The disconnect between academia and the real world of business can be costly. Consider this story from a veteran executive (who asked not to be identified) about some young MBAs who took a leadership role on a technology-heavy project at a Fortune 500 company. "None of the MBAs had experience with this level of IT management," he says. "While they were all focused on the big picture and growing top-line revenues, no one understood the need to apply tried-and-true IT management disciplines to ensure the success of their development and integration efforts. Clearly, they either missed the MBA class that covered these core disciplines, as applied to IT, or it wasn't a class that was offered. The result was a $40 million write-off by the parent company, and a major restructuring of the company's MBA hiring and on-the-job training/apprenticeship programs."

American University's Bill DeLone has heard stories like this before. He says recent doubts about the value of an MBA are motivating educators, students and employers to ensure that students are learning what they need to succeed. "There is a concern about the relationship between theory and practice, and whether faculty are teaching topics that are actually productive for students and businesses."

American University's Kogod School of Business, like many B-schools, works with businesspeople to craft its curriculum for real-world value. At Kogod, that includes an IT Executive Council that consults on technology issues for the MBA program. "We use direct interaction with our clients, the major regional employers, to guide our curriculum and our research," says DeLone. "We need to make sure what we do is applicable to IT management today, so we establish our goals and objectives collectively with the clients on our council."

The IT council is an active group, says its co-chair, Joe DeTullio, CEO of Royalty Services LP, and former CIO of Universal Music Group. (Others on the council include Carl Wilson, CIO of Marriott International Inc.; Nicole Gardner, director of IBM Corp.'s Center for Innovation; and Mohammed Muhsin, the recently retired CIO of the World Bank.) "We generally agree on what is important, from an evolutionary perspective, in terms of teaching these people about the basics of IT management," DeTullio says. "The idea is to teach project management and business management with an IT slant, and to build business cases with an IT focus."

Executives like to be on the council because it gives them an inside track on talented grads. "It helps me with recruiting," says Leif Ulstrup, a principal at Deloitte & Touche and a member of the Kogod's IT panel. "The students that I've hired from this program have been very successful in bridging the gap between technology and other subject areas."

To stay on top of the needs of the marketplace, the Kogod School surveyed its IT executive council, as well as other non-IT executives, to determine what every MBA student needs to know about technology, and also what specialized instruction should be made available to those students who choose to concentrate in technology. The word came back to emphasize project management and enterprise systems management. "These are the jobs that cannot be outsourced," says DeLone. "They are the high-value jobs that mix understanding of a business environment and information-technology systems."

Kogod will roll out a new program focused along these lines in the fall of 2006, replacing its current concentration on management of global information technology. "The idea is help the MBA students understand that these are the kinds of initiatives they will be working on as business leaders," says Jill Klein, who, in addition to serving as director of Kogod's special master's program for technology professionals, also works with MBA students. "We are giving them course work to help them understand analytically how to use information to make decisions, so they have the additional skills needed to work in close alignment with IT."

Though the teaching methods vary, one thing that is widely accepted is the inherent value of technology education. "An MBA is a general degree, so if you combine it with technology, it makes you more qualified in the workplace," says Marc Meyer, a professor of management at Northeastern University, in Boston. He runs the High Technology MBA program, a specialized program that teaches business skills to technology managers. MBA candidates aren't taking classes in how to write programs, he says, but in IT strategy and project management, so they can implement technology successfully. "If you understand how IT can provide value to a company, maybe you will be able to justify your IT needs at budget time." And that's a skill that just about any CIO can appreciate.