Beginning Fall 2023, the Information Technology and Systems program, or ITS, will be renamed to Computer Information Systems and Technology, or CIS Tech.
CIS Tech program director Timothy Stephens said that the name change process, which began in spring 2023 and has been in the works for years now, aims to reflect the degree’s intersection of business and computer science. While CIS Tech will remain a Bachelor of Science degree in JSOM, the name change — which does not change program staff, faculty, and class requirements — emphasizes the technical aspect of the program and makes it more marketable.
“Having a degree that shows both the business and the technical side will certainly build strength in the resume and LinkedIn profiles because, quite frankly, a lot of our careers are built around business and system analysts and those kinds of things,” Stephens said.
According to CIS Tech program manager Andrea Croasdale Woudwyk, incoming students will be automatically enrolled in the Fall 2023 CIS Tech course catalog. Existing students can apply for a Change of Major request in Orion if they want their diploma to reflect the name change by enrolling in the fall 2023 CIS Tech course catalog. Once a student submits the request, JSOM advising will send an updated degree plan and the student may stop the process at any time if they decide not to make the change.
“Between the last year’s ITS 2022 catalog and the new CIS Tech 23 catalog, there’s very little change [but] in 2021 and previous years, if they had an internship that met the three credit hour requirement, they were able to use that as a guided elective,” Woudwyk said. “Additionally, JSOM has a community engagement requirement. One of the ways to satisfy that is with the three credit hour course. Again, those earlier catalogs were able to use the three credit hour courses to satisfy guided elective requirements. Those were not allowed after 2022… so this is where students tend to see where they might see a difference between the degree plans. That is, if they are coming from an older catalog that made different allowances than the new catalog does.”
For students with any questions, Woudwyk said that both the ITS (bsits@utdallas.edu) and CIS Tech (bscist@utdallas.edu) emails will continue to be active. In addition, ITS merchandise can still be purchased while supplies last and the CIS Tech website is currently being updated to reflect the name change. She emphasized that the program staff, faculty, and classes remain the same, with the only difference being the name change.
“Students technically have until the summer of 2027 to complete an ITS degree plan so it’s going to be here for a while, but we’ll take the next semester, if not year, to kind of ease people into that,” she said. “What I’m putting in emails, I generally say CIS Tech/ITS. We’ll probably continue that method for at least the fall semester, if not the spring as well. However, we are going to start transitioning more fully to just CIS Tech. However, we’re still going to have references to ITS. It’s going to exist because the program still exists. There will still be students graduating with ITS on their diploma.”
Continuing the name change, the CIS Tech program is undergoing several changes, including a new program director, a new student engagement program, and a professional program in IT. Woudwyk said that students can stay up to date on these changes by checking emails from her, Stephens, or the program’s inbox.
“Over one fourth of the total [JSOM] undergraduate enrollment is this program, so … that means that there’s lots of opportunities with that and those opportunities will continue to grow as our environment changes in those kinds of things as well,” Stephens said. “We continue to evolve as our employers’ needs evolve and our student population evolves. I think that’s one of the key messages: ‘Why did you change the name?’ It’s just part and parcel of what we are, who we do, and how we do it.”