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On Friday, November 7, Michael Krauss visited Michigan and shared some great insight into the exciting telecom industry. Michael is a principal of Omnitech Consulting Group in Chicago, and he was formerly Director of Marketing at Andersen Consulting. As a regular visitor here--thanks to the Hi-Tech / Telecom Club--he is a definite favorite among students.
Michael organized his presentation around "who's hot and who's not in the industry". The bottom line:
Hot: Qwest and Worldcom
Warm: Bell Atlantic, Sprint, BellSouth, SBC and Ameritech
Not So Hot: MCI, GTE, US West, and AT&T.
Michael tried to give students a feel of each company by looking at the personality of the CEO, the advertisements, and the stock prices. This was well received, for everyone got to check out some cool commercials, and the mood in the Wolverine Room was particularly lively. And, most importantly, Michael tried to tell everyone "what would be important to me if I was getting a job in the industry."
Here's the inside scoop of his talk:
Qwest Communications
Stock: 22 to 68 in the last 6 months!
Highlights: "Used the railroads right-of-way from Southern Pacific to lay fiber optics without any digging. Sound familiar? Yeah, WilTel did the same, who are now a part of WorldCom. In any case, Qwest designed its fiber network to be the highest capacity digital infrastructure in the world. Their strategy is that they're gonna take on the big companies and offer service at a dime a minute."
CEO Personality: "Joe Nacchio was one of the various contenders for Bob Allen's throne at AT&T, but joined Qwest with some big backing, and is now a much wealthier person. Very charismatic, really knows the business."
Job Suggestion: "My answer is its too late. You wanna be there before the IPO. Are you a risk taker? É You gotta find the next big one."
WorldCom
Stock: 24 to 35 in the last year.
Highlights: "Anyone know Bernie Ebbers? His sailboat is named ÔAcquisition'. 50 mergers in the last year. He started LDDS, then gets together with WilTel, MFS, and UUNet--and now they bid for MCI! They were the 8th largest long distance carrier, and now they're gonna take over the giant. ÉWe think they'll win if the stock holds up. A $100 investment in WorldCom in '89 was worth $2214 by the end of '96, compared with $162 for AT&T investors."
CEO Personality: "This gym teacher / CEO doesn't have a cell phone. He does not communicate by e-mail. Spends his days walking around, coaching, talking, wearing his blue jeans and cowboy boots. If your personality meets this, then WorldCom is the place you wanna go."
Job Suggestion: "The train's already left the station. If you're really entrepreneurial, you wanna find the next set of WorldComs and Qwests."
Bell Atlantic
Stock: 60 to 81 in the last year.
Highlights: "A nice operating company. They've got a healthy stock return, and they bought Nynex.--The reason for this consolidation is that local telephony is very lucrative. Look at how hard it is for AT&T and MCI to break into the local markets, but Bell Atlantic is now there. They have their act together and are keeping up with technology."
CEO Personality: "Ray Smith, the "titan of telephony", has ample vision and conviction."
Job Suggestion: "Good place to go learn the business, especially if you're from the East Coast."
Sprint
Stock: 40 to 54 in the last year.
Highlights: "I'm just amazed at Sprint. They have a good, strong, disciplined corporate culture, but they're still savvy enough to have Murphy Brown represent them. ÉSprint's also gutsy. They invested heavily in PCS at a time when everyone was skeptical about it. Marketing savvy, good technology, they're on the Internet; Sprint has what it takes in this hypercompetitive marketÉ.But the question is, who's gonna buy Sprint now?"
CEO Personality: "Bill Esrey has done a solid job. But what will he do tomorrow? His Wall Street and AT&T experience should come in handy."
Job Suggestion: "Do you wanna go to KC? Be careful--KC's good for ribs, but what else? Sprint's a great place, but I'm not sure you will automatically get stock options; I think it depends on what position and in what department you join."
Bell South
Stock: 38 to 48 in the last year.
Highlights: "Nice company. Fine operating company but maybe too simple? Is the fatal flaw that they don't differentiate?"
CEO Personality: "Duane Ackerman best states it, "Keep it simple, stupid.'"
Job Suggestion: "If you have a spouse from the South or you wanna live in Atlanta, go there. If you wanna be a good manager and learn about operations, that's the place."
SBC Communications
Stock: 49 to 65 in the last year.
Highlights: "After swallowing PacTel, they are a real force. Gonna do well. Make it for a nickel and sell it for a dime. I mean, they're in a commodity business and they're treating it as a commodity. But the problem is, the technology wildcard is always out there; technology can differentiate the industry away from commodity status. That's where the fun is."
