Information technology has become pervasive throughout academic life at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School. In scale alone, IT at Wharton ranks as the largest among business schools in the United States. Deidre Woods, Wharton’s CIO and associate professor of computing, heads up a staff of 100 IT professionals who oversee an infrastructure of 9,500 desks, 200 servers, and support 10,000 Microsoft Exchange accounts, and 22,000 email alumni addresses.

Establishing good working partnerships has helped Woods carry out a range of activities that have helped enable Wharton to continue as the top business school in the country. In fact, Woods has built her entire IT career at Wharton on this strategy. She recently sat down with Enterpriseleadership.org to discuss what types of partnerships she nurtures, where governance fits into the organization, and what she expects from vendors and her IT staff.

EL: What is your strategy for IT at The Wharton School?

DW: The strategic part of my job is to provide the technology to enhance Wharton’s reputation has a thought leader and disseminator of relevant business information globally. It takes many tactical pieces to carry out this goal out. That’s where we get into running everything. We’re also tasked with protecting the institution’s intellectual property.

EL: Can you talk about one of the important technology initiatives  you’ve worked on with students?

DW: We’ve used innovation to strengthen the school’s reputation; this forms the underpinning of the projects we’ve developed with and for our students, faculty members, and business leaders outside the school.

In mid 1990’s, we became the first business school to provide students with Internet access. We worked closely with a group of students to find out what the first version of the system, called Spike, should look like. Since that time, we’ve revised Spike many times. In fact, Spike has turned into a verb. Students know it as a place to get everything, from their course schedules, to event calendars, and to do things such as reserving group study rooms.

EL: How do you balance where you put your IT dollars for hardware and  software?

DW: We buy turnkey systems to do specific tasks. For example, we bought our admissions systems from the University of Virginia’s Business School. The system works very well by providing students all of the information they need to apply. Spending thousands of dollars to improve the system’s interface would not make sense. Instead, we’ve put a lot of resources in applications like student blogs and student discussion groups, so potential applicants will get to experience life at Wharton.

EL: Do you support any commercial research ventures the school  offers?

DW: We provide the interface, sample programs, and Help Desk support for researchers to get global access to financial datasets through a service called Wharton Research Data Services (WRDS). About 10,000 researchers and faculty members at 125 academic institutions subscribe to this service. WRDS has become a standard for the way business research is done.

Another project we support is Knowledge@Wharton, a Web site and biweekly newsletter of insightful academic business research edited for professionals who read publications such as The Wall Street Journal and Business  Week. The service has about 450,000 subscribers in 189 countries. We support two aspects of the service – the knowledge network that runs from us to other institutions around the world, and the corresponding infrastructure that provides the foundation for the knowledge network.

EL: Describe one of the key projects you have done with faculty  members?

DW: Four years ago, our dean asked my group to look at how  technology can play a role in business education in the 21^st century. We created kind of a partnership between the faculty and members of the IT staff. A faculty committee reviews professors’ proposals for classroom changes, and if the proposal is accepted, the faculty member will get the necessary resources, including hardware and software. Right now, we’re working on 23 such projects with faculty members, and we’ve got five projects lined up for 2006.

EL: Do you have any partnerships with commercial entities?

DW: One of the partnerships we have is with the publisher Addison-Wesley for a commercial product called OTIS, an equities portfolio manager. We’ve sold it to 70 colleges. We’re also working on another commercial project.

EL: What types of governance do you have to protect intellectual  property?

DW: We’d like to have more governance. When it comes to issues such as security, I work with my colleagues across the University. In fact, several years ago, the University hired a chief of security; it has been part of her task force to set standards for handling data. If a policy means more work for us, we accommodate the standard. This way everyone will benefit.

When it comes to IT at Wharton, we tend to invest in resources for external reviews of our systems. For example, we ask Microsoft, one of our key vendors, to do a routine bill of health of our environment. Ernst and Young has done independent privacy assessments for us.

EL: Do you use quality practices such as Six Sigma?

DW: We haven’t, because the model for using these types of disciplines doesn’t fit us. Unlike universities, corporate IT departments usually require a lot of process to carry out projects. On the other hand, we have to turn projects around quickly, regardless of the size. We tend to be more focused on results, and our bottom line tends to rule what many corporate IT departments do. We pay close attention to how we use our resources to carry out various projects, and we also measure our results differently than do corporate IT departments.

EL: What types of measurements determine IT success?

DW: We are measured qualitatively on the best practices we use to leverage IT at Wharton. Serving as an example of IT best practices for IT departments at other business school has become a criteria for measuring our effectiveness. And keeping all of our constituents working with us provides the best benchmark for our success. For the past five years, we’ve gotten very high marks for how well IT at Wharton has enhanced students’ educational experience.

EL: Have you read Nicholas Carr’s book from Harvard Business Review  Press, Does IT Matter?

DW: It’s a good book. I agree that things such as email, database servers, and desktop support have become commodities. These things, however, form the foundation of more strategic initiatives.

The book forces IT professionals to go through the exercise of determining how well they are going, and how they can distinguish themselves from other organizations. During the dot.com boom, we had a tough time hiring good IT resources. Everyone wanted to work on the latest e-commerce venture. Business publications, such as The Wall Street Journal, now report that  companies have become more rational about IT. That’s what Carr’s book is all  about.

EL: I heard that some of your classrooms don’t have any Internet  connectivity for students. Why did you decide to do this?

DW: When we opened our newest building three years ago, we gave faculty members the choice of how they wanted to teach. They all wanted to preserve the live interactive experience and to add technology as they needed it. The U-shaped classrooms enable students to communicate with each other easily and with the instructor. The building has lots of group study space and labs equipped with computing resources, and each classroom makes available on-demand digital recording for the faculty.

EL: You interact with many future business leaders; so, what’s their  attitude towards IT?

DW:Many of our MBA students have grown up with the Internet. These students have also worked in organizations where they’ve been exposed to some aspect of IT. Since our students will be managing departments; perhaps, IT; and eventually, companies; they’ll need to know how to partner and work with their organization’s IT department. To this end, we try to be a model for the most effective and harmonious way to do things.

EL: When it comes to working with vendors, what’s the most important  thing you want out of the relationship?

DW: We work closely with a few well-known vendors such as IBM, Microsoft, Dell, and Sun Microsystems. Yes, we want value for our money. We also want to form a partnership that provides us with good service when something goes wrong.

EL: What disruptive technologies are you considering?

DW: Computer trade publications talk about how messy Web interfaces are. How do you move beyond HTML to have a better Internet experience? Rich media Internet applications makes sense for us to use in our learning laboratory environment.

When it comes to Spike, we’re looking at what types of services we can provide to students’ mobile devices. Our challenge here is to figure out what’s appropriate in a business school environment.

EL: What types of IT manpower resources work best in your  organization?

DW: We tend to hire a lot of Penn graduates right out of school. Sometimes our graduates will go to work in industry and then come back here; it’s kind of word of mouth. If we don’t have any eligible candidates to promote from within, we’ll go outside and hire someone with the required amount of experience.

We tend to look for professionals who have a track record of doing things well and knowing how to manage projects. Even our most junior people have some project responsibility. Being able to deal with our constituents is very important to us. We can tone down someone who has an overdeveloped sense of responsibility, but we can’t teach someone how to get along with others. And because things move quickly around here, we need people who are current in technology. Intellectual curiosity is another trait we look for. My job is to think about where we’re going. It’s everyone’s job to help us get there.

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Elizabeth Ferrarini is a free-lance writer based in Boston,  Massachusetts. Reach her at mailto:elizabethferrarini@yahoo.com.