"IT Rep!"

One responsibility I've undertaken at INSEAD is to become IT Rep for my section. It certainly takes up a lot of my scarce, scarce time, so let me illustrate:

Each class intake of 500 students is divided into about 7 sections of around 70-75 students. Fontainebleau campus has 4 such sections. At the beginning of the curriculum, the sections' students elect representatives - Academic reps to interact with the professors, Career reps to interact with Career services and keep students apprised of upcoming recruiting events, Social reps to organize parties, and an IT rep to spearhead mitigating IT and facilities issues the students face. I'll preface the following by repeating the classic IT person's lament, that when systems are working, little credit is given, but when things go wrong, much credit is taken.

Many components come together to give a school its reputation. From the point of view of its students, INSEAD's greatest strength is its faculty, who are truly superior. There are long term faculty, and temporary visiting professors. Both are exceedingly strong. INSEAD's next strength is it's career services. Career services work efficiently and tirelessly to get consultancies, banks, and industry to come onto campus for recruiting. The largest and top-tier consulting firms maintain consultant-caliber staff exclusively for recruitment from *this* school. (What is a consultant? You're forgiven if you're as unfamiliar as I was before the beginning of term, but you'd be better served by your own research into this than my explanation). Then, after school culture, the remaining component that drives a school’s student experience, and by extension it’s reputation, is the quality of its facilities and IT (Information Technology) systems. These include all of the PC’s on campus, the campus local area network, the campus connection to the outside world, PC virus security, e-mail services, and about 20 other items all of which, like parts of an automobile, require regular attention and maintenance.

Unfortunately, it is at this point that the school falls far short of the mark – printers fail, the network goes down, email (e.g. from recruiters) stops receiving after filling an unbelievably low 100MB quota, and much, much, more.

One thing I recognized early on starting the MBA program was that the many and disparate IT problems the campus faced were organizational in nature, not technical. For example, follow this train of thought: “Why is email down? Because they haven’t upgraded to a new mail server version. Why not? Because there are IT contractor issues. Why? Because they don’t have enough budget to properly incentivize the contractor or hire a superior one. Why not get quality in-house IT specialists? Because if you inadvertently hire the wrong ones in-house, they are too expensive to fire because of severance pay laws here in France. Why hasn’t someone figured whatever issues, stopgaps, drivers, and incentives exist or are necessary to make the organization robust? Because management, at some level, is not yet up to task.

I actually sought the challenge of figuring out what process distills human and human-created issues into tangible real-world physical effects. Looking from this point of view, you begin to understand that airplanes don’t fly because of differences in air pressure across a wing, they fly because Boeing/Airbus and the airlines will them to fly with no tolerance for failure.

To become a ‘rep’ , one runs for the position in an informal election. So I ran unopposed, for the rep position because I knew there were problems that needed to be solved, and I figured I was as reasonable a choice as the next person to solve them, and do a favor for my class in the process. My campaign platform noted all the problems we face and getting responsiveness from the IT department + facilities. There were three other IT reps, and they made clear early on that they didn’t share the same level of enthusiasm as I did for “getting things done”.

But over time, the class perceived my role as being Mr. Fix-It, instead of the role I intended: someone to take complaint surveys and push for organization change while learning more about how people and organizations work in the process. While I found the undesired fix-it view disheartening, it also pushed me to find the people throughout INSEAD responsible for how things work around here. Now I can solve most major things that go wrong in a technology-enabled classroom with a phone call or polite text message in French, and the relationships I have with the staff give me a peek into what isn’t working on an organizational level. By contrast, I’ve heard that the other reps experience great frustration because they didn’t know where to start when a problem struck and the pressure from the class built to do something about it – one rep even quit because he couldn’t handle the pressure.

It was about halfway through the first 10-week period of school that the senior class’s rep got on board my campaign and we managed to identify exactly who in the IT department it was we were supposed to meet with in order to start getting things done. Org chart? No way; doesn’t exist even if people weren’t too fearful of their jobs to give us one. What about tips from previous years’ reps? Well although these kinds of efforts have been taken up before, there’s very little continuity from intake to intake in the one-year MBA. Along with so many student clubs, like industry and affinity clubs, on campus, everything gets built from scratch every 6-months to a year. This phenomenon which in part represents the efficiency of the INSEAD curriculum, also represents a lack of continuity, deteriorating the effectiveness of the clubs (and the reps) – the contacts they make, and the cultures they create. For efforts expecting only long-term results, you have to pursue them knowing you and those around you won’t get to benefit from them since they’ll graduate in less than a year. Instead you operate on the knowledge that you’re helping the next class, and that has to be enough even though you know the next class will never tangibly realize what you did to make their experience better, or be able to thank you for it. In turn, we know that we are benefiting from earlier classes of students in perhaps intangible ways.

Eventually we managed to get weekly meetings in place that people actually attend. And after all of our haranguing, the IT Department is starting to “get it”. We’re seeing some specific improvements we’ve pushed for, like replacing lots of the printers with new ones, making some Windows7 support software available, and more excessively mundane issues that 1) drive people nuts when they encounter them and 2) don’t need mentioning here for their sheer obscurity. I have another meeting with the Dean of the school coming up. And after newer updates to my section and new surveys I’ve taken from them on their complaints, now I have enough political capital to get org charts and start asking about incentive schemes without feeling like I’m trodding on sensitive territory.

We at INSEAD like to compare ourselves among the top and penultimate tiers of American business schools. These include (not exclusively) Harvard, Columbia, Wharton, Stanford, Sloan, and Kellogg, Fuqua, Haas. If we expect to truly hold our own, IT+facilities absolutely have to be improved.

More than any student on this campus I am acutely aware of IT systems near term future. In light of that, to future MBA's intending to spend time on the Fontainebleau campus, I have to make the following recommendations: 1) Bring and rely on your own laptop - for example, an Asus mediabook is ideal – reliable, very portable + good size screen, long battery life. 2) Foot the bill for a Blackberry, it provides a lot of communications robustness independent of INSEAD systems. You'll be on a contract with Orange that you can, with some trouble, get out of if/when you switch campuses.

Having covered IT more than anyone should ever have been interested, look for discussion of Entrepreneurship next post, and Social life in a following one.