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Welcome! You are in the right place if you are:
enrolled in Medaille College's
MBA 504 in Spring 2006
interested
in information technology and business management
interested
in Medaille's curriculum
In socialist terms, the PC is the dominant means of production in our economy. It was twenty-five years ago that the number of knowledge workers exceeded the number of production workers. Since 1980, more US workers have processed information about things than have made the things themselves. Now most of these knowledge workers have a networked PC on their desks. Globally networked PCs (the Internet) are a new medium. Our economy was once based on manufacturing things. Now that the manufacturing is in China and the customer service is in India, our economy is based on managing manufacturing assets.
To
Epiphany - and Beyond
by Kenneth C. Green
Syllabus, April 2004
The year 1994 is important because that's when corporate spending on information technology finally surpassed corporate expenditures on manufacturing technology. Yet it took more than a decade, well into the late 1990s, before Greenspan and other economists could proclaim a real return on investment for the corporate spending on IT.
The Great Leveling
by Warren Bass
Washington Post, April 3, 2005
Indian accounting firms are expected to do about 400,000 American tax returns this year.
Of course, all those US manufacturing jobs have been going to China, right? Wrong. Just because the manufacturing went doesn't mean the jobs went. Stop thinking so 20th century. China is losing more jobs than we are because of robots. Talk about cheap labor!
China
Losing More Manufacturing Jobs Than U.S. But Adding Service Jobs at a Rapid Pace
The Conference Board, July 8, 2004
China is losing more manufacturing jobs than the United States. For the entire economy between 1995 and 2002, China lost 15 million manufacturing jobs, compared with 2 million in the U.S.
Why? Employment is down but productivity is up because of
"improved technologies", that is,
robots like our
friend on the left used for welding, painting and handling materials. That's
where the jobs went. Not to a Chinese peasant. To a Chinese robot!
China’s industrial labor productivity growth exploded at a 17% annual rate between 1995 and 2002. As in the more developed countries, this rise in productivity comes from improved technologies and the reallocation of resources from lower to higher value activities.
Moral of this story:
The new tools of production are not the torch or hammer or
shovel. They are the Internet and the devices you use to access it.
Writers used to hand their manuscripts and copyrights to a publishing company, which owned the editorial, printing, and distribution processes. Within an organization, that publishing function was performed by secretaries.
Now the writers' desktops have the tools, the means of production: the printing press, so to speak, as well as the paper factory, the bindery, the warehouse, and the truck that distributes the books. Micropayments and merchant accounts at the online bank will soon let the writers run their own bookstores. They can keep their copyrights. Watch this transformation happening in the music industry. It's about to happen to movies and TV. Book publishing, especially textbooks, and magazine publishing are right behind.
New media technology -- the Internet --
provides an
interesting challenge:
who's in charge?
If your company needs a new storefront, the marketing department
is not expected to hammer the dry wall and paint the signage. 
They call in
another department or they outsource to experts. Clearly, carpentry and sign
painting are not in the marketers' job descriptions. Their supervisor would not
want them using a hammer any more than the VP of Finance would want the
accountants to write the corporate press releases.
It is true that outside sales staff are expected to operate heavy machinery (the company car) and perform routine maintenance such as pumping gas, changing a flat tire, and scraping a frosty window. Other than those exceptions, unless you're self-employed and running a one-person business, your organization has a variety of professionals who specialize in various tasks.
Information technology has created a challenge. Marketers would never think of letting their secretaries deliver their sales presentations. But until twenty years ago, they thought nothing of having those secretaries write their letters and reports. Back then, the professional managers were expected to hand off their written communication to an expert, the secretary, who took notes and then transcribed them at a typewriter. To type their own would have been a waste of the managers' valuable time.
Most computers snuck into offices on the secretaries' desks.
They were fancy typewriters. What started the change was the first what-if
software, the spreadsheet, specifically Dan
Bricklin's VisiCalc (below) in the early 1980's.
