Building a Paperless Service: Making the Internship Connection

Abstract

Central Ridge University1 (CRU) is a large, research-oriented university composed of 10 major colleges, connecting over 15 branch campuses, and offering various continuing, distance, outreach and executive programs. One of the major colleges of CRU is The College of Business Administration (CBA). CBA maintains an optional internship program for its undergraduate and MBA populations. CBA strongly recommends its students to experience the corporate world by doing an internship before their graduation. Also, CBA students seek the internship experience to complement their academic courses. The Internship Office of CBA is charged with the responsibility of facilitating students’ contacts with corporate clients. In order to do so, the office must gather, record, and disseminate information to students and to corporations. In addition, the information must be kept private, accurate, and comprehensive. Typical information processes existing in the Internship Office relied heavily on paper entries, paper duplication, and mailings. However, in the Internship Office, the use of technology was lagging. An end user within the Internship Office was enlisted to develop an information technology solution to the paper-intensive tasks of the office. Issues of the case study include (1) the organizational behavior issues to overcome when implementing information technology even in an enthusiastic and sympathetic organization, (2) the difficulties in defining a system by an end user even a sophisticated one, and (3) the obstacles of implementing a satisfactory system under tight time and security constraints even with the cooperation of a systems department.