Abstract:

Management education is primarily characterized by the great vagueness of the subject area of management which still can be considered as: ‘The Art and Science of Mess Management’ (Russell L. Ackoff). IT management, as the special management that deals with the control of IT (information technology), only has particular features in this regard in that IT managers are assumed to have certain knowledge, proximity, and inclination to use IT in their daily management work.

A particularly impressive example of IT are Large Language Models (LLMs), which have recently become widely known, especially as the specific product Chat-GPT. LLMs in particular enable the creation of a variety of texts based on free text input, so-called prompts. However, LLMs now also produce other types of results, e.g., images, and can also process non-textual input.

It is obvious that from the educator’s perspective, LLMs have critical aspects related to the fact that the results produced by LLMs cannot be easily distinguished from those produced by humans e.g., students who have to create papers.

However, the design of targeted prompts is by no means trivial, so a good prompt represents a performance with differentiable properties that can therefore also be evaluated.

Apart from this more pedagogical aspect, the creation of texts – e. g. an invitation to a meeting or an incident response – is part of daily management work and the principle of efficiency requires the greatest possible automation, which LLMs enable at this point. The so-called prompt engineering is now both a research field and a professional profile.

In this area of tension, the contribution discusses how prompt engineering can be integrated into an IT management curriculum; starting from the practical demand within the subject area, through the corresponding skill-requirements and practical examples to a critical reflection. The contribution does however not provide an in-depth look at how LLMs work.

Keywords:

Prompt Engineering, Artificial Intelligence, Management Education, IT Management.