From cost center to thought center

In some industries, the need for business as well as tech skills is being driven by a shift in the traditional role of technology -- from the infrastructure that supports a company’s operations into a service the company can sell.

“Most of the products financial service companies create and sell are based on information systems,” Meyer says. “Our students feel limited if they don’t understand the marketing, market development, and sales processes behind the IT-enabled services their companies are making.”

Telecommunications is another industry where IT can become a revenue center. For example, several of Cingular Wireless’s offerings had their start in back office billing systems, says Cingular CIO Thaddeus Arroyo.

“We can’t activate or sell any service in the absence of a working IT system, so IT has to be a core competence of our service offerings,” Arroyo says. “We realized there were things we could do with our billing system to create a strategic advantage over our competitors, to give our customers more choices.”

Arroyo, who went back to Southern Methodist University to earn his MBA after several years in the tech trenches, says forward-thinking companies consider IT a “thought center” where new ideas and new revenue is generated. To succeed in such an environment, however, requires a different mindset than your typical software engineer.

“When I entered the tech market, people tended to build their careers moving down one path -- such as a programming language like Cobol --  or up the technology infrastructure stack. In today’s market, with sourcing that can come from anywhere, you need a skill set more oriented toward problem solving and business management,” Arroyo says.

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“Just because I got an MBA didn’t drive me to the next promotion level,” Arroyo adds. “But it helped me develop a set of skills early enough in my career to get a bump and get to positions faster than my peers.”

Think globally, enroll locally

For Alecia Hoobling, a firmware engineer at Hewlett-Packard, a high-tech MBA program represents insurance against the migration of tech jobs offshore.

“At the time of my decision [to go back to school], there was a lot of fear, uncertainty, and doubt about offshore outsourcing and if that would replace U.S. engineers,” says Hoobling, who is currently a student at Walden’s online program. “I thought an MBA would make me more marketable in other industries not turning as rapidly toward offshore outsourcing.”

A 2005 survey by the Society of Information Management found top IT managers much more likely to outsource technical functions such as telecommunications. Eight of the 10 skills managers deemed “critical” for keeping in-house were business or project management skills such as business process design, project planning, and change management.