Technology Wave Rolls Over HBS

Ron has missed class, but he does not want to hike to the professor's office for the handouts. So he logs on to the local campus network and views all the handouts and videos used in class that day.

Tamara forgot the names of some French students she met. She goes to the student directory and searches for students who speak French. Perusing the online pictures, she finds her comrades and sends them an e-mail from her lifetime school e-mail account.

For some Harvard students, these imagined cases are being realized daily--they are students of the Harvard Business School (HBS).

Its well-kept lawns and building outpost make HBS a beautiful place, but what is really impressive about this extension of Harvard over the river is its integration of technology.

David A. Garvin '71, an HBS professor, was one of the first to use the new system for course work. Garvin was interested in the transition that one goes through to become a general manager--a position such as chief executive officer.

"The data is out there. It's in the alumni's heads," Garvin said.

Garvin had a Web-based bulletin board system set up so that students and alumni could discuss issues related to the transition.

After 10 days of online discussion, the alumni were invited to Garvin's class where they spoke with students and had videotaped interviews. All of the data--the online discussion, the in-class talk and the videos--were organized, transcribed and placed on an internal HBS Web page for future access.

This week, one year after the first try, Garvin is replaying this exercise-with even more complexity and appeared even more excited.

"This is not a chat room," Garvin said, emphasizing the significance of the experiment. "You're tapping into real experience."

This real experience could be useful at the College, according to Garvin. For example, a student of organic chemistry could correspond with interns and doctors in the field to see how orgo has been useful to them.

Before 1995, there was no way to do what Garvin is doing. Different HBS divisions utilized six different and incompatible e-mail systems and there were more than 75 faculty configurations.

But that year, the new HBS Dean Kim B. Clark made a committment to overhaul HBS's antiquated and cumbersome system in just three months.

Today it seems that Clark's efforts have been successful.

"We went from a fairly ad hoc environment to a completely networked environment," Garvin said of the transition.

The centerpiece of this transition is the HBS intranet.

An intranet is just an implementation of the Internet with limited access, usually to a site.

The intranet is the method by which all HBS students, faculty and staff get just about all of their information, from curriculum to social activities. "They all live by it," said MBA IT Support Service Product Specialist Kevin F. Canavan.

Using Netscape Navigator, one has access to all course syllabi, announcements, memos and assignments.

Professors make the Web pages via a form interface which fills in their information to a preset template page. No knowledge of HTML is necessary.

In order to prepare its students, the B-School ships them a set of diskettes two months before their arrival that install all necessary software onto their systems including a pre-configured version of Netscape Navigator and Eudora Pro.

In addition, beginning with this year's class, all students are required to install and use McAfee Viruscan on their systems.

Canavan, who has worked for many companies' IT divisions, said, "I have never seen a place which puts [technology] at their fingertips [like HBS]."

Some people call it in your face, but I call it empowering," he added.

--Baratunde R. Thurston '99 is the Claverly Hall user assistant for HASCS, editor-in-chief of Computers@Harvard, published by the Harvard Computer Society, and a Crimson editor. He is also trying to figure out how to transfer to the Business School.