Design Thinking to Solve IS Enrollment Decline

As an enterprise team, you face complex challenges. You work across silos and juggle competing requirements—all while racing to meet rising expectations. That’s why we can use Enterprise Design Thinking, a framework that aligns multi-disciplinary teams around their users’ real needs. When teams apply these scalable methods, they can move faster and deliver differentiated outcomes over and over again. The supporters of this technique believe that the world’s systems should work in the service of people. At the heart of our human-centered mission is Enterprise Design Thinking: a framework to solve our users’ problems at the speed and scale of the modern enterprise.

Design thinking is an iterative problem-solving approach emphasizing empathy, creativity, and collaboration to develop innovative solutions. It encourages students to tackle complex problems by understanding the needs and perspectives of the people they are designing for. Design thinking is a flexible and dynamic process that encourages students to think creatively. It empowers them to approach problems from a human-centered perspective and fosters innovation and problem-solving skills.

In this individual activity, we will practice the design-thinking technique to solve a real business problem. The principles which guide us in this exercise are to see problems and solutions as an ongoing conversation. Each student can come up with a new way to solve the given problem. Then, each student needs to submit a report highlighting how they used the design-thinking technique to solve the mentioned business problem.

Background:

Information systems (IS) educators at universities face a number of challenges in the current environment, including dealing with declining enrolments, preparing students for the changes in the profession, and updating the curriculum to integrate new ideas and technologies. These challenges make sharing IS education-related knowledge and practices especially critical.

Scenario:

A large university recently announced that the number of applicants for Master’s degree programs in Information Systems (IS) declined by 55% in 2021, 45% in 2022, and 40% in 2023.
There are some speculations and assumptions about the reasons, but the university does not use a traditional problem-solving approach.
Use the design thinking technique to solve the issues.
Write the report using the following steps. Responses to each step will be assessed:
1- What is the business problem?

2- Do a “5 Whys” to find the main cause (dig deeper).

3- Who are the Users (main user identification)?

4- What is the User-centered problem statement (Problem statement from the users ‘ perspective)?

5- Do “As-Is” analysis: What is their current struggle today? Their daily work? Their needs?

6- Do “to-be” analysis: Propose some User-centric Ideas to solve their problems.