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Evolving MBA education with business technology innovation: An E-Business course directive

Yuwei Shi
Associate Professor, Monterey Institute of International Studies, Fisher Graduate School of International Business, Monterey CA, United States of America

Abstract

E-business has evolved from visionary ideas supported by optimistic technology maps to complex engineered solutions for business process improvement and innovation. And yet business school courses and programs by and large are lingering at the stage where e-business is introduced, discussed and debated as new phenomena.

This paper suggests that MBA e-business related curricula focus on learning the emerging Internet-based management methods and their practice. The gap between the suggested focus and that of the current curricula is evidenced by the results of a survey of over a dozen e-business related courses and programs in the business schools.

This paper further outlines a general structure for course or program development with the suggested focus.

Keywords

business education, information technology, e-business, innovation education

Article Text

The Death of E-Business and Changing Focus of MBA E-Business Education

We have witnessed at the turn of the century a huge swing of expectations from almost blind faith towards anything related to the Internet and the New Economy to unchallenged bigotry against everything with the letter e in front of it. Year 2003 is when the last of the ‘e-business is dead' stories will appear and people will generally stop talking about e-business altogether. Today, e-business has evolved from visionary ideas, new technologies and fresh startups to arrays of Internet-based business solutions and services that are being increasingly adopted by mainstream businesses.

Specific Internet-based solutions and services find their ways to the management of nearly all primary operations and support functions in companies large and small. Companies increasingly share product designs, sales forecasts and orders over the Internet. Supply chain management in practice becomes relationship management. Customer relationship management has also expanded beyond customer-interfacing management functions. From employee incentive and benefit programs to enterprise performance management, from corporate communication to internal service management, from business intelligence to enterprise-wide business innovation, breeds of business technologies have been tested, implemented and integrated as fundamental management tools.

These business technology innovations will collectively constitute a new way of conducting businesses and managing organizations. They will pervade every business and organization in the near future. By then the term e-business will sound as redundant and silly as telephone-enabled communication or airplane-enabled travel. Further, the key technical driver of all the recent advances in business technologies is simply the relentless march of improvements in the cost-performance ratio of information technology year after year after year. There is really little big-bang technological invention or business revolution but countless experiments to get all the nitty-gritty business and technology details right. To use the Internet successfully in business, managers have to figure out hundreds of things. The lessons they have learned from thousands of these experiments are valuable to MBA education.

Given these circumstances, proficient use of Internet-based business solutions and services and a good understanding of their impact on organizations will be competencies necessary for anyone pursuing a successful managerial career and managing a successful business. Anticipating the rising demand for these new competencies, we suggest MBA e-business related courses and programs change focus from introducing e-business as new technological and strategic phenomena to learning the emerging Internet technology based management methods and their practice in the real business world. Although it is extreme, unnecessary and even detrimental to terminate most e-business programs, the course or program objective, focus and design may have to change to reflect the changing world of business technology.

The Current State of MBA E-Business Education

We find through our preliminary survey of over a dozen e-business related courses and programs in the business schools that in general these programs linger while the real world has evolved from e-business to pervasive adoption of web-based business technologies. However, there are a few course and programs organized beyond general discussion of e-business as new or recent phenomena.

Figure 1. The Clusters of E-Business Courses and Programs

Legend:

1.    Stanford e-business program

a.    Electronic Commerce

b.    Management in the Information Age

c.    Seminar on Internet Marketing

d.    IT and Supply Chain Management

e.    Supply Chain Management

f.     E-Business Process Foundry

2.    CMU MSEC program

3.    NCSU - Managing Digital Enterprise

4.    UC Berkeley - Fundamentals of e-Business

5.    NYU - Managing the Digital Firm

6.    NHH - E-commerce

7.    UIUC - E-commerce

8.    Penn State - Research Seminar in E-business

9.    UBC e-Business Program

10. Wharton - Managing Electronic Commerce

11. SMU - e-Business

12. USF - E-business Technology and Trends

13. OSU - Emerging Technologies and Electronic Commerce

14. MIT Sloan e-business program

Sources: Google Directory: Business/E-commerce/Education/Courses University of San Francisco E-Business Program: Competing Programs

We studied the syllabi and detailed descriptions of the courses and programs identified by University of San Francisco E-Business Program supplemented by a list from the specified Google directory. There are 14 business schools with a total of 20 courses and programs studied. The content of a course or program was analyzed along two dimensions. One dimension is the degree of the integration between strategic-level discussion and operational-level discussion. It ranges from general introduction of e-business, new economy and e-business models to in-depth discussion on the interplay between company strategy and technology integration. The other dimension is the degree of the integration between business discussion and technology introduction. It ranges from general introduction of the Internet and basic Internet infrastructural technologies to in-depth discussion on specific business technology solutions. Figure 1 depicts the results of our preliminary analysis. We found majority of the courses and programs have low to medium degree of integration on either the business-technology dimension or the strategy-operation dimension or both. There are a few programs discussing in detail about specific business technologies but they lack coverage for the interplay between company strategies and technology-based operational integrations.

The Proposed General Structure

Replacing popular titles that contain the letter e, we suggest Managing with Internet Technologies (MWIT), Internet-based Business Technologies (IBT) or Management of Business Technologies (MBT) be the titles for a new breed of e-business related courses and programs. We further propose a general structure for such a course or program. The overarching objective for the new structural design is to achieve a high degree of integral learning of business and technology and strategic and operational management. The course or program should aim at the following goals.

• To provide students a critical review of the short but rich e-business history from studies of e-business visions, exemplary e-business successes and failures, and basic Internet technologies
• To prepare students for management challenges through hands-on experience in innovative and mainstream business solutions and services
• To integrate learning of management and technology, ie reinforcing management knowledge through experiential learning of Internet technology-based management methods.

A three-module structure is in place to frame the course or program design in order to achieve the above goals. These modules and their subordinate topics are listed below. Figure 2 provides a visual framework based on the company value chain concept (Porter 2001) for the core module that surveys business technologies.

Module 1: Overview on business and the Internet

• The Internet as a driver for business change
• Properties and implications of the Internet
• The state of Internet technologies
• Formulating and implementing Internet strategies
• Vendor and solution selection

Figure 2. Business Technologies throughout Company Value Chain

Module 2: Survey of business technologies

• Core process: research, design and development
• Collaborative product development and commerce (CPDC)
• Core Process: procurement, production and supply chain management
• Sourcing, procurement and asset management
• Material and production management
• Logistics, demand and supply based management (DBM and SBM)
• Supplier relationship management (SRM)
• Core process: marketing, sales and customer service management
• Marketing research, business Intelligence, and sales forecasting
• Marketing program management
• Customer service management
• Sales force and channel management
• Core process: strategy and enterprise management
• Organizational communication and enterprise Portals
• Organizational learning and knowledge management
• Project management
• Internal service relationship management
• Core process: financial and performance management and decision support
• Financial management
• Enterprise performance management(EPM)
• Decision support

Module 3: Business and Technology Integration

• From enterprise resource planning (ERP) to enterprise application integration (EAI) to extreme business reengineering
• Rapid innovation and rapid change management across organizations

We propose the above course and program design structure based upon our belief that business school e-business related curriculum ought to change to closely track or even lead the evolution of the real-world business technologies and the proposed structure reflects the main areas in which business technologies are implemented in management practice. Our assertions and suggestions do not result from thorough and comprehensive studies and are of exploratory nature. We value feedback from the peers.

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