Research Reinforced By Jeanne Spreier SOM's five research centers cover many topics but share the same mission: to seek and apply the newest, the brightest, the best business ideas-on campus and off Despite understated names and placid demeanors, The School of Management's research centers fit the category of inventive impresarios. Capitalizing on faculty talent and boldly putting forth professors' best new ideas, the centers reach beyond university walls, explore beyond conventional boundaries. Their quest? The School of Management (SOM) centers seek business problems to solve off campus and dynamic new ideas to implement on campus. Research is both a means and an end, according to SOM Dean Hasan Pirkul. He sees the centers - these incubators for improvement - as "organizational entities to bring faculty from different areas together on one subject. You put them together because you want to foster research and to create programs - academic degree programs or short-course programs." Altogether, The School of Management has five research centers. The oldest is the Center for International Accounting Development, which has been a change agent for decades. One of the newest is the Center for Practice and Research in Software Management, which studies such high-tech-age questions as the role of software in creating competitive advantage. "Every center, if it's functioning properly, should have major input from industry," Dean Pirkul says. "People from industry will be advising what to study. Centers are excellent vehicles for bringing industries into the University." Business schools around the nation have centers addressing various topics, sometimes the same issues being studied at UTD. "While centers are a common business school phenomenon, it's the level of activities that distinguish them," Dean Pirkul says, noting that the work of SOM's centers in marketing and international accounting development have garnered long- standing recognition for their contributions. While these two have earned worldwide acclaim by focusing their attention on one topic, other SOM centers cut across disciplines, drawing in talent and ideas from disparate sources while focusing on a common topic from multiple perspectives. This is especially true of the Center for Information Technology Management, which helps entrepreneurs develop new ideas into viable business plans. SOM centers typically offer various learning opportunities both on campus and off campus. The Morris Hite Center for Product Development and Marketing Science, for instance, involves advanced-degree students in its basic research activities. The knowledge garnered is brought back to the classroom as well as to industry. The Center for International Accounting Development, by contrast, is known worldwide for its monthlong seminar, held annually in Richardson, for accountants in the oil and gas business. Participants attend from around the globe, and alumni now exceed twelve hundred. Last year saw the launch of the Accounting Center for Excellence, which will research accounting issues - such as how information is generated, aggregated, reported, and interpreted in managing operations - with a post-Enron, forward-looking vision. The School's centers benefit its students in many ways, Dean Pirkul says. The centers increase UTD's profile by underwriting research, sponsoring forums, and hosting short-courses, all activities that indirectly help a UTD graduate. And for those centers that do assist in corporate projects, the benefits are tangible. "If the center does outreach, if the center does projects, students participate in these projects," the dean says. "They get valuable experience. They learn what real problems are out there and how to solve them." These pages contain profiles of The School of Management's five centers. Fusion Laboratory: The Center for Information Technology and Management Dr. Michael Savoie mixes research and real-world business at this SOM testing ground By Jeanne Spreier With acute awareness of students' needs for hands-on experience and an astute understanding that small and mid-size businesses need a place to fuse academic research with real-world applications, Dr. Michael Savoie oversees the UTD Center for Information Technology and Management (CITM). He knows each project the center undertakes - and there are many. He knows the skill sets, as he calls them, of each master's level student who works on projects - there may be fifty students or more each semester. He knows the equipment - hardware and software. And he knows the professionals - the fifteen faculty-in-residence who work through the center on research projects and the four executives-in-residence, who maintain full-time commitments in industry in addition to their volunteer work at the center. CITM serves as an umbrella over several organizations within the center, including the E-Business Institute, the Entrepreneurship Institute, the Intellectual Property Institute, and the Institute for Privately Held, Employee-Owned Companies. Each addresses aspects of managing a company and the technology it uses to stay competitive. For instance, at the Entrepreneurship Institute, for the nominal charge of a thousand dollars, an aspiring business owner can get help through the business incubator program. The entrepreneur brings an idea to students who help develop business, marketing, and technology plans. Dr. Savoie reviews those plans and helps company executives develop presentations and speeches. Then there's the "test bed" - twenty personal computers, networked into a software-testing facility that allows CITM partners and sponsors trial runs of new and emerging technology on work processes and organizational structure. These computers get networked, torn down, realigned, and reconfigured - if it can be conceived of, it can be done. Companies that are center members can send their information technology (IT) people to the test bed to run software before they install it on their own system to find out how their networks will respond. "If they break something or ruin something, that's OK," Dr. Savoie says. "That's what the test bed is for." While only master's level students now work on center projects, Dr. Savoie plans to get undergraduate students involved. It's the younger, undergraduate attitude of bold and daring inquisitiveness that he's after. He's also after curious and dauntless sponsors. The CITM has varying levels of corporate sponsorship - ranging from the twenty-five thousand- dollar Strategic Partner level to the five thousand-dollar Client level - based on the scope and difficulty of project they bring to the center. Detailed information on CITM sponsorship can be found at