Instead of guess-timating or asking the secretary or mainframe programmer to "run these numbers", managers could answer their own what-if questions. "What would happen to our break-even date if we cut the cost of this part 10%?" "What if we went with this new distributor's offer?" As aids to decision-making, spreadsheets raised the stakes.
The sharpest managers could do their own; soon everyone was expected to.
Also during the 1980's, many information workers, that is, most organizations' professionals, started doing their own typing. They may not have formatted and printed the final draft of their letters. They may not have copied, collated, and bound their own reports. But they moved from a dictaphone and longhand to their own keyboards. They printed out their own rough drafts.
From then on, the slope got more slippery. Although the sequence
varied depending on organization, individual, and vendor, the software that
often followed the spreadsheet and the word processor was the presentation
program. By the late 80's, Microsoft made it easy for marketing and finance executives to add text
and clip art to a PowerPoint template and quickly make a reasonable-looking
presentation.
For a major presentation, the PowerPoint slides were polished by a graphics expert and sometimes the text was polished by an in-house editor. For routine and low-stakes presentations, however, managers found that they could use templates or make their own good-enough PowerPoints. By the early 1990's, it became common.
Next came email. Many managers still have their secretaries screen and print out their email, which they scribble on so that the secretaries can type the responses. Most managers, however, do their own email, especially routine, in-house email. Now it's instant messaging. Soon it will be video-conferencing.
How do you come across in a three-inch video window on a computer monitor? What about when it's projected onto the wall at a meeting?
Then came the World Wide Web. As one of my colleagues asked in 1996, "When is all this online stuff going to end? Haven't we gone far enough?"
While I heartily sympathized, I hesitated to inform her at the time that I could see no sign of an end. She was really asking, "What's my job?" For what it's worth, in 2006, she is no longer teaching. I don't know what she's doing, but I'll bet it's low-tech.
The Web has dramatically raised the stakes. I use my 19-year-old daughter as a touchstone. She will be in the workforce before you know it. You may not be competing against her, but you may well be managing her, which means you have to communicate with her. And her friends. These young women do instant messaging daily. They have webs at gURL.com. Combining IM and a browser, they shop together on the Web. They get their email on their cell phones. On our last monthly Cingular bill, my daughter had over 500 text messages recorded on her account and according to her, she hardly ever uses text messaging. The most adventurous of my daughter's friends took her digital camera/cell phone on vacation and recorded Bavaria on a moblog. According to a recent Wired feature, these young women were born digital:
We learned to crawl alongside the PC. We came of age with the Internet. Early-adopting, hyperconnected, always on: Call us Children of the Revolution, the first teens and tweens to grow up with the network. It takes a generation to unlock the potential of a transformative technology – we are that generation. From IM to MP3 to P2P, we lab-test tomorrow’s culture. While others marvel at the digital future, we take it for granted. Think of it as the difference between a second language and a first. And imagine the impact when full fluency hits the workplace, the shopping mall, the living room. In the past, you put away childish things when you grew up. But our tools are taking over the adult world. Check it out: The technology is trickling up.
SWITCH: Alison Lewis has a web broadcast of how tos intended to introduce girls to technology.
Electronic Jewelry Workshops Page: Elisabeth Sylvan conducts workshops where participants learn to make electronic jewelry.
We a
ren't
even sure what to call these things. What used to be a "phone" as in short for
telephone is now a videophone or a "communicator" -- -a cellphone with built-in
camera, thumb keyboards, Web browsing, for example, T-Mobile's HP iPAQ 6315
PocketPC PDA Phone on the right. Yes, it's a "pocket PC PDA phone", a handheld
computer that also works as a cell phone and can tap into the Internet using
high-speed wireless hotspots.
The Toyota Prius has a microphone built into the rear-view mirror, a "Make a
call" button on the steering wheel, and Bluetooth circuitry so that you can make
calls without even removing the cellphone from your pocket or purse. Want the
Internet in your car? Try DashPC
(uses frames; click on Pictures).
