Chuck The Geek.com

Lessons Learned

May 14th, 2008 by Chuck Sharp

So, I’ve been thinking about the big lessons from school over the last year. Here’s what I’ve come up with so far.

What I learned about graduate school, especially with a day job and a family:

• Graduate school is pretty mundane. There’s nothing particularly special about it, except that you get harder assignments, texts, and the instructors seem nicer.
• A year-long program is tiring, but it’s the sweet spot. Honestly, any shorter and I would have short-circuited. Any longer and I would have gone crazy from despair. In a year-long program, you can actually see the end of the tunnel around the 3rd month. That’s not bad.
• Cohort programs are very cool. I was leary of the idea at first. But familiar faces made it much easier to stay on track in school. The peer support you can get in a cohort program is really excellent, but hard to describe (I’m lazy though).
• Business school is different than tech school. I didn’t get this point, and it caused me heartburn until I accepted it. Business school is about business. Technology, in these programs, is taught as an enabler to business, not for its own sake. If the business value ain’t seen, it ain’t taught.
• There are several things that are important, or at least smart, to do in such a program:
• Set up a good ecosystem first, and keep it maintained. This means your family, friends, job, and lifestyle need to be amenable to school. School will consume much of your time and energy, and this point will cause tension. Spend time upfront to set up your life to support it.
• Before classes even start, develop as many friendships and alliances as quickly as possible from within your program. Use get-togethers, class time, and projects to make friends. Don’t piss people off. In a cohort program, this is quadruply true.
• Get to know the professors out of class. Stop by office hours, send emails, talk about class and the readings and assignments. It was amazing to see the degree of understanding of classmates that did this versus those who didn’t. Personally, I did not do this, except to a minimal degree, but I wish in hindsight that I did. In addition to learning the material better, you’ll learn that professors are just regular people. Ok, maybe not normal, but they’re worth knowing. They can be good friends and contacts. Business professors, in particular, probably have many valuable contacts for you.
• Connect everything you learn together. Each class is a silo, but the material and concepts can all be inter-related. It makes it much more interesting. The professors probably won’t do this for you.
• Connect everything in the program with your work. There are connections between the reading you just read and your company. Can you apply it, even theoretically? Practical application is a bonus (maybe even a monetary bonus…)
• Keep your eye on the prize, and keep multiple goals in mind too. There are many reasons to go through a grad program, especially a business one. Maybe your goal is be a CIO, get a raise, achieve more personal development, become better at your position, get into management, or simply to get a master’s degree. It’s important to have more than one goal, I think. And keep it in mind the whole time. And share your vision, especially with your spouse, friends, and family. They need the encouragement too.
• Simplify your life dramatically before the program. If your life is full tilt right now, and you’ve got programs, clubs, community service, church groups, etc., you’ll be in for a rude awakening. Put everything you can on hold for the duration of the program.
• Make sure everyone understands your priorities for the duration of the program too. Everyone who is a stakeholder in your life (boss, spouse, kids, family, friends, groups you’re in, etc) need to know, so they know why you’ll be saying no a lot more.

General lessons I think I learned:

• Business is about profit, and everything we do at work needs to be about that somehow. I know, this is obvious, but we seem to forget this, especially in IT.
• One of the biggest challenges facing IT today is to be seen as a profit or investment center rather than a cost center.
• IT can enable competitive advantage when it’s combined with an aligned strategy and something that cannot be replicated with technology, like customer base, brand loyalty, intellectual property, or strategic partnerships.
• Big areas where advantage can be gained, but with difficulty, are business intelligence, business process engineering, balanced scorecards, knowledge management, social networking, process-driven innovation, and inter-enterprise supply chain integration.

The value I see from the program - stuff I gained:

• The degree itself (duh.)
• Financial analysis introduction
• Strategic thinking
• Valuation tools - (Porter’s five forces, Ansoff’s matrix, SWOT, ROI, NPV, real options)
• Business thinking & perspective
• Leadership thinking
• Data normalization concepts and practice
• Learning more about what a DBA does
• MDM concepts
• Data quality mindset
• ER design process
• Value of data to business
• Data in business terms
• Infosec policy making
• The Cobit framework
• Top-down information security mindset
• Learning what an infosec officer does
• Value of business intelligence
• Methods and tools of BI
• BI architecture
• Opened up the possibility of becoming a BI engineer/analyst/architect
• What Scorecards are, why they’re neat, and strategies for successful implementation
• Process engineering mindset
• Tools for understanding and redesigning processes
• Concepts, distinctions, considerations, and tools of enterprise application integration (EAI)
• Concepts of various enterprise systems (SCM, ERP, CRM, etc)
• Strategies for leading enterprise system implementations
• Intro to PMI/PMBOK
• Preparation for PMI (PMP) tests
• Mindset of a project manager
• KM project possibilities
• Social network possibilities in organizations and entrepreneurship

Everyone is asking when I’m going to get my doctorate. Let me be clear on this: never. I don’t need it, the payoff isn’t there, and I value my family too much to go through this again. One year was Ok, but no more. It was a good year, and I truly value it. I’ve gained more than I thought I would. Now, the challenge will be to apply the knowledge to my job and the degree to my income earning potential…

Entry Filed under: Information Technology, Personal