Amazing. It's only 9:30 on a bone-chilling Saturday morning, and already Bill Schiano's class is deep into a discussion of the evolution of the Web as a place to do business.
This master's-level class isn't noteworthy just because these Bentley College students have braved the New England cold so early on a weekend morning. No, this bunch is remarkable for another kind of bravery: Although most of the students come from backgrounds in business and liberal arts, this morning, they're talking tech like they were born in the basement of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
But, even though the students have come to the program largely without backgrounds in technology, they don't even blink as Schiano launches straight from a discussion about online transaction monitoring to hashing out how corporations are using Sun Microsystems' Java Enterprise Architecture to support their e-business operations.
What a difference a few years makes.
As recently as five years ago, graduate business students across the land mainly busied themselves learning to craft business plans, manage teams of workers and balance budgets. Sure, down the hallâ€"perhaps in the basementâ€"computer science students would be focused on writing and debugging code, designing databases and building computer networksâ€"but never the twain would meet.
Curricula for business disciplines such as accounting and marketing were often devoid of instruction regarding the Internet. When it came to the underlying technologies that support e-business, undergraduate and graduate business curricula were like a trio of monkeys: Hear no tech, see no tech, speak no tech.
But in Schiano's e-Commerce in the Global Economy classâ€"first offered in 1997â€"as in many other college classes now, students are jumping across disciplines to learn a mix of technical and management skills. Numerous cross-disciplinary e-business education programs have sprung up at the undergraduate and graduate levels over the last two to three years.
That's good news for enterprises in search of the next generation of e-business leaders. Some academics and corporate recruiters said the students now starting to emerge from these programs are exceptionally well-qualified for IT and management roles in e-businesses because they're not learning a narrow set of skills in a vacuum; rather, they're acquiring disparate types of knowledge in settings that require a heavy degree of teamworkâ€"just like in the e-businesses where they might someday work.
Little wonder, then, that corporate enterprises such as Federal Express are taking an increasing role in shaping the curricula for these programs by acting as advisers to the schools. By doing so, corporations can be assured of getting job applicants like those whom Schiano's class is molding: capable of understanding both what a business is trying to do and how technology can help the business do it.
"The class is about how the technology side of a business should work. To know what a given technology can do for a business, they have to know how it works, regardless of whether they're a programmer or a business-unit VP," Schiano said.
