How many planes? Insight and strategy build on questions and perspectives
The officer in charge of the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 would have had early warning of the Japanese attack that day had he asked his radar watchers how many planes they had spotted. This story is sometimes told to students in the W. P. Carey School of Business MSIM programs – evening and online. It exemplifies the importance of asking the right questions, which is one of the key lessons the program strives to impart.
“How many planes?” is the question U.S. Air Force lieutenant Kermit Tyler didn’t ask when two army privates manning a radar station on the northern tip of Oahu spotted in-coming aircraft early on the morning of December 7, 1941. Tyler, who was officer in charge that day for the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, was expecting his own fighters — who would be piloting six B-17 bombers — and they were coming from the same direction as the planes that were reported.
Although the radar operators had never seen such a large formation of in-coming aircraft, they didn’t mention its size to Tyler. And, because the lieutenant didn’t ask the number of planes, he missed early warning on the first wave of the 353 Japanese bombers and fighter planes that sunk four U.S. battleships, decimated 188 U.S. aircraft, killed more than 2,400 Americans and wounded another 1,282.
This story is sometimes told to students in the W. P. Carey School of Business Master of Science and Information Management (MSIM) program. It exemplifies the importance of asking the right questions, which is one of the key lessons the MSIM curriculum strives to impart.
The program teaches students to shift from focusing on technology to seeing solutions for business problems. It accomplishes this with a set of courses that balance several factors, including skills building and strategic thinking, business performance versus operations, internal and external forces to be accommodated, as well as business and IT alignment.
Four-part harmony
Ra
ghu Santanam, professor of information systems at the W. P. Carey School of Business and a key player in the MSIM program, sees the curriculum as being a blend of four elements, with the first being a leadership-oriented approach.
“How do you build IT leadership?” he asks. “We view our students as those who want to be on top of rapid technology changes. We don’t want them to be the kind of workers who just keep training on each new technology that comes along,” adding new certificates to the skills section of a resume.
“We want our students to see the broad picture of what IT is,” Santanam continues. This, he says, encompasses proactive application of automation and IT in business operations, leveraging technology to engage customers more effectively, harnessing data for business intelligence that informs smart decision making and other strategic uses of IT.
To bring about such comprehensive understanding, Santanam says the W. P. Carey School borrows a teaching philosophy used at West Point, the U.S. military academy for building future Army officers. “West Point talks about knowing, doing and being,” he notes. “The translation of this in an IT environment is providing knowledge development, skills development and the opportunity to apply lessons learned in a real-life context.”
To achieve this, the MSIM program uses textbooks, models and frameworks — as well as corporate case studies — in its knowledge development. For skills building, instructors try to immerse students in new technologies and the business problems they might address. This effort frequently involves visits from esteemed IT practitioners, as well as the classroom discussion their presentations prompt.
To bring students into the “being” state of IT leadership, the program’s final course is a cap-stone project requiring students to work together and with mentors to solve complex business challenges. “This program isn’t about learning facts and regurgitating them in exams,” Santanam quips. “It’s about figuring out the right questions to ask.”
Exploring the continuum
While “knowing, doing and being” sums up the philosophy behind the W. P. Carey School’s MSIM, the word “continuum” sums up the way the courses are presented.
First, there’s the learning-orientation continuum, or the spread between acquiring skills and learning concepts that facilitate strategic thinking. If you view this continuum as a graph in which skills building versus strategic modeling takes up the horizontal axis and the vertical axis rises from operations strategy to business strategy, each class in the program could find a spot on this graph.
So, the courses on project management, information management and business process lean toward the operations and skills-building side of the graph. IT security and controls, another course in the program, also is operational in nature, but it’s strategic, too. Enterprise systems and emerging technologies, two other required classes, focus more on business strategy than operations, and they teach decisional frameworks and models rather than strategic ones.
Another continuum addressed in the program bridges the traditional gap between IT and the business itself. Aligning IT strategy to the company’s business strategy must take into account internal and external pressures, as well as the structures and processes within the organization and IT systems. The W. P. Carey School faculty has balanced all those forces in each course of the MSIM program.
For instance, the business intelligence course guides students to look at the data in a company enterprise system — such as customer and manufacturing data — and find ways to leverage this information to track and improve business performance. Santanam sees this as a course that’s focused outside the company itself, “because you’re looking to use information in your organization to drive competitive advantage.” Likewise, the eBusiness and emerging technologies courses also are externally focused, because they require students to formulate business strategies to address the competitive marketplace.
On the flipside, two internally focused classes are business processes and project management. Both address how to “organize and execute initiatives to make sure that what you do aligns with what you intend to do,” Santanam says.
Along with fitting into the IT-business continuum and the learning-orientation continuum, each class also fits into one of three “lenses” with which students can more closely view the subject at hand. Those lenses are “strategic,” “organizational” and “informational.” The information management course, naturally, best falls under the informational lens. But, like any other course it touches the other elements of the triad: strategy and organization. Santanam notes that slotting courses into the lens concept is merely a way to emphasize and balance focus for comprehensive understanding of business problems and the systems used to address them.
Personal payback
Santanam also reports that students often come back to him saying, “When I started the program, I didn’t have this wide perspective. I couldn’t communicate to the business.
But, the courses helped me put the pieces together so I could talk to my managers and clients.”
He remembers a student who sold computers and wanted to learn more about the industry. “After this student graduated, he came back and said, ‘My job is about selling things to CIOs. Now when I go to the CIOs, I know exactly what their problems are. I’m a better salesman because I now connect with my customers,’” Santanam recalls.
This connection comes, in part, because the MSIM program builds both knowledge and contacts. The students who participate move through the program simultaneously as a unified cohort, which allows them to get to know each other’s challenges and develop ties during the 16-month program.
