Management: IT Education and The Modern-Day MBA - ' Stanford'

Stanford University is located in the heart of technology country, and perhaps no institution is more closely identified with high-tech companies and entrepreneurs. But Stanford's Graduate School of Business remains resolutely committed to providing a general management education. That doesn't mean Stanford doesn't teach its MBA students about technology. In fact, says professor Haim Mendelson, the school has a serious focus on tech, and one that is well-suited to the way businesses actually run today.

"Philosophically, we feel that the best way to make progress toward the goal of making technology a routine discipline is to embed it in other courses," says Mendelson. "Our approach is that these things are a part of business. All employers want students who are well-versed in information management. They see it as a critical skill."

Mendelson is the former director of a five-year research program at Stanford called the Center for Electronic Business and Culture, which was folded into the main course of study in August of 2005. The CEBC was founded in 1999 with its eventual demise already planned; the idea was to develop expertise in several IT disciplines and then incorporate that expertise into the business school curriculum as part of the new routine. "When we started the program there were a number of centers doing similar things at other schools, and people were saying that you needed specialization in IT as a separate discipline. But we don't need it as a separate entity anymore," Mendelson says.

One of the key accomplishments of the CEBC was the development of about 70 case studies on electronic commerce and business that are now used in the general MBA curriculum. "We have helped introduce IT into the study of marketing, operations management, and every functional area of business," says Mendelson. "We show how technology supports business in all these different areas, not just how the technology itself is used."

A strategy course that is part of Stanford's core curriculum, for example, looks at how Capital One Financial Corp. formulates its information-heavy marketing plan. "We look at the way Capital One outsourced IT and then brought it back in because it was core to what they needed to do," says Mendelson. The case also considers the big credit-card company's methods of testing its strategies and learning from the results. "The class learns how they put together a new project that combines IT, operations and marketing, and how to manage it," says Mendelson.

IT is often discussed in core classes, and concepts from the technology world have entered the mainstream curriculum. A class on network effects, for example, looks at different ways to do online auctions, including business-to-business and consumer transactions. "The crux of the analysis is, what are the implications of network effect for strategy, and a significant part of the discussion is how technology is facilitating this," he adds.

Like most B-schools, Stanford has an information-management requirement, which means each student must take at least one from among a handful of tech-specific courses in order to graduate. The courses vary in intensity and focus, from relatively basic offerings to extended studies of the strategic aspects of IT and the way it changes firms, value chains, and industries. Upper-level students line up for a class on IT industry strategy taught by former Intel Corp. chief Andy Grove and professor Robert Burgelman. But overall, says Mendelson, "The emphasis is less on how the technology works, and more on its impact and integration into the business."

Interestingly, one buzzword Stanford avoids, he says, is alignment. "If you start out with the idea that the business comes first, there's no need for alignment down the road."

Next page: Keeping the Tech Curriculum Current