Where To Recruit Your Next Rising Star

Surprise! Universities are starting to take up the challenge of turning out techno-savvy, businesswise graduates who are likely to star as new-wave IS employees.

By Debra Bulkeley

View Datamation map of techno-savvy University Business Schools.

Cindy Bradburn's career in IS climbed to a new level while reading an airline magazine on a business trip in 1991. That's when she learned about the Management of Technology Program at the Sloan School of Management at MIT.

Bradburn, the manager of securities accounting systems at the Hartford-based Aetna Life & Casualty is now one of 45 students from 15 countries enrolled in the intensive masters program at the Sloan School in Cambridge, Mass. She is taking on one of the toughest personnel issues facing IS today: "It's difficult to find a technologist who can talk to a business person and explain the benefits of technology as a cost-effective investment," says Bradburn, who at 28 is the second youngest person in this year's program. "There have been instances at Aetna where we weren't bringing in state-of-the-art tools that we should have because we couldn't effectively explain the benefits of the technology in a business sense."

Bradburn echoes what many IS executives across the country already know: Being the master of the technology universe isn't enough. You have to understand business--whether it's banking, real estate, industrial services, or insurance. Unfortunately, she's among the few who have discovered that higher education is finally listening to business's perennial cries for programs that unite both traditional management and information technology skills in a holistic way.

This movement is taking shape in several ways:

• Colleges and universities are now forging alliances with their local businesses, whose executives are helping teach courses.
• Academic institutions are adding more courses that combine technology and business. They are bringing in more guest speakers from the business world who can talk about what it's like in the "real world." And they are increasingly offering courses that examine both the technology and business potential of new technologies like the Web.
• The medium IS increasingly the message, as universities use information technology to teach. That should help cure managerial techno-ignorance.
• Still other institutions are concentrating on offering high-quality internships and coop programs so their graduates will be better prepared for what lies ahead when they graduate.
• Last, the cultural atmosphere of higher learning--which often has reinforced the solitary star mentality--is changing. Reengineering has arrived at higher education: Colleges are teaching teamwork.

Related article: Recruiting from Within

CORPORATE SPONSORS BOOST "REALNESS"

Some of the most exciting programs happen when universities team up with local businesses to develop course content and in some cases even have company executives help teach the course. For instance, Stephen Ruth, professor of technology management at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., has taught both undergraduate and graduate-level courses in conjunction with company sponsors American Management Systems (AMS), Bell Atlantic, and TRW.

A graduate course offered this fall for the fourth time with Bell Atlantic, "International Business Issues in Telecommunications: A Human Factors Perspective," focuses on the human interface issues that make the difference "between a vibrant, trillion-dollar per year phenomenon or an overhyped, underleveraged technology," Ruth says. About a dozen guest speakers participate from industry, government, and the research community--including Tony Rutkowski, executive director of the Internet Society, and John Townsend, director of multimedia training at Martin-Marietta. The classes are held at Bell Atlantic's training facilities in Arlington so that students can get a feel for a corporate setting.

Another course Ruth teaches, sponsored in part by AMS, is "Leveraging the Information Superhighway--A Business Perspective." This course, Ruth says, takes aim at a significant and still-unanswered question: "How can businesses extract major profit and efficiencies from the so-called Information Superhighway?" Guest speakers include executives from AMS.

"The goal of the course is to get an understanding of the Internet technology and how to use it in business," says Judy Cohen, Electronic Commerce Lab director for AMS, which is also in Fairfax, Va.

Is it successful? Cohen thinks so, since her company has reaped the benefits of the program's graduates.

COURSEWORK HITS CYBERSPACE

Students in both of Ruth's courses use the Internet to do course work, a trend at many other schools in the process of forging new links between business and technology education. True, academics have used the Internet for decades, but this is different. Some professors are creating home pages for their courses and holding chat sessions on the Web.

Take the Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management Program at Stanford University in Palo Alto. Among the courses in this graduate program is "Organizations and Information Systems," offered for the first time this year.

"It was the first course at Stanford in which the World Wide Web totally replaced all of the paper we would have used in this course," proudly says Behnam Tabrizi, consulting professor. The 60 students enrolled in the course studied about 15 to 20 companies via the Internet. They also got a chance to grill guest speakers--in person--who included the CIOs of major companies like Cable News Network. Tabrizi says the students spent two hours a week presenting information on the Web.

"I feel it's important to start the students early learning about technology because they are the future executives," he says.

REAL LIFE, REAL STORIES

Some universities are going beyond course offerings to develop dual-degree programs that give students a mix of business and technology. At the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, for example, students can receive a BS in Economics from the Wharton School of Business and a BS from the School of Engineering. Students take courses in marketing, management, accounting, and real estate while learning about computers and engineering.

The Graduate School of Industrial Administration at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh also combines a curriculum of technical courses with business courses in a two-year program. About 14% of graduates take positions in IS, says a university spokesperson.

Allen Gula Jr., chairman and CEO of Key Services, a subsidiary of Key Corp., a Cleveland-based financial services company, recruits about 14 college graduates a year for IS jobs. Right now, Key Services is using both traditional schools (Ohio State University, Indiana State, Purdue University) and ones that combine computer sciences and business courses like accounting and marketing (Bowling Green, Miami University, and Indiana University).

Says Gula: "It's easier now than 10 years ago to hire good students, but it's still not perfect. The curriculums should be based more along the line of the real business environment. It's still too theory based. The graduates are still not prepared to enter the business world."

Key Services has hired about 66 college graduates since 1991; 60 still work at the company. Gula's strategy is to hire college grads with both MIS and business degree backgrounds. "Generally, we do our recruiting at schools where the students have majored in technology with a minor in accounting and business," he says. New hires go through a six-month "Systems Associate Program" at the company, which includes courses taught on site by business professors from the Cleveland area. They learn about teamwork and business etiquette, Gula says.

Like other companies, Key Services is working with universities to be part of their curricula. Gula says the company is talking with Michigan State and Case Western Reserve, although no definitive program has been developed.

Gaining experience through the intern route is another way that many colleges take to help give their students valuable real-world experience. Jim Holste, associate director in the Office of Graduate Studies at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas, says: "The main thing is for the students to get out and see what the real thing looks like."

The need for more business courses at the undergraduate level of MIS is growing. Rochelle Weichman, director of the Management of Technology Program at the Sloan School, says that at a recent conference she attended with undergraduate faculty from MIT, the message was loud and clear from industry: "They told us the undergraduates should have more business courses.

Debra Bulkeley writes about manufacturing and technology from Boston.

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