a trademark of theBritish firm International Computersand Tabulators. The use of ICT arisesbecause the field of telecommunica-tions has become increasingly digitaland the source of ever more consumerproducts.

A merger of digital engineering andcommunications engineering, or atleast of its device-level practice, seemsto be taking place informally and per-haps should be made formal. Certainly,the use of the Internet and othertelecommunications industry productslooms large in both computer scienceand information systems.

Computing has a strong secondaryrelationship to electrical and electronicsengineering, as IEEE Spectrum, theIEEE’s house magazine, clearly shows.For example, the front cover ofSpectrum’s October 2006 issue featuresa picture of a robotic surgeon and theheadline “How Electronic MedicalRecords Could Save Lives.” Inside, it’smuch the same: for example, the back-page column describes what happens“When Good Clicks Go Bad” (PaulMcFedries, p. 52). An article subtitled“How to cross the cultural divide whenworking overseas” (“Shaman, BlessThis Lab,” Susan Karlin, pp. 43-45)even quotes a consultant as saying, “Inengineering circles, no matter whereyou are in the world, people are verypassionate about their preferred oper-

computing academics, who were con-sidered incompatible with businessand commerce, which forced adop-tion of a distinctive title: “Schools ofInformation Systems” thus sprang upwithin business faculties.

In universities, administrative com-puters were kept separate from theiracademic counterparts. University ad-ministrators saw their task as runningthe university, the academics’ task asteaching and research—again, a thor-ough incompatibility. By the 1980s,many universities had three mainframecomputers: one administrative, one inbusiness, and one in engineering orphysics. All remained very much atarm’s length from each other.

Since then, the successive develop-ment and widespread adoption ofminicomputers, desktop computers,and personal computers has dramati-cally increased the number of com-puters on campus, while their overallcomputing power has grown astro-nomically. Now, most departments,administrative or academic, even iftiny, have their own computer labo-ratory and accompanying technicians.

IMPLICATIONSAcademic teaching of computing

suffers in two ways from personalcomputers’ ubiquity. Because com-puting is taught in most major uni-versity schools, as a discipline it islosing respect. Teaching computing toundergraduates is seen as simply amatter of teaching them to use thesoftware particular to a specific disci-pline, something any academic in thatdiscipline can do quite capably. Thisresults in both teachers and studentsbeing shackled to their software, caus-ing both groups to lose interest inmoving beyond the software, and los-ing the capability to do so as well.

Because computing is taught or usedthroughout schools, typically with anemphasis on entertainment and as asubstitute for the library, students loseinterest in computing as a future occu-pation or profession. The kind of cov-erage computing gets from themedia—which emphasize the jargon-overloaded world of nerds and geeks

T H E P R O F E S S I O N

The kind of coveragecomputing gets from

the media only increases the disinclination to

consider computing as anattractive profession.

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on the one hand and the fluctuatingprospects for employment in a worlddetermined by the stock market on theother—only increases the disinclina-tion of both students and their parentsto consider computing as an attractiveprofession. This lack of interest hasled to a decline in enrollments andthus to pressure for computing schoolamalgamation and the focus on nar-row popular applications such as Website and videogame design and imple-mentation.

Defining a new imageWe need instead a clearly defined,

stable, distinctive, and widely acceptedportrayal of the computing profession,one that can only come about throughthe actions of higher education, sup-ported by professional institutes.Defining the computing profession asa secondary profession that deals withdata use brings clarity. Excluding theaspects of the profession that focus ondigital technology and program cod-ing brings stability. Emphasizing therole of computing professionals aspartners of other professionals bringsdistinctiveness. But widespread accep-tance of computing as a profession willrely on universities changing what theyteach and how they teach it, with thesupport of all professional institutes.

Computing must be seen within theuniversity as a partnership with otherdisciplines, in both teaching andresearch. The main step is to bringboth computer science and informa-tion systems out of the normal facultystructure, together with mathematics.After all, mathematics is simply thesubset of the theory and application ofcomputing that deals with quantitativedata. Given responsibility for allundergraduate teaching of basic com-puting—for example, of programmingand statistics—a separate computingfaculty would acquire a large enoughstudent load to justify its existence.

Partnership for a better tomorrow

There would be great political resis-tance to such a move, but the advan-tages of uniform content, standards,

and equipment throughout the uni-versity should be plain. At the sametime, the danger of isolating comput-ing from practical context must becountered by giving priority to part-nerships in research and specialistteaching.

With partnerships established at theteaching level, it becomes possible toestablish it for students. Those takingcomputing degrees need to select amajor course of study in another pro-fession with a view to specializing incomputing for that discipline. Thetaking of double degrees should beseen as an extension of this.

Much professional education re-quires undertaking practical projectsin the final year, if not earlier. Part-nership in these projects would bene-fit all participants.

B ringing computing out of thecupboard at universities is amajor undertaking and requires

a complete change in the outlook of allconcerned. There are many variationsto be considered, many possibilitiesbeyond those I’ve outlined, and manyimplications for earlier education.

What should be clear, especially tothose involved in teaching computing,is that, unless such a change is under-taken, the number of computingdegrees granted will decline. Moreimportantly, the full potential of com-puting within the teaching and prac-tice of all disciplines will not berealized, in either sense of the word. ■

Neville Holmes is an honorary researchassociate at the University of Tasmania’sSchool of Computing. Contact him atneville.holmes@utas.edu.au. Details ofcitations in this essay, and links to fur-ther material, are at www.comp.utas.edu.au/users/nholmes/prfsn.

January 2007 115

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