Business in the Information Age Gives Rise to the ‘Techno MBA’

After a few years in marketing at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Teresa Tauchi was eager for a switch into the booming field of multimedia software.

There was one problem: Her technical skills were, to be blunt, sorely lacking.

“It’s a pretty big leap,” acknowledged Tauchi, 30. “Haas is my tool for the transition.”

That would be UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, which in recent years has retooled its two-year master’s of business administration curriculum to emphasize technology management as one of three key areas. The others are global business and entrepreneurship.

Spurred in part by companies’ complaints that MBA programs are failing to adequately prepare students for the rigors of today’s fast-changing business world, schools nationwide are rethinking and revamping their courses of study. At many, including UC Irvine, the chief focus is on information technology, helping to give rise to a new term: “the techno MBA.”

Come fall, UC Irvine’s Graduate School of Management will funnel about one-third of its 140 or so MBA candidates into a special group that will spend even more time on intensive lab work focusing on leading-edge concepts such as electronic commerce and Internet-based marketing research. The school expects that many of these students will go on to become chief information officers.

“Technology is dramatically affecting the way business is done,” said Vijay Gurbaxani, the management school’s associate dean of academic degree programs. “Most business schools haven’t realized the role of technology.”

Berkeley and Irvine bristle at suggestions that they’re creating a bunch of “technonerds” with technical expertise but limited people-management skills. Rather, Gurbaxani said, “the idea is to prepare people for an increasingly technological world.”

Come the fall term at Irvine, students will be required to provide their own laptop computers. Electronically loaded classrooms--in vogue now at UC Irvine, Berkeley, UCLA and a host of other schools--make it easy to plug in and network with professors and other students.

Haas construes technology management quite broadly. The hope is that graduates will be thoroughly comfortable with technology and able to incorporate it seamlessly into everyday business, including multimedia presentations.

William Hasler, dean of the Haas school since 1991, noted that industries such as banking and utilities, traditionally slow to change, “are undergoing dramatic upheavals--all driven by technology.”

A veteran of KPMG Peat Marwick, a consulting and accounting firm, Hasler also became aware years ago that business was becoming more cross-functional. Increasingly, companies were assigning projects to teams that cut across the normal organization--with representatives from marketing, manufacturing, engineering, finance, etc.

At Haas, students get exposed to this interdisciplinary approach in the international business development program, which enables them to work overseas in small teams for high-profile companies such as Levi Strauss & Co., Motorola and Bank of America. Tauchi, for example, spent three weeks in Shanghai consulting for Ford Motor Co.

“There’s no such thing anymore as a domestic market,” said JoAnn Dunaway, the Haas school’s director of international programs. “Companies now understand that international skills will be required.”

Employers are starting to see results from the curriculum changes. Berkeley students’ starting salaries, many of them in technology consulting jobs, have been rising about 6% a year since the Haas program began revising its courses five years ago. Last year, about 25% of UC Irvine’s MBA graduates went into technology consulting. Deloitte & Touche, a consulting firm, has already offered 12 jobs to members of the class of ’96.

Salaries for graduates have jumped by $20,000 a year recently. “They’re getting the jobs that pay more--often in the mid-$60,000s,” Gurbaxani said.

“We’re finding that the students are immediately productive,” said Don Giudice, a 1987 Irvine MBA who works in the information technology consulting arm of Ernst & Young Kenneth Leventhal Real Estate Group in Newport Beach. The firm, which routinely uses automated tools such as spreadsheets, databases and electronic mail, finds that with Irvine grads “there’s a real short learning curve.”

Just weeks shy of graduation, Berkeley’s Tauchi is in serious job-hunting mode. Thanks to her studies, her overseas experience and a summer internship with a San Francisco multimedia company, Tauchi said the search “looks promising.”

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