teaching

I promissed you a report from my guest lecture at the Norwegian school of Management BI.

First, thank you to all of you who gave me ideas and input to the workshop! Invaluable! And I thank a great deal of the success to you! You all know who you are!

On to the report then.

I was given the opportunity to host a guest lecture for the third year bachelor students at the Norwegian school of management BI. The study is a bachelor in IT management – i.e. these students are going to be the next generation CIO's, IT-managers and IT-directors out there.

Some of you might scream;

“Oah – what the hang glider – white-collars to be the IT-managers??? What about the nerdy-ness required? What about their technical knowhow? Do they even know how to configure a firewall?”

First of all – the CIO, the IT-director and the IT-manager – those are managerial jobs. Those are there to handle the business side of ICT. Those are there to execute the business strategy of ICT. The sooner you realize that, the better.

Secondly – the study is very interesting indeed. Agreed, they do not dwelve deeply into firewall administration – but they do dig into technology, ICT and the students are genuinely interested in the geeky side of things.

Thirdly – they bring business understanding and value to the table. They have been thought budgeting, reporting and economical analysis. They understand the relation between business goals, and the relevance those has to ICT.

So IMO, this study is very important and relevant. It provides the market with IT-managers with a sound combination of business understanding AND ICT-interest. These boys and girls can set up a network, while discussing implementation of business strategy with the CEO.

Now that is out of the hat, and I can move on :)

I got approval from Renny – the lecturer of the class – to run my guest lecture as a workshop. The purpose was simple – to actually have the students working instead of just listening or surfing.

I based the workshop upon the TJX case. I took some of the facts, without telling them that this was a true case of course. The facts I gave them included the size and time frame of the breach, and then I asked them to discuss the possibility of this being true or not.

As expected, discussion was on.

I then added some more details, and they where to role play being the the company, and decide what they should have done to prevent this to happen. They had to incorporate some theory that they where supposed to have studied too. This exercise was in groups of 4, and they spent some time finding the answers. A healthy discussion and plenum summary followed. Many great ideas and they realized the complexity of such a case.

Their last task was given them after I told the truth, and some more details. The task was to be the upper management, in the days after the breach was publicly known. They would have to decide what to do now – and the focus is of course to make the best business possible.

Taking into consideration that they where students, with no or little knowledge of running such huge operations as TJX are, they did very well indeed. Most importantly, I think they learned that business is about making a profit, while reducing risks.

According to the feedback after the session, the students enjoyed the workshop.

I know I loved the opportunity, and had great fun.