For a MBA level, I'd say the education probably needs to involve:
- visualizing the types and size of data collected and maintained by IT systems. Data size will generally scale with the amount and complexity of systems, I think there can be good high-level measurements for MBA types about data sizes and complexity. Of course they won't measure producivity in systems dev, but from a systems maintenance perspective it could help.
- a lot of apocryphal stories about systems development and implementation
- and of course, as I alluded to, a model of the employees and their responsibilities and necessary competency in IT, and how the business relies on them. How a competent IT org isn't just maintenance on the bottom line, how Amazon leveraged good Silicon Valley talent to be a lethal marketplace weapon, and probably lots of stories of big box stores relying on good IT orgs to scale their logistics and operations beyond what was thought possible in the 80s and 90s.
That's from two minutes of me thinking about it. What modern MBA student doesn't want to know how Amazon does things? They run both a high-margin software/hardware operation and a low-margin retail operation with "good" IT (I mean, don't get me started on the workplace practices, but they scaled with good IT talent, ditto for Google).
Good IT + Good Finance should power any decent business plan to success. Really, in the modern age of cartels, the only way to disrupt the big players in a traditional market will likely be through well-applied IT that has superior scaling, cost, integration, and adaptation to the old guard players.
- visualizing the types and size of data collected and maintained by IT systems. Data size will generally scale with the amount and complexity of systems, I think there can be good high-level measurements for MBA types about data sizes and complexity. Of course they won't measure producivity in systems dev, but from a systems maintenance perspective it could help.
- a lot of apocryphal stories about systems development and implementation
- and of course, as I alluded to, a model of the employees and their responsibilities and necessary competency in IT, and how the business relies on them. How a competent IT org isn't just maintenance on the bottom line, how Amazon leveraged good Silicon Valley talent to be a lethal marketplace weapon, and probably lots of stories of big box stores relying on good IT orgs to scale their logistics and operations beyond what was thought possible in the 80s and 90s.
That's from two minutes of me thinking about it. What modern MBA student doesn't want to know how Amazon does things? They run both a high-margin software/hardware operation and a low-margin retail operation with "good" IT (I mean, don't get me started on the workplace practices, but they scaled with good IT talent, ditto for Google).
Good IT + Good Finance should power any decent business plan to success. Really, in the modern age of cartels, the only way to disrupt the big players in a traditional market will likely be through well-applied IT that has superior scaling, cost, integration, and adaptation to the old guard players.