By Eileen K. McCluskey

Special to the Gazette

The next time you're thinking of turning your basement into usable space, consider the Business School's remodeling plan, and create for yourself a state-of-the-art computer laboratory. Maybe you won't need quite as many computers -- HBS has 150, all together, in two labs.

And perhaps you should take life a bit easier and not build your tech lab in as aggressive a time frame -- "It was exhilarating, and really quite fun. But it's not the kind of production schedule you'd want to attempt too often," laughs Chief Technology Officer Susan Rogers as she explains about the eight weeks it took to turn Shad Hall's basement into command central for the Business School's intranet.

Rogers takes a stranger on a tour of this new corner of the cyberspace universe from one of the sparkling workstations in the pristine lab, enjoying the wide-eyed wonder that this extensive, cutting-edge intranet elicits.

"Information Technology (IT) at the Business School operates on eloquently powerful concepts," says Rogers, "one of which is that IT creates the formats, and users actually create the content."

Rogers explains how the system works: "It starts with Netscape, which is an open system, and therefore usable from any kind of computer, anywhere. Next we have Dynamo, which is the Web engine we use. Dynamo's a tool that creates our Web pages on the fly, using information from 'Coursetools.'

"This brings us to Coursetools, which is a custom application that we've developed. Coursetools tells Dynamo how we want our Web pages formatted," says Rogers. In partnership with Dynamo, Coursetools takes information typed by a professor onto a standard online form, and turns these words into a colorful, customized Web page for all of the professors' students.

"Now a driver pulls information from an Oracle database," continues Rogers, and the visitor can tell that this is where the excitement really takes off. "The database is huge. It has all the information that faculty put in on each of their courses -- and we're talking about several hundred courses -- so the database contains tests, slides, Excel spreadsheets, videos, assignments, polls -- everything the faculty put in. Another piece is put in by the registrar -- student names, students' class schedules, classroom assignments. Students also [add information] when they fill out their classcard forms, which tell where they come from, which industries they've worked in, their hobbies, whatever they want to share, and when they respond to polls and discussion groups.

"So let's say you're a student," Rogers says, "and you've just logged on from your laptop at home. The driver instantly pulls everything out of the database that pertains to you and puts it on your pages of the intranet. So that when today's class schedule pops up, your assignments are right here, plus any late-breaking information you may need. You can visit the library, complete assignments, review cases, whatever you need to do."

Kevin Spaulding, manager of the Information Technology Lab, shows the visitor an electronic case, "Pacific Dunlop," one of several which have videos embedded in the text. "All of the images appear as a video still," says Spaulding as he scrolls through a few paragraphs of text and stops on a full-color picture of a businessman. "When you click on this image, a video window comes up." Spaulding points and clicks and suddenly the picture expands and the plant manager speaks of his frustrations in working with a sock-making plant in China. "Seeing the manager talk and watching his facial expressions gives you an immediate sense of his aggravation," Spaulding observes.

Further along in the case, Spaulding points out words appearing in small ovals that refer to different phases of the sock factory's production process, steps that include "linking," "dyeing," "packing." Click on one of those words and you're transported into the factory for a 30-second look at workers performing the task.

"Pacific Dunlop" also contains a simulation exercise that enables students to play the role of a plant manager who schedules jobs on sewing machines. "You click on the jobs with your mouse," Spaulding says, highlighting small squares that represent the jobs, "and drag them up and place them on the sewing machines." Once the machines are set up, the student clicks the "run" button and the results instantly appear: expected revenue versus "actual," and jobs blacked out that have missed their deadline.

"These simulations are not new, but they're a lot easier now," says Spaulding. "The students used to have to punch in the information on cards and IT staff would have to feed the cards into a computer while the students waited for the results." As with other IT changes at the B-School, a time-consuming and awkward task has been made fast and simple.

"The students can play this game as often as they want," Spaulding says. "Just drag the blocks back down off the machines -- you can even do these simulations from your laptop at home if you have a Java-enabled browser." Answering the blank look this last phrase elicits Spaulding explains, "This means you need the latest releases of Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator."

The video clips embedded in the Pacific Dunlop case are, however, only available on campus because of problems in transmitting the images over modem lines. But, says Spaulding, "we expect to take advantage of innovations in the convergence industry, using those improvements to provide the same environment we have in these labs to all outside sites."

