Early Mental Stretching in the IT Business Program

Academicians catch a lot of grief from people in industry about the relevance of the work done in schools. Despite this, however, most of the people in industry have been to school and probably liked some of their professors. I was certainly one of the people that had professors that I liked and I aspired to be like some of them, and that had influence on me leaving industry and pursuing a PhD.

Despite the fact that I have begun this journey, I do not feel that I am qualified to give a definitive description of what it is all about. I have asked questions about relevance myself and have found my opinions have shifted over time and I believe they will continue to shift. Being a former practitioner, I think I am not unique in the struggles that I experience as a PhD student in order to understand what research is and how to value it.

In my first term, I studied many classic IT theories and read many modern IT papers. Unlike the laws of gravity, none of them really jumped out as if to say "this is a universal law that governs business or the use of IT within businesses". In fact, it has been argued that despite being decades old, the IT emphasis has yet to deliver a theory that defines it. In other words, there hasn't been a theory or something that builds on that theory that people both within and without it can point to and say "this is an important finding and it validates the existence of your discipline". In contrast, Supply and Demand is something that is relevant and important to a field like economics.

One experience that is probably unique to me is that I am working during my first year in the bureaucracy side of things. I work for the Office of Research at the school. One thing that is unique to this experience (as a Business Student), is I get to see the funding and grant proposals that come out from non-business schools and I can contrast it to what we in the Business School do. One thing that stand out to me is that all of the hard sciences are working on tangible things that make a big impact in the world. People here are working on new storage materials for electronic devices, for solutions to viruses and cancer, for ways to repair spinal cords, etc. To be frank, those kinds of things resonate a bit more than do some of the business theories, like the framework that businesses compete based on bundles of resources.

One thing that differentiates business schools from other schools is their funding. All the hard science schools generate hundreds of millions of dollars in local and federal funding through grants. And based on the problems they are trying to solve and the jobs that get created as a result of successful completion of these research activities, they deserve it.

Business is different. I believe that our funding comes in part through the MBA programs and private donors and companies. At first glance, it seems that the research we do pales in comparison to what other hard science schools research.

So why do we even have business schools? To some extent, much of what we learn about doesn't transfer directly to a job. It isn't a vocational school, so we don't learn or teach hard skills, for the most part. I mean, the closest to vocational training is probably accounting, and I'm sure that could be taught through bookkeeping courses of some sort at a vocational school or something. The rest of the stuff could probably just be picked up on the job.

This term I am starting a sociology course, and even though I haven't yet attended the first class, I think that business school is in part a school that falls under sociology. Sociology is tricky, it isn't a hard science like the laws of Physics. You get to observe things, you try and apply prediction and control to given situations, but it isn't provable in the same ways. And yet despite this, interactions with others in a group setting defines everything we do in business.

For instance, economics is useless when two people are involved, but add a 3rd person or more and predictable behaviors emerge, collectively representing markets. Working within a corporation is all about a social setting, and that is what differentiates it from a self-employed entrepreneurship. Marketing teams, accounting teams, finance teams, sales teams, internal and external support teams, boards of directors, software teams, operations teams, etc. They are all important. Without these management structures defined by social networks, most people don't have jobs in this world. Nevertheless, the study of these things is still "fuzzy" compared to hard science. There is no right or wrong way to do marketing. There is no right or wrong way to do project management. There are an infinite number of variations of these things in practice, and what may be suitable for one period of time may not be for another as social conditions and expectations change (like gender-based promotion).

Let's take a step back again. In sociology, you can't really answer the question about which is the right or wrong type of government. You can, however, observe it, experiment with it, hypothesize about it, and learn from it. Although there is seemingly never a perfect answer of right and wrong because of the millions of ways to adapt any sociological construct, it can be classified, compared, and contrasted. In the same way, in business, you might not be able to say that a particular management style is the right one, but you can classify it, measure it, and put it in a framework.

A lot of people leaving business school are probably saying "they didn't teach me anything in school". And if that means that they weren't told the right or the wrong way to do something, they are probably right. If you are given a bunch of frameworks to see the world through, and none of them are perfectly provable, then you could easily conclude that you haven't learned anything useful.

And so back to the beginning of this post. Is academic work relevant and what can I do in the field of IT? As it pertains to business, academic work is definitely subject to criticism and there is a lot that isn't relevant to creating a sellable product. Most people in academia, however, appreciate the day to day operations of business but are working on describing bigger questions. The answers to most of these questions are ultimately not provable, but trying to understand social world around us whether within business or outside of it is powerful and what comes out of this work affects the way people understand the world and act within it. The product of this work has already infiltrated everything we do in a business setting and how we understand it. Does Business Research matter? The way to answer this might be to ask what happens when you take away the filters it has provided us such as: "How do you classify and market to people? How do firms differentiate themselves? How do you keep people happy in a company and what is fair? How do you set prices? How do you motivate? How do you promote? How do you organize? How do you communicate? How do you make decisions? How do you collect and analyze data? How do you manage risk? How to you keep records? How do you do project management?" etc. etc. etc. There isn't a right answer, but you can understand a lot and share that with the world. You can understand these fields through observation, theory alone, or both. You can spend a lifetime observing, testing, and explaining, but there will never be a time when it isn't easy to question the value of understanding the world around us and efforts made to improve upon it, because it isn't quantifiable, but it the social world of business permeates all we do.

Bad Programmers or Bad Managers?

A few days ago I read an article that claimed the dot-bomb was caused by bad programmers. I tried to go back and find it today but I couldn't and instead I spent 30 minutes reading lots of other related but interesting articles.

At any rate, the assertion made in that article seems ridiculous to me. You mean to tell me that most of the ideas that were funded in that time period failed because of programmers? I don't recall hearing anything in that time period about how a business would have succeeded if there weren't so many bugs in a given website or if it had been released 50% faster. On the contrary, one company I worked with found a way to give away about $100,000 in services every month and supported tens of thousands of customers, but when asked how they were going to make money with that customer base, they weren't sure.

One of my pet peeves in the software programming world is the tendency to assert that the programmers have all the answers, or that they should. Recent programming paradigms over emphasize the importance of software developers and minimize the importance of understanding the purpose for which the software is being built. Agile programming fits into this category. On the one hand, I do see that waterfall methodologies can be bad if you launch a monolithic project and 3 years later you find that what you intended to build does not meet market needs. On the other hand, most of the programming work that gets done in the world is not some bleeding edge project that requires throwing out a formal design process done with the help of someone who specializes in understanding needs and deliverables. To take the same thought process to the construction world, you wouldn't fire every architect and building inspector that ever lived and trust the construction of everything to anybody that has ever hammered two boards together, even if they have a really good recursive model for getting feedback on their activities.

In the end, achieving great results in what is usually a very plain vanilla software world is brought about by solid business skills. To succeed in the dot.com era as well as today, you needed a good idea and a way to market it. You need to have a way to produce an income. The skill of the programmers in writing code or a useful development methodology will seldom bring about anything of lasting value in business if the core principles of business are overlooked, and that is an area that programmers are not trained for. The dot com bust isn't attributable to the programmers, it is attributable to the managers and visionaries of that time period.