Ahead of the Class
You’re an Australian manufacturing expert. You’ve been parachuted into your company’s money-losing sock factory in China. You don’t speak Chinese, the factory’s computer data has been wiped clean, and you are so swamped with technical problems that you can’t get any sleep. What to do?
This is the kind of case study Harvard Business School students have been presented with for years. But this particular study, of Pacific Dunlop China--which will be used by executive trainees this term--comes with a high-tech twist.
The case sits on a World Wide Web site, where, at the click of a mouse, students can watch videos of key executives discussing the factory’s problems or get a glimpse of the factory and the workers’ living conditions. There is even an online spreadsheet that shows students how different production schedule options would affect the factory’s sales, inventory and costs.
This isn’t an isolated experiment in high-tech learning. Harvard Business School, for years a technological backwater, has jumped to the top of its class by building a high-speed, state-of-the art “Intranet,” an internal network based on Internet standards that it uses to more efficiently address a full range of educational and administrative needs.
Intranets have become the rage among corporations and other large institutions in recent months because they’re relatively cheap, they can exploit Internet features such as the ability to establish Web sites to disseminate information, and they use popular browsers like Netscape to search for information.
Once you have an Intranet in place, says Susan Rogers, chief technical officer at HBS, “everything that is being developed for the World Wide Web quickly becomes attributes you can attach to your network.”
At the same time, because the Intranet operates over an institution’s own communications lines and includes “firewalls” to ward off outside invaders, it doesn’t face the security concerns and slow speeds characteristic of the Internet.
“There will be a dramatic transformation in the way people acquire and use information,” says Kim Clark, who was appointed dean of HBS in September. “We want to be leaders in that process. The challenge is to reinvent the Harvard Business School.”
HBS students, staff members and professors are trained to exploit the Intranet: They use the same Netscape browser to pick up assignments, read materials and class schedules on class Web sites as many now use to surf the Net.
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Other universities have already traveled a long way down that road. The University of Washington, for example, has trained members of its men’s and women’s basketball teams to use the Internet to gather information, write papers and communicate with their professors while on the road. The university also teaches about 1,600 freshmen each year, roughly half the entering class, how to use the Net for research and how to build personal Web sites.
Employees at AT&T; Corp.’s Bell Laboratories can put up their own Web pages incorporating video clips. Many corporations see great potential in using the Intranet to offer training to employees. Netscape says 70% of its sales are for products used on corporate and other Intranets.
But few institutions have moved as far and as fast as the Harvard Business School has in building an Intranet to handle all administrative and educational needs.
Since Clark became dean, the business school has spent $11 million on the system, including new communications equipment and 1,400 new computers for the staff, students and faculty. The school’s video servers, which offer the kind of real-time video that cable companies have long promised but haven’t delivered, are the envy of the high-tech community.
“What the Harvard Business School is doing is groundbreaking,” says Jim Long, chief executive of Mountain View, Calif.-based Starlight Networks Inc., which makes software used to help deliver video clips over Web sites.
Whether through good planning or dumb luck, Long says, Harvard Business School’s decision to build an Intranet came at an opportune time. “We’ve just had a huge turn of the technology wheel,” he says.
“Harvard was getting a lot of knocks for not being technologically engaged,” says Barbara Gordon, vice president of academic and research computing at Sun Microsystems Inc. “Clark did things that allowed [HBS] to jump to the head of the pack.”
Last fall, HBS had a hodgepodge of dated technology. “We had one of everything,” Clark says. The school had six e-mail systems that couldn’t all talk to one another. That created communications barriers among divisions such as the library, the executive education programs, alumni office and the faculty. The business school’s 200 faculty members had personal computers in 75 configurations, making support difficult.
Clark called together the technical support people from the school’s various departments, who had been frustrated by the school’s lack of direction on technology. “I told them the bell had rung and I wanted them to run the race of their lives.” The goal was to bring the school’s tech infrastructure up to parity in just three months.
Fortunately for Clark, his predecessor had recognized that short-term fixes would be a waste of money and had stopped spending on technology two years before, allowing the school to accumulate a substantial war chest. At the same time, he made sure cable was installed whenever new buildings were put up, making it easy for the Intranet to be put in place.
As the network neared completion, there was some grumbling from those against change.
“I had five petitions asking me not to turn off the old system,” says David Upton, a professor whom Clark assigned to handle much of the transition. “I said, ‘Tough,’ and pulled the plug.”
Then the school created a lab with 100 computers tied to a central computer so professors could experiment with the Intranet.
The school is only beginning to learn how to exploit its networks’ new capability. Students are being encouraged, for example, to make videos of themselves explaining how to use the computer system. These videos are to be made available over the Intranet.