http://citm.utdallas.edu. The projects, meanwhile, meld research with real-time applications in a way that isn't possible in a classroom setting. Dr. Savoie says he personally approves all projects from outside businesses and agrees with their executives on what the scope of work will be before turning it over to student teams at the center. "We've never had enough resources to work on all the projects brought to us," Dr. Savoie says. The projects run from setting up billing systems to analyzing distance learning software. Student-led projects generally cost companies twenty-five hundred dollars. Larger projects are done either as part of an overall research track or on a fee-for-service basis negotiated before the project begins. The center also accepts a limited number of projects from nonprofit organizations at no charge. There's more. Seminars, luncheons, newsletters, and research reports all get generated by CITM. The economic downturn hasn't slowed output, but it has affected the kind of work being done. "In 1999, almost everything we did was related to e-business," Dr. Savoie says. "Last year, nothing was a true dot.com, but all of it was tech-related. . . . While the business-to- consumer [e-commerce side] has slowed dramatically, the business-to- business side is growing." Dr. Savoie sees the CITM as a liaison between businesses and the University, noting he started a similar center as a nonprofit organization about five years ago while a professor at the University of Dallas. His goal for this UTD center, he says, is that the University not only be seen as a valuable and contributing organization in the community-but that it is. All this isn't to lose sight of the center's purpose. "If you are pursuing an MBA, you're looking for practical experience," Dr. Savoie says. Universities teach the theory of how to run a business. The Center for Information Technology and Management is bringing in the practical experience part of the equation, one project at a time. A Study of Core Competence: The Center for Practice and Research in Software Management New center reviews software from both makers' and users' perspectives By Jeanne Spreier A simple ranking starkly reveals why Dr. Rajiv Banker, director of SOM's Accounting and Information Management Programs, and Dr. Indranil Bardhan, assistant professor of Accounting and Information Management, began addressing software issues in a holistic way. The Milken Institute's listing of Dallas as the second-largest concentration of telecommunications companies in the nation provided them a good indicator that there would be demand for a center that studies the best ways to manage software. "Most telecommunications companies' core competence is software," Dr. Banker says. The goal of SOM's Center for Practice and Research in Software Management (PRISM), which Dr. Banker and Dr. Bardhan set up last fall, is to help companies that develop, operate, and maintain software systems, regardless of size. Software issues affect virtually every company these days. As with SOM's other centers, this center serves as an umbrella, pulling together experts from disciplines inside and outside the School who can address challenges that arise in the management of software systems. To accomplish its goal, PRISM is concentrating on software products from the perspectives of companies that use these products as well as companies that make them. The center is studying the best ways for companies to manage the life cycle of the software they purchase along with developing financial evaluations of when such software needs to be replaced. Other center research assumes the point of view of software product makers, investigating questions of how such products are bundled together and how they are positioned competitively. Dr. Banker and Dr. Bardhan note that the PRISM Center is also launching several short professional development programs on software management issues and plans to hold symposiums that provide an open forum on these issues. A Worldwide View: The Center for International Accounting Development Dr. Adolf J.H. Enthoven brings accountants from around the globe to UTD and travels internationally to standardize accounting education By Jeanne Spreier The Center for International Accounting Development has been around longer than many of UTD's students have been alive. While the center's activities today don't resemble, except in mission, what they did twenty-five years ago, they still make a major impact in the oil and gas business and international accounting world. In the mid-1970s, Dr. Adolf J.H. Enthoven was working with the World Bank, which recognized "a tremendous need in Third World countries for oil and gas management," he recalls. Later in the same decade when he agreed to come to UTD to set up the accounting department, one of his conditions was that he be allowed to establish a center to answer that need. UTD agreed and provided fifteen thousand dollars as seed money. Now self-sustaining, and in fact turning some money back to the School, the Center for International Accounting Development has hosted more than twelve hundred oil and gas managers from around the globe at its annual one-month conference in Richardson. Participants get training in accounting, financial management, and other aspects of the energy business. Worldwide interest in attending the seminar hasn't changed over the years, but the topics have. These days, classes deal with market development, globalization, and other issues that weren't topical a quarter century ago. Dr. Enthoven plans to expand the program this fall, offering an intensive one-week program for senior oil and gas financial executives. And he anticipates that, as companies cut back on travel and executives cut back on the amount of time they are willing to spend away from their operations, the center will be developing additional one-week programs to address international accounting issues. Dr. Enthoven teaches a graduate level comparative international accounting class - this semester he has thirty students - where he shares issues he has discussed at the center. He also teaches comparative international accounting to Executive MBA students. In a nutshell, the accounting world, despite globalization of businesses, lacks an internationally recognized standard for accounting education, he says. The result is that while U.S. accountants are driven by one set of rules - typically investor protection - accountants in other countries are keyed to other issues. Dr. Enthoven would like to see accounting education worldwide achieve a level of parity. To that end, he travels throughout the year. His trips are usually to small, emerging nations, lately Central