FH-Prof. Dr. Sylvia Geyer

Job Description:

Principal, Head of Department Computer Science

My educational path:

I attended a language high school in southern Burgenland and then decided to study business informatics at the Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien) after graduating from high school.

Already during my studies I gave courses in adult education (Word, Excel, …) to finance my studies.

After graduating with a master’s degree I changed to the Vienna University of Econoics and Business (WU Wien), where I did my doctorate in the field of business informatics with specialization in eBusiness.

What makes it interesting for me?

Business informatics is an interdisciplinary and diverse subject area. Every company in every domain or industry needs business informatics specialists and the tasks of the business informatics specialist can be very different. This starts with requirements engineering, IT project management, system design, data analysis, consulting up to classical software engineering, and much more.

Why do I work in this job?

What I enjoy most is finding solutions for people. The core of business informatics lies in the elicitation of problems, a translation into requirements and the planning and implementation of solutions – and thus contributes to making people’s (work) everyday life better.

Why me?

I think this work suits me very well because I am communicative, I like to talk to people, I work with them on solutions and I find the diversity of the solution space exciting. Sometimes the solution lies in the adaptation of a procedure or process, sometimes in the creation of a new tool, sometimes in an organizational redesign or sometimes in the IT architecture. There is no one-fits-all solution concept but a set of methods to identify the solution.

What would make this job even better?

If there  were more awareness that there is a big set of methods and approaches  that support the development process, help to focus it more and in the  end also help the product to be well-received.
 If ethics would be  taken more into consideration when applying UX methods (no more dark  patters, no slide of persuasive designs down into manipulative designs)

This is the advice I would give to my 15 year old self:

Don’t be shy, ask questions and if something interests you, try it out – you can do more than you think!