Clark says the Dunlop case is just an early example of the way new technologies can help simulate real-life situations for teaching.
This video capability “enables us to bring context into the classroom in a powerful way,” Clark says. He sees virtual-reality capabilities being added to make the learning experience even more immediate.
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Ultimately, the biggest advantage of the Intranet, HBS users say, will be the establishment of a schoolwide standard for developing new electronic courses.
It took Upton more than a year to develop his first electronic case. But the HBS staff developed a second course in only 18 hours, based on the format Upton had established.
Multimedia features that once cost professors $50,000 and required months of work by outside contractors can now be done in-house in a matter of days.
Business school professors have developed their own ways of exploiting the Intranet’s abilities. Upton, for example, asks students to send in perspectives on a case before class begins. If 20% of the students say Dunlop should drop the Chinese operation, the professor can pick out those students and ask them to explain the minority view.
“I’m still learning how to teach with this machine,” says Upton, who has long pushed for the infrastructure upgrade.
Consultants say the Intranet isn’t for everybody, however. Large corporations with sophisticated programs that, for example, will check the personal schedules of each member of a work team and automatically set a meeting for when all can attend, will find such applications aren’t available on the Intranet.
“The Intranet is a least common denominator,” says Bill Bicklin, an analyst at Gartner Group, a Stamford, Conn.-based market researcher. Bicklin says it could be two years or more before the Intranet offers the range of functions now offered by a variety of proprietary systems, such as Lotus’ Notes program.
And there are still technical glitches to be worked out. The high-speed network today exists only on campus. Students living off-campus must access the network over slower modems.
But there have also been dozens of unexpected payoffs from using the Intranet.
Scheduling of rooms, equipment and speakers, a huge headache for academic institutions, has become easier with everybody having quick access to regularly updated information. Students can see pictures of their classmates, hear snippets of audio on how to pronounce their names, learn backgrounds and get classroom seating charts.
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Students and alumni are being given lifetime e-mail addresses on the HBS system. That way they will not only use them while at school, but they will also be able to keep in touch afterward. That could be a boon for alumni fund-raising.
The new technology infrastructure is being used first for the school’s high-priced executive education programs, where it is proving to be an important competitive element in a market flooded with similar programs.
“Developing the materials will be the hard part,” Clark says. “You need a new set of skills. Our strategy is to develop the capability to develop these materials.” The school has already announced that new professors will be given special training in how to design courses incorporating the technology.
Peter Orton, who once worked as a scriptwriter for Steven Spielberg’s TV series “Amazing Stories,” is among a corps of producers developing CD-ROM multimedia titles for executive education programs. The school last fall released one title on general management and is adding new ones on diversity and other topics.
As more material becomes available over the network, Harvard expects to begin offering more of its courses to executives around the world.
Says chief technology officer Rogers: “The ultimate goal is to make it so it won’t matter if a student is in London or Boston.”
Leslie Helm can be reached via e-mail at leslie.helm@latimes.com
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Ahead of the Class
The Harvard Business School had for years gotten by with a hodgepodge of incompatible computer systems. But now, in a ambitious effort to put itself on the leading edge of networked information systems technology, the school has installed a new internal network based on Internet standards. Known as Intranets, these networks are the latest craze among information systems managers in corporations and in public and private institutions.
A. The Intranet enables the faculty, staff and students to communicate easily with one another and to access information stored on private Web sites using the same Netscape softwarethat’s used to access the public World Wide Web.
B. Major departments, such as the business school and the publishing and library divisions, each have their own servers--computers used to host Web sites and store information that can be accessed through the Intranet.
The MBA program, for example, will use the Intranet for course materials, including a new genre of “multimedia” case studies. Rather than buy texts or find them in th library, students will go to the Intranet site and find documents that feature text, graphics, audio and video.
Student clubs will be able to post event information and other documents of interest to club members.
The library server will feature an online card catalog, links to abstracts of faculty research and links to other business Web sites on the Internet.
C. People surfing the public Internet can get access to the Harvard Business School home page, which in turn includes links to certain sites on the Intranet that are open to the public. These sites include course descriptions, faculty biographies, library resourcesand abstracts of faculty research. A security “firewall” prevents their gaining access to the rest of the network.
D. Unlike corporate systems, Harvard’s Intranet allows limited access from the outside. Certain people with Internet access may be given special access to the business school’s Intranet. Off-campus students, for example, could get access by using a special service. Companies and academics from other campuses working on joint projects with Harvard professors might also be granted access to selected Web sites being used for projects.
