Fatemeh "Mariam" Zahedi loves research projects. That much is evident upon entering her office in the School of Business on the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee campus. Columns of paperwork are neatly stacked on Zahedi’s desk, file cabinets and any other level surface surrounding her computer. Some of the stacks appear taller than Zahedi herself.
"I’m heavily involved in research," Zahedi said, pointing to the paper columns around her. "I have several projects that are studying information technology and small business. One is a very large project that we started a few years ago and is ongoing of a nationwide survey of the benefits of the Internet on small business."
Zahedi is one of three Wisconsin Distinguished Professors — one of the highest honors a professor in the University of Wisconsin system can earn based on research — who hails from the management information systems field within the school of business. In total, the university system has 25 distinguished professors; MIS professors Zahedi, Hemant Jain and William (Dave) Haseman fill UWM’s entire quota.
All three of these professors, as well as the school of business, have served the outside community long before Chancellor Nancy Zimpher began promoting the school’s Milwaukee Idea. The Milwaukee Idea promotes collaboration between the university and community for the benefit of southeastern Wisconsin.
"We’ve always believed in partnerships with the business community," says interim dean V. Kanti Prasad. "It [the Milwaukee Idea] gave us more confidence because she’s [Zimpher] out there giving more credence to what we are doing. She’s excellent in raising the awareness of the community of our capabilities. … In a way, she opens the door of opportunity for us."
The School of Business has approximately 4,000 students. Of those, about 800 are in graduate programs ranging from executive MBAs to doctoral candidates. UWM and UW-Madison are the only two business schools that offer doctoral programs within the UW system. Having doctoral students is an advantage for UWM, according to Prasad.
"What it does is it puts us in a different kind of niche," Prasad said. "The type of faculty that we look for and the type of strengths they bring gives us a good advantage for our students. We have a Ph.D. program in many areas within the business school, but as far as the school is concerned, we are attracting people that are at the cutting edge of knowledge and research in their fields. So they can bridge, they can link the research and the practice much better as a result of that. They can bring the cutting edge into the classroom and give the students that edge. And they have to be constantly on top of what’s going on in their field. I think that gives our program and our students a good, solid advantage."
Perhaps the depth of the management information systems program can be attributed to the school’s foresight. UWM’s MIS program is the largest academic area in terms of students in its master’s program and second largest in undergraduates, and the number of faculty members within the school is rising, according to Haseman.
"We stayed with the information technology revolution; it wasn’t a fad with us," Prasad said. "We were there from the beginning. I can’t say that of everybody. Not all schools invested in this area, but we did."
Haseman is a self-described wearer of many hats. As the elder statesman of the MIS faculty, Haseman has seen the program grow in two major spurts in his 23 years. When he joined the staff, there were three or four faculty members; this fall, there will be 16, making it one of the largest MIS departments in the country in his estimation.
The growth in the department has enabled senior staff members to pursue areas of interest to them. In Haseman’s case, it’s emerging technologies and Internet development tools, fields that, by definition, force him to remain current.
"Part of the issue is that IT requires a tremendous amount of retooling," Haseman says. "… And certainly, the students are going to want the current state-of-the-art so it’s not something that we can say, ‘Oh, we can wait a year to learn it.’"
Center for Technology Innovation
Haseman is also the director of the Center for Technology Innovation (CTI), an organization made up of mostly CIOs of companies from around the Milwaukee area. One of the center’s objectives is to act as a link between UWM, the UW system and Wisconsin businesses. It also provides outreach training, research projects and actively seeks partnerships with industry representatives. Many of the area’s leading companies are members of CTI, including Northwestern Mutual, Johnson Controls, Kohl’s Department Stores, MGIC, GE Medical Systems, Metavante, and Briggs & Stratton.
The CTI runs seminars that are designed not only to keep people in the industry up to date, but also are attended by UWM’s faculty members. It also incorporates other things like practicums in which teams of master’s degree students in their last semester are placed with companies in the area and work on an MIS project for those companies.
The CTI, in partnership with the Northwest Side Community Development Center, recently received a $727,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Commerce to research how Internet technology can be used to help small and minority-owned, inner-city Milwaukee businesses.
"Small businesses don’t have that kind of technology or resources or knowledge to use the Web to solicit new business, to develop business," interim dean Prasad said of the businesses that will be helped by the grant.
But small business owners are more educated in the use of the Internet than a few years ago, according to Zahedi, who volunteers teaching a workshop on the Internet for Wisconsin Women’s Business Initiative Corporation (WWBIC).
"I have done it for the last three years, and I started it with basic Internet and in the middle of the first workshop I realized that they needed more," Zahedi recalled. "It’s wonderful because people are coming in with ideas and questions, and, through the years, the audience has become more sophisticated."
