A fit-gap analysis of e-business curricula and job demand in Taiwan and the US Eldon Y. Li a, * , H.J. Rebecca Yen b , C.Y. John Cheng b a Department of Management Information Systems, College of Commerce, National Chengchi University, No. 64, Section 2, Zhi-nan Road, Wenshan, Taipei 11605, Taiwan b Department of Information Management, College of Management, National Central University, Taiwan Received 31 August 2007; accepted 23 September 2007 Abstract During the past decade, many enterprises have been re-directing their resources into critical business areas to keep up with economic and market changes. They have adopted electronic business (EB) systems, such as supply chain manage- ment, enterprise resource planning (ERP), and enterprise application integration (EAI), to ensure seamless integration with internal processes as well as suppliers and customers. This phenomenon indicates that EB systems are playing an important role in attaining the effectiveness of enterprise operations. However, there is a constant complaint from recruiters that EB professionals with the right skills are hard to come by. To gauge the rapid changes in EB education and industry demand, EB curricula from top universities and job announcements from popular career Web sites in both the US and Taiwan are collected. We analyze the data and compare the results between the two countries to recommend remedial actions for nar- rowing the gap between industry and academia. Ó 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Country-specific developments; Improving classroom teaching; Pedagogical issues; Post-secondary education; Teaching/lea- rning strategies 1. Introduction Information technology (IT) has been advancing rapidly in the past few decades, ranging from micropro- cessors to the Internet. IT changes not only business operations, but also business interrelationships. During the meltdown of Internet economy at the beginning of the new millennium, many dot-com companies van- ished because they failed to meet investors’ expectations. This phenomenon, however, did not stop the grow- ing use of the Internet as an essential business tool (Pinker, Seidmann, & Foster, 2002). Electronic business (EB) still plays a major role in many industries. According to a Forrester (2005) report, expenditure on IT goods has increased from 9% to 10%, especially on communications equipment, IT consulting, outsourcing 0360-1315/$ - see front matter Ó 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.compedu.2007.09.013 * Corresponding author. Tel.: +886 2 8661 8082; fax: +886 2 8661 1384. E-mail address: eli@calpoly.edu (E.Y. Li). Available online at www.sciencedirect.com Computers & Education xxx (2007) xxx–xxx www.elsevier.com/locate/compedu ARTICLE IN PRESS Please cite this article in press as: Li, E. Y. et al. , A fit-gap analysis of e-business curricula and job demand ..., Computers & Education (2007), doi:10.1016/j.compedu.2007.09.013