What will be hot in 2006? WiMax will let your wireless devices work at a distance measured in miles not feet, as the current WiFi. VoIP -- voice over Internet Protocol -- will take off with new WiFi phones that will let any hotspot turn into a phone booth.
Mobile phone TV begins in Japan
BBC News, April 1, 2006
Mobile phone users in Japanese cities can now watch digital TV on compatible mobile phones for the first time.
My new Sony Handycam on the right has Internet access. I can take a video and
send it to you right from the camera.
A student said to me the other day, "I need to email that picture to my cell phone so I can take it with me." Yikes!
The only device that satisfies all of your personal communication and information needs. It's your wireless everything, it includes Internet browsing, e-mail, AOL Instant Messenger ™, two-way text messaging and fun features such as mobile snapshots and games. It all runs on the only nationwide GPRS network, by T-Mobile, where you get more. Free camera attachment included.
Toshiba's New
Ubiquitous Viewer Software Gives Anytime Access to PCs from Mobile Phones
press release, 18 January, 2005
Breakthrough Software A Bridge to Ubiquitous
Connectivity.
The world’s first software supporting remote operation of a
personal computer from a mobile phone. Ubiquitous Viewer provides access to any
Windows-OS-based home or office computer and allows users to open productivity
software, such as the MS Office suite, and to read and modify files. Ubiquitous
Viewer also supports access to PC-based e-mail, internet browser and other PC
applications, providing users with groundbreaking access to PC-based resources
at any time, wherever they are.
Camera
Phones Help Buyers Beware
by Amit Asaravala
Wired, January 19, 2004
During the past six months, no fewer than four software
firms have released applications to help consumers turn their camera-equipped
mobile phones into personal bar-code scanners. ...
The applications automatically trigger the download of coupons, reviews and
other information about a given product whenever a user takes a photo of its bar
code. ...
"Clearly, this is going to change the way people think about shopping," said
Olivier Attia, chief executive of New York-based
Scanbuy, one of the firms specializing in
bar-code-scanning software.
For example, "with a camera phone that is also a bar-code scanner, you can go
into a store like Barnes & Noble, take a photo of the ISBN number on a book and
instantly receive a coupon offering the book for 30 percent less at Amazon.com,"
said Attia.
What does your professional web site look like?
While it seems as though we are awash in a sea of luscious
choice, there's another C-word that's even more important.
A useful term for the overall situation is the most important C-word: CONTROL. Who has it? Who's getting it? Some of what companies used to control, they don't anymore. The process of transferring and transforming that control can be messy. Jobs will be lost. Companies will fail. Industries will wither. Skills will be obsolete.
To whom is control passing? Download completed, as the book cover on the right says. You don't need a German weatherman to tell you which way the wind is blowing. Das Ende der Musikindustrie.
The Future of Ideas
Lawrence Lessig
Rip. Mix. Burn. Apple, of course, wants to sell computers. Yet its ad
(left) touches an ideal that runs very deep in our history. For the technology that
they (and of course others) sell could enable this generation to do with our
culture what generations have done from the very beginning of human society: to
take what is our culture; to "rip" it -- meaning to copy it; to "mix" it -- meaning
to reform it however the user wants; and finally, and most important, "burn" it
-- to publish it in a way that others can see and hear. Digital technology could
enable an extraordinary range of ordinary people to become part of a creative
process.
When academics do it, it's not rip, mix, and burn. It's gather, create, and share.
The Scholar’s Box: A Tool for Gathering, Creating, And Sharing Reusable Digital
Learning and Research Content
by David A. Greenbaum, Raymond Yee, and Peter Brantley
Get the custom parts you need - the first true online machine shop. Download our free software, draw your part, and click to order - it's that easy! Your part will be machined and delivered. Even better, your cost is low due to the Internet, software, and automated machines.
miniMIXA (on the right)
A revolutionary integrated multi-channel mobile audio mixer and
recording studio. It allows the easy mixing together of content in many audio
and MIDI formats, including microphone recordings, plus application of
wide-ranging sound effects for the on-device creation and recording of stunning
grooves.
