The 26-year-old says he had always planned to go to business school. What he hadn’t counted on was getting a master’s in information systems at the same time. Davenport, who spent four years managing a call center for Capital One after graduating from Vanderbilt University, had no interest in pursuing a career in technology. But he says he quickly realized that if he wanted to be successful in business–regardless of the area he chose–he needed to bone up on his tech skills. “I’m like a baseball catcher who can catch and hit, but can’t throw to second base,” says Davenport. “I have the management, the people skills, but I can barely use the Internet. I realized that if I want to be a total player I need to work on that skill.”
So last September, Davenport joined 92 others in the first class of a new program at Boston University. The M.S.M.B.A. program will allow him to get an M.B.A. and a master’s in information systems in just 21 months, instead of the usual three to four years.
Boston University spent a lot of time and money building up its technology department, installing state-of-the-art equipment and hiring renowned faculty members–an investment that paid dividends in the days of dot–com mania, when students swamped such schools with dreams of becoming Internet millionaires. MIS Quarterly, a research journal focusing on information technology, ranks the school’s IT department among the top 10 programs in the nation (though other surveys, like the U.S. News annual list, do not include it in their top rankings).
When the Internet bubble burst, some business schools opted against expanding their e-commerce coursework. But others like Boston University took a different tack. Its intensive five-semester M.S.M.B.A. dual-degree program is aimed at M.B.A. students who don’t necessarily have a background or even a strong interest in technology but who want to know how technology will impact the industries they are in and how to use it to their advantage.
“Technology has not fundamentally changed what business is about, but how it is done, and that means the nature of M.B.A. training has to be different,” explains Louis E. Lataif, dean of Boston University’s School of Management and a former top executive at Ford. “Every company is saying, ‘We want more everyday operating people to be a lot deeper and smarter about using technology to do the work.’ With this program, we are not talking about people who go into technology, but any person who wants to be a proper executive business person.”
While others offer dual-degree programs, Boston University is the only school to offer the two degrees in such a short period of time, according to Dan LeClair, director of knowledge services at the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business International, an 85-year-old accrediting agency for university degree programs in business administration and accounting. Most of the nation’s top M.B.A. programs now offer some type of technology training, either through coursework, a concentration or a dual-degree option. But schools vary greatly in how much of an emphasis to put on technology versus traditional business training.
Some schools offer few, if any, courses though expect students to be computer proficient. On the other end of the spectrum are schools like the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, which offers an Executive Master’s in Technology Management Program (EMTM) that it claims is the only one in the country to combine the study of emerging technologies with modern management principles at the graduate level. Others, like Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Lally School of Management and Technology, place equal weight on management and technology (even in its name).
MIT’s Sloan School of Management, which already has a well-developed e-business research center, launched a new “Digital Business Strategy” track this fall. And Stanford University, which offers courses to M.B.A. students through its Center for Electronic Business and Commerce, held a seminar at the start of the academic year titled, “Don’t Bury E-Commerce Just Yet.”
“E-commerce is becoming a part of the curriculum in general–it’s here to stay, and business school students need to be aware of that,” agrees Frank Wert, executive director of the Association of Collegiate Business Schools and Programs, a specialized accrediting association for business schools and programs established in 1988. “But there is always the debate between what is the appropriate level of technical competence and the appropriate level of business training.”
A survey by AACSB International found business school administrators were split sharply over the implications of “e-business”–or what it defined as the use of Internet technologies to transform business processes. Nonetheless, by the spring of 2000 (when the most recent survey was taken), nearly three quarters of the 282 schools surveyed indicated that they had already introduced at least one course in e-business in response to student and business community demand. A quarter of the schools surveyed said they offer e-business concentrations in their M.B.A. programs.
“What our survey showed was that, even prior to the [dot-com] ‘bust,’ business schools were pushing hard to integrate technology throughout the curriculum,” LeClair says. “What we are seeing now is that there is a lot more interest in making sure every M.B.A. has the skills and knowledge in the information technology. But it is a much different perspective on things than before; before, the emphasis was on online retailing, but now it’s clear that technology is transforming the way regular businesses do business.”
That is the message Boston University is trying to get out as well, by focusing on prospective students like Davenport, who plans to start his own business, and on Amy Thompson, a 25-year-old Californian who worked in the health-care and biotech industries after graduating from the University of California, San Diego, with a dual major in psychology and biology.
“I wasn’t interested in technology before, beyond having a PC at home, but it’s already so important in everyday life, and I thought this would give me an extra edge,” says Thompson, another member of the first M.S.M.B.A. class. “I see myself going into one of the more traditional M.B.A. routes in finance or marketing but having IT background so I could communicate with the CIO and tech people and know what can be done even if I’m not doing it myself. I think everyone is going to use technology soon.”
