Harvard Business School

Over the course of the 20th century, technology went from being irrelevant to management education to being inseparable from it.  At HBS, this transition occurred in three waves: in the 1960s, the 1980s, and the 1990s.

Early technologies

Paul T.  Cherington, the School's foremost authority in marketing at its founding, was one of the first members of the faculty to explore the significance of new business-related technologies and their possible implications for the MBA program.  In 1916, he established a "Laboratory of Business Devices," which displayed a number of office machines and "labor-saving devices," including the relatively novel Hollerith punch-card tabulating machine.  Although students were encouraged to experiment with these machines, they apparently did not encounter them within the confines of the formal curriculum.

The experiment was short-lived, however.  Cherington himself left HBS in 1919 to become Director of Research at the pioneering J.  Walter Thompson advertising agency in New York, where he developed new techniques for focused market research.

In subsequent decades, tabulating machines came into their own as research tools—greatly assisting the statistical studies of the School's Bureau of Business Research in the 1920s, for example—but technology mostly remained outside the MBA classroom during the first half of the 20th century.  True, students learned about lathes and milling machines in the context of their Production courses, and the Business Statistics course exposed (mostly unwilling) students to tabulating machines, but "computers" and "data processing"—still relatively exotic terms—remained the province of scientists and engineers.

In 1954, HBS, Harvard's Division of Applied Sciences, and the Harvard Department of Economics—building on wartime advances at Harvard, including the development by Howard Aiken of the world's first large-scale automatic digital computer, the Mark 1—together established a "Graduate Program in Automatic Data Processing." Although not a formal joint degree program, the cooperative effort helped focus the attention of those three faculties on technology, and gave a limited number of Harvard graduate students a technological home.

The First Wave: The Sixties

Computers first began to have a direct impact on education at HBS in 1962, when a computer simulation of a business enterprise—nicknamed "Harbus II" by its creator, Jim McKenney—was used in special summer sessions for executives.  These sessions were cosponsored by HBS and the Educational Testing Service, and involved 50 executives.  Meanwhile, McKenney was running a quiet test of the program in one of his first-year Control sections.  Both experiments were deemed a success, and in the following year, a modified simulation was migrated into the AMP curriculum, and all first-year MBA students participated in the first run of the "Business Game." In subsequent years, the Business Game became a highlight of the first year and, occasionally, the subject of controversy.

Technology made its way into the classroom by another route during this same time, thanks in part to another young computer buff named Warren McFarlan, then finishing up his MBA degree.  By coincidence, it was McFarlan's Control professor, John Dearden, whom Dean Stanley Teele charged with developing the first course in management information systems.  McFarlan had become friendly with Dearden, and after graduating from the MBA program in 1961, he enrolled in the DBA program and signed on as Dearden's research assistant.  Together, they created a "Management Information Systems" elective—a radical departure that was first offered in 1962.  McFarlan and Dearden continued to refine the course over the next few years, and in 1966 published the influential Management Information Systems: Text and Cases, which ultimately spun off more than a dozen books and other publications.

The first wave was beginning to crest, evidenced by a groundswell of interest in technology both on the part of faculty and students.  Meanwhile, the School was facing an increasing financial investment in computer-related technologies.  In 1964, the first computer—an IBM 1401—was installed on the campus, in part to support administrative processes, but also to permit the data-crunching associated with the Business Game to occur on campus.  Faculty member and administrator Lewis Ward was named head of the new Data Processing Center: a difficult and generally thankless task in those days.  Two years later, in 1966, the first computer terminals were introduced into the Aldrich classrooms, and HBS entered into a formal time-sharing relationship with the University's Computation Center.  The School's goal, at that point, was to have 18 remote computer terminals on campus by January 1967, and 32 more within a few more months.

