Thoughts on Business and Management (before 2011)

obviously written before retirement as I wasn't attending meetings any more.
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I really shouldn't be allowed time to think.

On my way to the meeting today I was questioning in my mind whether we were a Business School or a Management School, forgetting of course that we are the Management group in The Business School.

I contemplated what each was: What is Business?/What is management?, and  came to the conclusion that in order to do management you needed something to manage, - a Business.

Then what does a Business do? It supplies something, whether it be a product, a service, a process, or a skill. (and other things?)

It needs to:

- Create  the product or service

- Market it

- Supply it to customers

- do it legally. And legislation is always changing.

Each type of these requires management, and the forms(?) of management may vary.  The functions of management that are required, based on the specialities available in the Business School, and thoughts that came out of the meeting today, are:

Bean counters (  Accounting and Finance) {- already a group}

Legal people   (Law) {-already a group}

- Strategy

- HRM

- Direction of the business (day-to-day management/decision making)

- Production management ( Not taught in the Business School)

- Project Management

- Data Management?

- Marketing

- Disaster Management ( Hopefully pre-emptive)

- ??

And all of these require, in different forms and amounts BI (business Intelligence) which comes out of or is parallel to KM (Knowledge Management), which comes out of Information Systems.  ( Is this where data management is?)

Therefore, as Dean Brady said, IS should be embedded in every aspect of the teaching in the Business School.

At one point my differentiator between the BS and DEC was that in DEC they were taught the in-depth stuff of Networking and Communications (and Software) so that they could design the next generations of the stuff, whereas in the Business School students were taught how to use it and put it together in order to optimize its use in the Business World, and overcome 'the productivity paradox' (Goldman 2003). Nowadays I think that this has changed. The networks are there in the Business and techies exist to look after them. We must concentrate more on the 'Information' in IS, and the optimization of that.