Asian countries. "The center gives focus to these works," Dr. Enthoven says. It also gives UTD an international face. Alumni from the oil and gas monthlong seminar live in more than fifty countries. "These transition countries need [accounting education standards]. I don't need to go to France or Germany," he says. "But in my opinion, [these emerging countries are] where the excitement is. These are the countries that need it." Marketing Savvy: The Morris Hite Center for Product Development and Marketing Science Dr. Frank Bass refines his famous marketing model in a venue that gives students the chance to do basic research By Jeanne Spreier Marketing, as Dr. Frank Bass will eagerly share, is a science driven by statistical analysis, sophisticated modeling, and - like every other discipline at The School of Management - research, research, research. The Morris Hite Center for Product Development and Marketing Science was established in 1984. Two years earlier, Dr. Bass had arrived at UTD and met Morris Hite, then president and CEO of Tracy-Locke, Dallas' legendary advertising and marketing firm. "Every time there was a civic project in Dallas, he was the marketing force behind that project," Dr. Bass recalls. Mr. Hite was involved in other projects, as well. He had lobbied the state legislature to establish The University of Texas at Dallas and had been a driving force behind marketing the 1967 bond issue that financed construction of what would eventually become Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport. "I asked him if he would help us raise funds for a research center in marketing science," Dr. Bass recalls. Mr. Hite made a commitment, but before he could launch the project, he was killed in an auto accident in 1983. "His friends took it upon themselves to raise money for the center in his memory," Dr. Bass says. They collected one million dollars for an endowment, ensuring the center's long-term financial stability. Dr. Bass, who came from Purdue University, where he oversaw doctoral students in marketing science, wanted to establish a similar program at UTD. The Morris Hite Center allowed him to do so, giving doctoral students an opportunity and a venue to do not only applied research but also basic research in marketing. It is a mission that has remained constant over the center's eighteen years. While the center primarily involves doctoral students and some master's students, Dr. Bass says all students ultimately benefit from research conducted there. "Knowledge doesn't come from teachers. It comes from research," he says. "These research products create the knowledge flow that ultimately ends up in textbooks." Much of the center's research focuses on the Bass Model, which Dr. Bass himself created in the late 1960s as he studied sales of then-new color televisions. In 1966, using differential equations, Dr. Bass decided that color TV sales would plateau in 1968. His research and opinions were roundly discounted but ultimately proved to be on-target. The Bass Model has been extended and generalized over the years. Now, not only does it permit forecasting of how a single generation of high- technology products will be dispersed, it also allows for the forecasting of sales of multiple generations of technology. Beyond that, the model provides the basis for evaluating the policy alternatives for marketing strategies. Recently, Dr. Bass has made forecasts about satellite television, third- generation wireless phones - those that might be called Internet phones - and personal computers. In recent years, the Morris Hite Center has supported several research projects that involve theoretical extensions and applications of the Bass Model to technological innovations. One project was a case history study of the application of the Bass Model in forecasting the subscriptions of DIRECTV, a satellite television company, prior to the launch of the product in 1994. Actual subscriptions were tracked and compared with forecast subscriptions for each year through 1999. The center also undertook a forecast of the growth of the third generation of cell phones; it did a theoretical study of the response to different prices using the Generalized Bass Model. And in one project, center researchers did a model and analysis of nine generations of personal computers beginning with kits in 1975 and extending through the Internet in the late 1990s. "There are some other marketing centers, not many though," Dr. Bass says. "And the other ones are more concerned with applied research, not basic research." This goes back nearly two decades to the friends of Morris Hite, who set up the endowment that funds the center. Because of it, Dr. Bass says, the center is free to pursue research that isn't necessarily client - and thus fee - driven. And that research, ultimately, has worldwide impact. "It brings an international reputation to the University," Dr. Bass says. Going with the Flow: The Accounting Center for Excellence Center's programs keeping financial officers up to speed on information technology By Jeanne Spreier "Accounting practice requires a good understanding of information technology, especially as related to information flow," says Dr. Rajiv Banker, director of SOM's Accounting and Information Management Programs. Dr. Banker leads the recently established UTD Accounting Center for Excellence (ACE), which sponsors research and curriculum-development projects that address how information is generated, aggregated, reported, and interpreted in management operations. Drawing on the expertise of UTD faculty, the Accounting Center for Excellence offers short programs to mid- and upper-level corporate financial officers. The programs delve into such topics as financial analysis and strategic cost management. Dr. Banker says the center also offers symposiums that "emphasize the interface between academics and industry." Dr. Banker leads ACE as well as co-directing the School's Center for Practice and Research in Software Management (PRISM) (see A Study of Core Competence on page 22). For both centers, he hopes to draw on corporate financial support. "The University sees the business school as one of the major gateways to the industry around us," Dr. Banker says. "These centers provide a link [to those businesses]. This allows companies to get into the University and see us, to see our programs firsthand." Both ACE and PRISM will receive funding through private research grants and projects, corporate support, and in-kind support from the University. Dr. Banker says doctoral students will be involved in research and projects brought to the center, bringing real-life experience to some of the School's highest-level students.