In answering questions about the MSIM program for a KnowIT podcast, information systems professor Robert St. Louis noted that “virtually anybody who’s in the computer industry says there’s going to be more change in the next 25 years than there was in the last 100 years … firms that are going to be successful are the firms that recognize trends and act on them before they’re generally recognized as being trends.”
This, too, is a focus of the MSIM program, which is designed to help IT managers identify and harness business-transforming technology.
Finding the right systems and applying them wisely comes back to asking the right questions. Are you asking them? Is it time to sharpen your skills? Do you know how many planes are headed your way?
Bottom line
ghu Santanam, professor of information systems at the W. P. Carey School of Business and a key player in the MSIM program, sees the curriculum as being a blend of four elements, with the first being a leadership-oriented approach.
“How do you build IT leadership?” he asks. “We view our students as those who want to be on top of rapid technology changes. We don’t want them to be the kind of workers who just keep training on each new technology that comes along,” adding new certificates to the skills section of a resume.
“We want our students to see the broad picture of what IT is,” Santanam continues. This, he says, encompasses proactive application of automation and IT in business operations, leveraging technology to engage customers more effectively, harnessing data for business intelligence that informs smart decision making and other strategic uses of IT.
To bring about such comprehensive understanding, Santanam says the W. P. Carey School borrows a teaching philosophy used at West Point, the U.S. military academy for building future Army officers. “West Point talks about knowing, doing and being,” he notes. “The translation of this in an IT environment is providing knowledge development, skills development and the opportunity to apply lessons learned in a real-life context.”
To achieve this, the MSIM program uses textbooks, models and frameworks — as well as corporate case studies — in its knowledge development. For skills building, instructors try to immerse students in new technologies and the business problems they might address. This effort frequently involves visits from esteemed IT practitioners, as well as the classroom discussion their presentations prompt.
To bring students into the “being” state of IT leadership, the program’s final course is a cap-stone project requiring students to work together and with mentors to solve complex business challenges. “This program isn’t about learning facts and regurgitating them in exams,” Santanam quips. “It’s about figuring out the right questions to ask.”
Exploring the continuum
While “knowing, doing and being” sums up the philosophy behind the W. P. Carey School’s MSIM, the word “continuum” sums up the way the courses are presented.
First, there’s the learning-orientation continuum, or the spread between acquiring skills and learning concepts that facilitate strategic thinking. If you view this continuum as a graph in which skills building versus strategic modeling takes up the horizontal axis and the vertical axis rises from operations strategy to business strategy, each class in the program could find a spot on this graph.
So, the courses on project management, information management and business process lean toward the operations and skills-building side of the graph. IT security and controls, another course in the program, also is operational in nature, but it’s strategic, too. Enterprise systems and emerging technologies, two other required classes, focus more on business strategy than operations, and they teach decisional frameworks and models rather than strategic ones.
Another continuum addressed in the program bridges the traditional gap between IT and the business itself. Aligning IT strategy to the company’s business strategy must take into account internal and external pressures, as well as the structures and processes within the organization and IT systems. The W. P. Carey School faculty has balanced all those forces in each course of the MSIM program.
For instance, the business intelligence course guides students to look at the data in a company enterprise system — such as customer and manufacturing data — and find ways to leverage this information to track and improve business performance. Santanam sees this as a course that’s focused outside the company itself, “because you’re looking to use information in your organization to drive competitive advantage.” Likewise, the eBusiness and emerging technologies courses also are externally focused, because they require students to formulate business strategies to address the competitive marketplace.
On the flipside, two internally focused classes are business processes and project management. Both address how to “organize and execute initiatives to make sure that what you do aligns with what you intend to do,” Santanam says.
Along with fitting into the IT-business continuum and the learning-orientation continuum, each class also fits into one of three “lenses” with which students can more closely view the subject at hand. Those lenses are “strategic,” “organizational” and “informational.” The information management course, naturally, best falls under the informational lens. But, like any other course it touches the other elements of the triad: strategy and organization. Santanam notes that slotting courses into the lens concept is merely a way to emphasize and balance focus for comprehensive understanding of business problems and the systems used to address them.
Personal payback
Santanam also reports that students often come back to him saying, “When I started the program, I didn’t have this wide perspective. I couldn’t communicate to the business.
But, the courses helped me put the pieces together so I could talk to my managers and clients.”
He remembers a student who sold computers and wanted to learn more about the industry. “After this student graduated, he came back and said, ‘My job is about selling things to CIOs. Now when I go to the CIOs, I know exactly what their problems are. I’m a better salesman because I now connect with my customers,’” Santanam recalls.
This connection comes, in part, because the MSIM program builds both knowledge and contacts. The students who participate move through the program simultaneously as a unified cohort, which allows them to get to know each other’s challenges and develop ties during the 16-month program.
In answering questions about the MSIM program for a KnowIT podcast, information systems professor Robert St. Louis noted that “virtually anybody who’s in the computer industry says there’s going to be more change in the next 25 years than there was in the last 100 years … firms that are going to be successful are the firms that recognize trends and act on them before they’re generally recognized as being trends.”
This, too, is a focus of the MSIM program, which is designed to help IT managers identify and harness business-transforming technology.
Finding the right systems and applying them wisely comes back to asking the right questions. Are you asking them? Is it time to sharpen your skills? Do you know how many planes are headed your way?
Bottom line
- The W. P. Carey MSIM program strives to teach IT leadership skills to those who want to be on top of rapid technology changes.
- Courses reflect continuums of perspectives and issues related to IT proficiency, such as IT/business alignment, internal/external strategy focus and skills building versus strategic thinking.
- Students in the MSIM program gain a comprehensive view of IT’s role in business performance and learn how to ask the right questions.
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