Applied IT vs. Computer Science/Technology

I wonder if one of the root causes of the ever widening gap between the Business and IT are the business schools?

During another vendor demo, two of the presentations specifically covered business processes with workflow definitions along with business rules. Mid-way during the presentation, one of the audience asked, "These tools are typically used by someone from IT, right?"

Without missing a beat, the vendor said, "No, this should be really familiar to anyone who has used Visio to diagram a workflow and the rule definer should be very familiar to anyone who has used Excel macros." Needless to say, that went over like a led zeppelin and the room fell silent. "Don't you have business analysts," asked the vendor? "They are usually the people who do this but, at most of our deployments, the end-users in the business write and test their own rules. Sometimes, they might have the help of a very junior IT person if the logic is particularly complex or chained, though."

Again, more awkward silence. I interjected with, "We actually don't have a job classification of business analyst here but, these responsibilities would probably fall into the domain of a program manager or an operations analyst," whereupon all of the program managers glared at me. As an aside, most of the program managers work in IT!

Of course, my knee-jerk reaction (which I kept to myself!) was the thought of me having to do my job and part of the businesses' job, too! Taking a mental step back, I really wonder if this is fair? I've worked in many different environments and to a large degree, the one tool almost everyone on the business side can use far more efficiently than I can is Excel. I've seen some pretty amazing and impressive spreadsheet macros in my career. However, perhaps the business-people who are capable of these feats of spreadsheet scripting are just as rare in the business as it is to find a good programmer in an off-shore outsourcing company?

In this age of self-service, why aren't business schools teaching their students to exploit common, desktop technology? Not just use, but really exploit and actually design curriculums to require these tools to be used at progressively complex levels. Instead of making them take a programming course, why not focus on some applied technology courses starting in their freshman year where they need to build some fairly complicated financial models involving multiple cases and decisions? The last time I looked at a B-School curriculum (about 2 years ago), this kind of coursework didn't appear in the calendar until until 3rd or 4th year. Back in the paleolithic age, when I was in school, this level of applied technology was usually relegated to MBA students!

Getting back to the demonstration, I had the impression that most of the spreadsheet users in the room were really skilled with the layout tools in a spreadsheet, maybe even knew how to add columns and do some basic cell manipulations but otherwise, were pretty much dead in the water. Am I off-base? I'm certainly not trying to shift the blame, by any means; I'm just as disappointed at the miserable job the majority of IT has done with respect to delivering value to the business (current employer not excepted) but, I'm sure there is a bit of blame to share.