Students to take first complex IT systems degree

Standard degrees are not suitable for understanding the behaviour of large IT systems

Students will study patterns in nature to help them understand large IT systems

A programme to train students how to handle large-scale complex IT systems will begin at the start of the next academic year, in October.

The scheme has £15m funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and industry partners.

Founding director Dave Cliff of the University of Bristol said the aim of the course is to give the next generation the skills they may not find elsewhere.

"We need a step-up change," he said. "We want to come up with a new community of practitioners who can deal with these kinds of systems."

The approach of the course will be founded in mathematics, but will also look at innovation, socio-technical issues and software engineering.

Students will look at how IT systems are affected by human, organisational, business, social and political factors.

The scheme was set up after the Information Age Partnership (IAP), a panel of senior IT executives, reported to the former Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) that a complex IT systems research institute would be a strategic investment.

The project will particularly look at IT systems whose behaviour cannot be predicted, by analysing their component parts.

The IT industry's intention to offer utility computing solutions – where computing power is used and paid for in the same way as electricity or water – will produce a step change in the complexity of systems.

The courses will examine biological systems, such as ant colonies, which have developed methods for achieving goals without central control.

Increasingly IT staff will have to move away from traditional study areas, said Cliff.

"The next generation of IT professionals are going to need to draw together research from a number of different fields," he said.