Recognizing that an expensive new educational model might be emerging, Dean George P. Baker in 1967 asked longtime faculty member Edmund Learned to lead a faculty committee to prepare a report on the School's technology-related obligations and opportunities.  Learned, by then a member of the faculty for 40 years, had no particular expertise in technology, but had an uncanny ability to size up a field, and to some extent, look into its future.  Learned, along with his 22 colleagues on the committee, predicted that the School's educational philosophy, as well as its administrative processes, had to change dramatically to accommodate the reality of technology.  They were proven right almost immediately: in 1968-69, the Business School community logged some 20,000 hours in terminal time; a year later, that number had climbed to more than 42,000.  Among the first-year class, "time-shared" computer usage increased 140 percent (up to about eight hours per student per year).

Difficulties with time-sharing increased as usage went uP. As a result, the School bought first a PDP-8, the versatile minicomputer introduced by Digital Equipment in the mid 1960s, and then the successor PDP-1070 (brought online in 1972).  Having what was, for the time, considerable computing power on campus led to a decade of relatively technological stability at HBS.

But even in this relatively quiet period, the seeds of a new technological revolution were being sown.  In 1977, the Apple II—an early but versatile version of what soon become known as the "personal computer"—hit the market.  A year later, in Aldrich 108, a second-year student and experienced computer programmer named Dan Bricklin sketched out a rudimentary electronic spreadsheet for use on Apple's exciting new machine.  In 1979, Personal Software, Inc., released a commercialized version of Bricklin's inspiration: VisiCalc.  It was the first "killer app," and Apple II's sales jumped from 35,000 units in 1979 to more than a million in 1984, with an estimated 20 percent of those sales being a direct outgrowth of VisiCalc.

The Second Wave: The Eighties

Although two first-year sections experimented in 1980 with the use of personal computers to analyze cases, PCs—the second technological "wave" to hit the campus—first had a substantial impact on HBS through executive education.  In 1983, the School and IBM conducted a joint study of the potential uses of PCs in business education, with the Program for Management Development (PMD) as their laboratory.  The experiment proved successful, and in 1984 all entering first-year students were required to purchase IBM "portables," which were quickly dubbed "luggables" by their new owners.  Increasingly, the PCs were used not only to permit data manipulation, but also to support other kinds of course work. In 1987, for example, Warren McFarlan encouraged students in his second-year MIS elective to take their final exams by downloading the questions and uploading their answers.  His faculty colleagues were skeptical, but gradually the electronic take-home exam became the norm, rather than the exception.

At the end of the 1980s, other faculty members began to take an interest in integrating computers into the School's educational programs.  One was M.  Colyer Crum, who as the new head of the PMD, was looking for a way to rejuvenate and differentiate this program aimed at middle managers.  Forging an unprecedented alliance with Apple Computer, Crum and his colleagues developed new computer-based instructional materials with a "friendly" Macintosh interface, thereby making computer technology more accessible and useful to students, and incidentally introducing part of the HBS campus to the concept of a network of linked PCs.

In the early 1990s, toward the end of his deanship, John McArthur adopted a unique approach to technology.  On the one hand, he effectively froze spending on computer hardware and software, thereby putting an end to the kinds of uncoordinated and scattershot purchases that were being made across the campus.  At the same time, he invested heavily in a fiber optic network designed to bring the campus together under a high-bandwidth umbrella and to take advantage of an emerging phenomenon called the internet.

The Third Wave: The Nineties

The stage was thus set for the third great wave of technological change at HBS.  When Kim Clark became dean in 1995, he called upon his faculty colleague David Upton to lead an ambitious "IT Initiative." Within a matter of months, a far-reaching new technological network was in place, supporting both the School's educational programs and its administrative work. A School-wide e-mail system was put in place.  The School's first website was launched.  A 100-station PC lab opened in the basement of Shad Hall.  A new electronic course platform in the MBA program not only facilitated case distribution, internal information exchange, and other housekeeping matters, but also deepened and broadened interactions in the classroom.

The third wave continues today.  Legacy issues have become increasingly important.  As the campus put more and more demands on its IT backbone, stability and security also became primary concerns.  Innovations in the Executive Education curriculum—involving off-campus modules, in addition to on-campus learning, place new demands on technology to support the School as a learning nexus.  And as always, the pedagogical opportunities and challenges posed by technology continue to evolve.