Myself and my Learnings

Bio

Hi everyone!

My name is Thierry and I'm a student of Business Information Systems at the University of Göttingen, Germany.

This program of study is not obviously not very common in some parts of the world, so let me briefly describe what it includes: After doing two years of basic knowledge in business and computer science, as introductory accounting, economics, marketing, some programming languages and theoretical computer science and statistics classas, I have to choose 5 subjects in which I will have to achieve 24 (european = ECTS) credits. There are certain restrictions to the choice, however, I focus on "Computer Science", "Business Information Systems", "Marketing", "Accounting and Corporate Management" and "Management Psychology", whereas I am considering to exchange the last one with "Operations Research". If somebody might be able to guess some German words, you're welcome to see some mindmaps I created while studying on my website.

Relevant professional experience for this course may be an internship at Deutsche Bank
in the Business Management department, where I was involoved for preparation and rollout of a new CRM System. Other employers in that sort of context I had where AVG and TNS.

My career goal is not completly set yet... I am considering IT strategy consulting as an really interesting option, but I'll have to figure out if it is like I imagine it to be. This course will help me achieving my vague career goal by giving me more insights in a very condensed time frame that will be in every case nescessary (I know I will have to deal with SAP when I return), but might rise a fascinantion for a subject I didn't really know a lot about until now.

By the end of the course I hope to have a better overview and insight about what ERP Systems are really about, have a certain idea about the look&feel, strategic issues, and of course, some anecdotes from somebody that worked with them and already gained some professional experience.

One fact about me? Many of you may already know it: I was born and grew up in Germany, but still I only have the French citizenship, although this is the very first time I live in France for a longer than two-weeks period. I'm excited about living in "my" country the very first time.

Learnings

I don't want to repeat what my fellow students already mentioned. My key learnings today where the historical developement of the ERP Systems and the first time I thought about strategic issues while choosing them, whereas the discussion open source versus proprietary software is very similar in a lot of IT (landscape) descisions and not really specific for ERP. BTW: Open Source Software can have a variety of different licensing aspects. Still, different considerations have to be made even if the descision is already made for a proprietary system, as there might be different reasons for choosing bigger or smaller players.

The group work let us consider a special enterprise and focus on the reasons for implementing an ERP in an actual firm.

A special learning is this way of organizing a lecture: Writing into a teacher's blog is a completely new expericence, this being an assessed part even more. Let's see how this works out.

CU all tomorrow,

Thierry