Management: IT Education and The Modern-Day MBA - ' What They Don'

Warren Bennis and James O'Toole called attention to some of the problems plaguing MBA programs in their much-discussed 2005 article, "How Business Schools Lost Their Way," published in the Harvard Business Review. The authors, both professors at the University of Southern California, wrote that some top schools focus too much on a "scientific" model of business and on arcane research, and not enough on real-world practices that would help graduates perform in the marketplace.

That critique extends to spotty technology training. The focus on technology as a key component of business education at the master's level has been inconsistent over the last several years. As the Internet bubble expanded, schools rushed to add technology to their MBA curricula, but in the aftermath of that irrational exuberance, many of the newly created "techno-MBA" degrees were deemphasized or scrapped altogether. "Defining the MBA became a huge challenge after the dot-com bubble burst," says DeLone. "Interest among incoming students in information technology, either as a career track or as an academic concentration, went down."

Those changes reflect the hard reality of the marketplace. "When the job market was terrific, you could get multiple offers if you had IT training," says Michael J. Shaw, a professor of business administration in the College of Business at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, where he holds the Leonard C. and Mary Lou Hoeft Endowed Chair in Information Systems. "We see less of that now—these days, it is more about combining managerial and technical knowledge."

For an employer, it can be difficult to glean, from a simple program description, just what students are learning at any given school. Some of the most prestigious names in academia, including the business schools at Harvard and Stanford, pride themselves on offering general management degrees—yet even the most broad-based curricula focus more on technology than they did in the past. Meanwhile, the specifics taught within a given program can change from one year to the next, and students can load up on technology electives, or get by with the minimum.

Some programs try to differentiate themselves from the competition—there are hundreds of MBA programs in the U.S.—by offering specialized instruction in technology management. And still others offer master's degrees in business management aimed specifically at developing technology professionals (see sidebar this page). But there is a growing sentiment, both in the business world and academia, that separating IT from an otherwise well-rounded business education is a mistake.

Next page: Stanford's Business-Tech Blend