Web study
Zahedi suspects that there may be a digital divide separating companies into those that are technologically savvy and those that are not.
"And for those that are not, they may be left behind," she said. "Although the dot-com debacle has reduced the visibility [of the Internet], the fact of the matter is, the Internet is here to stay, and it is going to change the way we live — it has changed the way we live — and the type of market, the sophistication of the market and the type of instant gratification that we get."
Zahedi, along with three other UWM professors and one industry representative, recently completed a study on small businesses and the use of the Internet. The study must be subjected to more reviews before it’s officially published, but the group has made its findings available on a Web site at www.sba.uwm.edu/ESmallBus.
The purpose of the study was to answer the question: Does the Internet help small businesses? Most people expect the answer to be yes, and there was plenty of anecdotal evidence, but no scientific study had been done on the topic, according to Zahedi.
What the researchers found was that while the Internet/Web hasn’t had a major impact on all types of small businesses, it is apparent that those companies are trying to find ways to use the technology. They also found that while the companies aren’t hesitant to use the Internet/Web, many have reported little to no benefit from its use (although as technologies become more pervasive, small businesses will eventually be able to use the Internet/Web to their advantage).
The Internet/Web study coincidentally affirms that small businesses need help in using technology effectively, something the grant given to CTI and The Northwest Side Community Development Center hopes to remedy.
There were more surprising results as well. For instance, 77% of the CEOs of small businesses have a bachelor’s degree or higher; only 9% of CEOs have high school degrees.
"I sort of had this romantic vision of a small business owner as saying, ‘OK, I have this fantastic idea, I’m a high school student, but I’ll just go into business,’" Zahedi said.
The study also indicated that such things as improving the company’s image, a need to reduce costs, a need to improve customer response time or increasing response time to suppliers’ requirements largely drove committing resources to the Internet/Web. In general, respondents indicated a minor reason for committing resources to the Internet/Web was to conduct business with trading partners or international partners.
Another revelation of the study: Almost 50% of the companies that committed resources to the Internet/Web reported extensive use of state-of-the-art equipment and technology and that they introduced new methods, techniques and processes on a frequent basis. That finding makes sense when talking to local business owners who say they have advantages over larger competitors because they can change gears faster and they can do that with efficiencies brought about by the use of technology.
The researchers talked to business owners in the Milwaukee area to see if the survey, which was administered nationally to 376 small businesses, was understandable. Zahedi got a sense of the magnitude a decision like committing resources to the Internet was for small business owners in those talks.
"They were very hands-on," Zahedi said of Milwaukee business owners. "So you may think that in large businesses, like Enron, you can really waste all this money on frivolous things, but small business owners don’t have that money, or they don’t have much so they — in my mind — are very cautious in investing in technology.
"… The question that they raised when I was talking with them was if I do invest, how is it beneficial, how much further should I go?" Zahedi said. "Because really when you look at technology, if you don’t have the expertise and the expertise is expensive to get, it’s scary."
International flavor
Faculty research projects stretch beyond US borders as well. Jain is working with several consultants from the Indian-based Tata Consulting Services. Tata is Asia’s largest global software and services company and is working with Jain on component-based technologies, which could be a boon to Wisconsin-based companies.
Over the past 20 years, information systems were, for the most part, built on a customized basis, Jain explained. The problem with customized programs is that they are expensive and prone to error — at least in the initial phases. But with the development of the Internet and what has happened over the last five years with interactive programs — like one program that can work on any kind of hardware — it is now becoming feasible to develop software systems very similar to the way hardware is developed, component by component. That’s the basic objective of the partnership with Tata that Jain is working on, which includes developing tools and techniques that allow different companies to design pieces of a larger software package and then developing a system to put those pieces together.
"What that’s expected to do in the next five or seven years is to change the development of systems in a very big way, from customized systems to companies that can range from small to large developing these small pieces at a time similar to the auto industry where you have smaller companies building the different pieces of the car and then the auto maker assembles them together," Jain said. "It’s the same idea if you have a large software company — you may have a number of smaller companies developing pieces for that software company."
Staying close to home
One of the most encouraging aspects of the MIS program at UWM is that the students tend to stay in town, so the "brain drain" widely talked about by politicians and business leaders alike isn’t happening with UWM grads. According to Prasad, nearly 90% of all business graduates stay in Wisconsin.
"A very large percentage of our students are in the state, and that’s after 15-17 years," Jain said. "And at this point, a lot of our graduates are reaching the highest levels of IT in those companies."
The future of UWM’s MIS program looks bright. With a relatively new (1995) facility, state-of-the-art computer labs, increasing enrollment and a faculty that’s starting to get national and international recognition, the MIS program is taking the Milwaukee Idea to the cutting edge on a global level.
May 24, 2002 Small Business Times, Milwaukee
