IT as a business process optimizer: back in B-school tracks

Yesterday, I read an extremely interesting article in the British daily newspaper Financial Times. Basically, two NYU professors, namely Vasant Dhar & Arun Sundararajan, conducted a research about the importance of IT teachings in MBA programs.

After the bubble burst, IT suddenly become a separate area despite having been a superstar two-letters word during the net economy period.

I found really telling the parallel drawn in the article between finance and IT: market finance is a stand-alone set of skills that are very specific to people willing to work on capital markets; corporate finance is on the other hand a subject every single executive should know about, since investment decision-making science is based on such measurings as ROI, IRR, EVA, NPV, EPS, WACC, etc.
The same actually goes for IT: IT is both about studying technologies (like market finance: everybody doesn´t need to know about networks architecture, etc.) and the way technology apply to companies by driving business processes improvements. Henceforth, the impact of Information Technology in organizations should be an underlying topic in all business management courses. According to the article, the universities of Stanford & Harvard seem to have integrated IT as a performance driver in all its MBA course topics.

As far as I´m concerned, I enjoyed a very good exposure to the challenges and opportunities raised by the integration of technologies at HEC Paris: you get compulsory general MS Office training seminars, optimization and simulations on Excel, statistical marketing analysis on SPSS, Information Systems (ERP, networks, security, databases), and if you chose to, there are Visual Basic for Excel classes too. Furthermore, IT systems were often to referred to as potential competitive advantages in marketing (SRM, CRM, BI, etc.), supply chain (SCM, RFID), management accounting and control (tableaux de bord, balance score-card, etc.), financial economics (arbitrage, etc.), etc. Not bad, uh?

If I may add something, it looks as if the best IT-driven companies are most of the time the best performing and most respected corporations in their field. For instance, an e-Business investment plan made CISCO save 1.4bn$ last year (e-education, distance collaborative projects, billing, etc.); take a look on HP (IT-driven operations & logistics), Dell (a company that sell IT products through IT systems that had been providing its value chain a great advantage over the competition for several years), Home Depot, IBM, GE, Procter & Gamble, Decathlon, Toyota, Nissan, etc.

Basically every leading company is actually a leader thanks to a perfect fit between information systems & organizational structure. A good understanding of the integration of information technologies within corporations has become a key skill, one of these skills that will differentiate good people with excellent change agents.

But still, too many business management students believe IT is the designated area of all geeks and techies. Too bad!