How could so much technology have been made so smoothly available over such a short time? Forget about building the lab; how did the videos embedded in online cases, or the standard formats allowing even computer-shy professors to publish beautiful Web pages, come into existence so quickly? "The way we're doing this is by writing code in-house," says Rogers. "We continuously enhance our applications by adding new code that provides value and functionality, rather than going out and buying big packaged applications and putting them on our network."

The way the IT team envisions its work also encourages this streamlined creation of production services. And driving this vision is Associate Professor David Upton who, by sharing with IT staff what he teaches in his course called Designing, Managing, and Improving Operations, has made possible the rapid changes in the School's technology. As Upton explains, "Instead of organizing our work around large, point-in-time projects, we have paths; for example, the alumni site is a path, the use of streamed video in the curriculum is a path, putting Web publishing power directly in the hands of faculty is a path. We develop modules that, like Lego blocks, plug into one path or many. Online student biography forms, for example, first developed for the M.B.A. program for the creation of classcards, can be reused in Executive Education programs, and for Alumni activities."

In days gone by, Business School IT was much different, Rogers notes. "We had a bunch of Web pages that were completely static. A programmer was needed in order to change them. It was not possible for us to keep up with the whole school." Those static pages were also blind to the students, so that each student would have to know the Internet address for each of their courses and surf to each address individually to get the information that now pops up on their screen automatically as soon as the student logs on.

Let's also remember that "days gone by" were not all that long ago. As Rogers recalls, "The library services, the alumni site and so forth have been online only since last summer."

Dean of the Business School Kim Clark has spearheaded the technology revolution at the School. Clark says IT is a critical element in educating M.B.A. students: "I think today's students need to be conversant with the nature of the technologies and to know what can be done with IT, both as individual executives and as people who lead organizations.

"As our students confront a rapidly changing world," Clark continues, "they'll have to shape, change, and adapt their organizations. Technology is a very important element that managers can use in this process."

Clark wants the School not only to provide the best that technology has to offer its students, but to act as an organizational role model for its budding business leaders: "We want our students to experience the technology in the context of an organization. We set the standard using the Business School as the model, so that the students learn how an organization should use technology. This is a very tough thing to do," adds Clark. "The education is in the community itself, in how it uses and manages the technology."

Teaching on the Web

As integral players in this organization-as-role-model, Business School faculty are credited with adapting quickly to the School's rapid revamping of technology, and it would seem they're enjoying the challenges.

"I use the IT resources at HBS extensively in my teaching, research, committee work, and professional activities," says Richard Nolan, M.B.A. Class of 1942 Professor of Business Administration. "In the morning, I use my computer to access a custom version of The Wall Street Journal to catch any breaking events about the companies I'll be teaching about that day.

"After I scan the news," Nolan continues, "I access my course Web page, which often contains students' responses to assignment questions. Reviewing student responses provides me with a headstart in class discussion, sensing the students' reactions and understandings of the course materials and concepts.

"And during the day, I will frequently access e-mail to stay on top of projects and communications both at HBS and outside the school," says Nolan.

F. Warren McFarlan, the Albert H. Gordon Professor of Business Administration, enjoys electronic mail, too. "Through e-mail," he says, "I can stay more in touch with the students and relieve the burden of them either coming to my office for small items or playing telephone tag. Through broadcast messages, I can very quickly insert new assignment questions."

Nolan points up a central way that IT enhancements have already changed the way business students are educated: "The student is no longer limited to the first paragraph of the traditional case where the casewriter describes the company in a rather limited way. Now, we're always teaching 1997 cases, and we're moving from term papers to Web pages. The way this works is we have the students create a knowledge base and then, using hypertext, we can explore the subject any way that we want. Student-developed Web knowledge bases address subjects such as industry restructuring and the role of IT, intellectual property protection, and the future of cable modems."

McFarlan also makes extensive use of the new technology in both his M.B.A. and Advanced Management Program courses. "One of IT's major impacts," says McFarlan, is "the ability to present material much more powerfully, by adding audios and videos. The students can easily see the cases' protagonists on the computer. The old adage that a picture is worth a thousand words clearly applies here."

McFarlan feels that, in general, "the technology has allowed me to bring more realism to the class situation and to become more closely connected to the students."

"Our students are becoming comfortable with the technology," Clark declares. But the School won't stop here. If anything, Clark sees the recent technological revolution as only a beginning. "We want to push the approaches we've begun, for example in the use of multimedia in cases. We've only just scratched the surface. We've still got a lot of work to do."