This feature-packed application also lets you incorporate in your mix sounds
generated live from music engines and modular synths, for an unparalleled mobile
mixing experience.
Audio app adds
DJ capability to Windows Mobile smartphones
WindowsForDevices.com, August 13, 2004
The smartphone is set to take center stage playing a dance set at FutureDJ, part of the ISEA2004 arts festival in Reading, England. Festival director Drew Hemment will use a Windows Mobile smartphone to create on-the-fly mixes using SSEYO miniMIXA, a "feature-packed, multi-channel audio mixer and recording studio application".
If you read the above carefully, you'll see that tools that used to be expensive and belong to an elite are now cheap and in your pocket.
If you don't already, you will soon have a home network. Right now, you have more multimedia and raw computing power on your laptop than all but a dozen rich and powerful Western New York organizations had in their whole organizations twenty years ago. That much power will soon be in your belt buckle and collar button. It will be powered by your walking.
Are you going to be mired in the old world of your education and experiences so far? Then you will marginalized in this new world.
In times of change, learners inherit the earth, while the
learned find themselves equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.
-- Eric Hoffer
Are you going to learn new skills? HTML. NLE. VoIP. CMS. That
sounds confusing, but they're all tools for you to capture and design design things,
especially visual things: images, movies, web pages, presentations, prototypes. These skills
will profit both your employers -- the actuaries expect you to have half a dozen
in your adult working life -- and yourselves.
While I don't expect e-commerce, especially retail, ever to dominate, I do expect e-business to be business before too long.
Yes, I understand that your industry doesn't get it. Your company doesn't get it. Your boss doesn't get it. Your co-workers don't get it. They are dinosaurs and ostriches. But you have to be smarter than they are. You not only must win, you must rule.
The always-on networked world is where you will spend the rest of your working lives. You will compete with and manage today's children, who don't know a world without the World Wide Web.
MBA 504 will give you a fighting chance.
Since the Web is so new, it's even more important that we use the same vocabulary and begin to develop shared values. Thus, I would like you to actively participate in a collaborative online environment that we will use for learning and that will increasingly be used for business. As the instructor, I will be modeling leadership and project management by his participation in this online environment to supplement the traditional classroom. A virtual classroom to simulate a virtual office, if you will.
Find out all the official stuff. How is this course described in the college catalog? What are you going to know more about? What are you going to know how to do better? What's the self-assessment all about?
This is the page to bookmark. It will change often, get very long, and be the place to learn what we're going to do in class and what you should do before class.
In this course, you'll learn by doing. We're going to pick up where the section above on the end of civilization leaves off.
If the course were Mission Impossible, the Case page would be the tape-recorded message at the beginning, except that it wouldn't self-destruct until Halloween 2003, when the course is over. "If you choose to accept this mission, ... ."
The ideas at the top of this page are meant to be provocative. At the Ground Zero Bistro, you can talk about it. Ask questions and get answers. Share your opinions.
You will demonstrate your learning in a series of oral demonstrations as well as homework on your Plaza web site and in discussions at the Bistro. What are the other students doing? When are you scheduled to make your presentation? How will it be evaluated?
In the new media world, you can't hide. What's your URL? That does not mean, what's your company's PR department's URL? or what's your company's marketing department's URL? It means, what's your personal professional URL? For now, it's http://RicciStreet.net/dwares/plaza/
Carefully chosen words, crafted paragraphs, and logical arguments are terrific tools for communicating in organizations and for influencing others. This course addresses so many hot current issues and events that it's hard to know where to begin. The Roundtable gives you common readings and focused questions to address yourselves to in an orderly manner.
The knowledge and skills in this course are covered copiously on the Internet. The PC and IT industries are hot news. I put articles -- links and excerpts -- onto this page as Signs of the Times and Ripples and Quakes.
Printer-friendly version of the Course Disclosure Statement
I am always doing what I cannot do, in order that I may
learn how to do it.
-- Pablo Picasso
Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach him to Web surf and he won't bother you for a week.
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