brent phillips

I came across a post today on Sam Larbi’s blog entitled Save your job: understand the basics of business. Its a short post that gets to the heart of something that I have been thinking about for quite some time: how should engineers think about their role relative to the strategic direction of their organization? In Sam’s post he shares some insight from a fellow who had been replaced by an outsource firm. In part he writes “Looking back on it, I realize how foolish we were. We worked for a business and our job was to contribute to either making or saving money for that business. Yet we didn’t understand the basics of how the business came to profitability…” This is an interesting point that I took, not long ago, to a couple of acquaintances who teach computer science. My questions to them were along the following lines:

Do students think about the business side of the work they are training to do? Do they think about the strategic value they bring to an organization? Do they think about entrepreneurship? Do they think about intellectual property and how they might innovate to build a business? I also asked if students had an opportunity to take classes on such subjects.

The answer to the latter was yes. Students could certainly take business courses as electives in their curriculum. Most did not however.  In terms of the other questions, the answers were basically ‘no’ across the board. According to my conversation,  students learn a trade (coding) and most expect to land an hourly position somewhere, then expect to apprentice with a more senior developer to learn the complexities of a particular sofware product. This is certainly not a bad approach and many do quite well following this model. I cannot help but think, however, that a few minor changes to the core curriculum of a computer science program would add significant value to the skillset of a newly minted engineer. Specifically, I think a course on business strategy would be a great start and possibly a course on innovation and intellectual property. Perhaps a survey course could be created to address the gamut. The material doesn’t have to go too deep, but just deep enough to give students insight into the environment they will most likely be working.  The easiest way to address this in fact, might be some cross-pollination programs among various schools at a university. GSU offers an intellectual property survey course to its business students for example, so it would be easy enough to make something similar available for the CS students. 

Taking it one step further - consider an entrepreneurial capstone program for MBA’s, JD’s, and MSCS students that included the identification of a market oppportunity, building prototype software, and developing a business plan to take it to market. Maybe along the way you secure a trademark or file a patent or two. Not a bad way to round out a college degree. Maybe they even launch a business.

I’m sure there are schools doing this today, but my guess is that they are a minority. If you read this and know of an interesting program, let me know.

I checked out the new iTunes U catalog yesterday and was pleasantly surprised (shocked!) at the breadth and depth of offerings.  For those who are unfamiliar with the service, iTunes now offers video/audio downloads of course lectures from a number of leading universities.  The topics vary as do the number of lectures you might get for each - A Human Computer Interaction course at Stanford, for example, offers  8 lectures, while the IS 103 “History of Information” Series at Berkley offers a staggering 40 lectures. Other offer considerably more. As I reviewed the catalog, I was also impressed by the fact that the lectures all seem to be current (within a year or so) and also - best of all - free of charge.

Now for someone like me, this is a dangerous proposition - although much appreciated. I’m already an avid reader and have a very broad range of interests.  At the very least I see the service as a complement to other professional development activities, but also as a way of brushing up on various hobbies (guitar lessons, anyone?).  My challenge of course is scarcity of time so picking and choosing wisely will be the challenge. 

Shifting gears a bit, I also checked out apple’s website and found the following comment which got me thinking a bit:  ”iTunes U is transforming the way people learn on campus, off campus, and where there’s no campus at all. ” Its a pitch, but also an interesting point that begs the question - Do we need lecture halls anymore? I’ve got some thoughts on that which I will revisit in another post. For now, I’ve started my downloads…

1. Human Computer Interaction: Innovation on User Research Methods during the development of Windows Vista, Gayna Williams, Microsoft.
2. Intellectual Property Scholars Conference 2007, DePaul University. Accommodating the Evolution of Intellectual Infrastructure: Applying Lessons from Trademark and Copyright to Improve Patent Law. Peter Lee.  
3. UC Berkley. Information: An Introduction. Paul Duguid.