CEO Personality: "Old fashioned, stern father, native of Texas, tough minded."
Job Suggestion: "Go there if you wanna learn operations. Then again, if you really wanna learn operations, go work for Purdue chicken. I don't know that I'd wanna go into the technology business and be on the commodity side."
Ameritech
Stock: 54 to 66 in the last year.
Highlights: "They've surprisingly done a good job. Their strategy is a tad confusing, but not bad. Gotten big in the securities business. Big in worldwide growth. Good operations. But I still think they're worried about the old paradigm, where the chess board is 7 players and 3 carriers."
CEO Personality: "Dick Notebaert appears to be welding together a solid operating company in the same vein as BellSouth and SBC."
Job Suggestion: "Solid place to learn the business and become a manager."
MCI
Stock: 26 to 36 in the last year.
Highlights: "This one shocks me. If I would have thought five years ago that anyone would make it big, I would have thought MCI. But there are so many tigers in the company and they can't keep patient with one good strategy. And they lost the marketing mantle to Sprint. McGowan was on a mission from God to break up AT&T. Except now, the gym teacher is the titan to slay!"
CEO Personality: "The sudden death of McGowan in '92 created a leadership vacuum that Bert Roberts couldn't fill."
Job Suggestion: "Stay out of places where you're group is being acquired."
GTE
Stock: 40 to 43 in the last year.
Highlights: "When I think of GTE, I think of AirFones. The stock's holding up, but not appreciating much. The one advantage that GTE has is that they are in a lot of small counties, which is tough for all the other players to enter."
Job Suggestion: "If GTE wins the MCI war, then maybe I'd go there, cuz then you'd be on the acquirer side, not the acquiree side."
AT&T
Stock: 47 to 44 in the last year.
Highlights: "Great place. Will do just fine. One of the toughest things to do is to be the category leader at the lead. The analogy is IBM. But their biggest challenge, is, can they retain people? They've lost James Barksdale to Netscape, David Hunt to Universal, and many more. But they have good cutting edge technology and they are still the giant."
CEO Personality: "Michael Armstrong will be taking over in Bob Allen's place. Until he settles in, everything is still on hold."
Job Suggestion: "I'd be a little bit intimidated; but it would be a surprisingly attractive opportunity if you are tenacious and patient. But if you're looking for rapid wealth accumulation, go to Qwest!"
What do you think of M-track? We all have things that we love and hate about this system that increasingly rules our lives. While M-track is important to business students, the other subject that really interests University of Michigan Business School students is other business schools. In our constant efforts to rank ourselves against "the competition", what systems do other schools use for the business of business school?
Each top business school now has an intranet which resembles M-track. (An intranet is a secure Website on the Internet that is available to specific groups only.) For example, Northwestern's intranet is called "Kellogg Serial"; Wharton has "Spike"; Harvard has "GSB Information Kiosk"; and Darden creatively named theirs "Darden Intranet."
However, UMBS definitely has capitalized on its superior technical architecture and the vision and programming talents of OCD and Computing Services. As Maureen Shannon, Career Resources and Technology Coordinator, states, M-track "blows away" the intranets of the other schools (except for, maybe, Harvard's "Kiosk") by almost every measure.
M-track's advantage is driven by its integrated Oracle database. This database allows the school to capture information on students from the time they request a brochure through when they give gifts as alumni in one place. Integrated information is extremely powerful, allowing M-track's functionality to perform the way that we view it today.
In 1991, Michigan made the strategic decision to integrate all of the Business School's departmental data into a single Oracle database. Last year Harvard spent $11 million to create a similar database structure and Darden is beginning to move toward integrated data. What are other top business schools doing? You can imagine other business schools as capturing data in separate databases by department: alumni information in Development, student applicant data in Admissions, student data in Student Services, event scheduling in Facilities, and resume and company information in Career Development. Each department has vast amounts of information on their spheres of data, but the links among the data must be handled through manual processes such as additional data entry, data patches, or paper shuffling.
Harvard's investment has brought their intranet on par with M-track's functionality, but at a greater cost in 1996 than Michigan spent in 1991. As a result, Harvard's intranet can be considered to have similar advantages to Michigan's over other business schools. Here are the main functions that M-track covers, and how M-track compares to other business schools:
Company Research
Other business schools show company postings as "static pages" while M-track's postings are more "dynamic." In other words, other schools scan listings of company job postings sorted by a particular field and post them on the web using a format similar to Adobe Acrobat (the application used for M-track's resumes). On the other hand, M-track allows company postings to be shown and sorted by any data field, such as Company Name, Zip Code, Internship vs. Full-time, etc. In addition, only M-track shows interview history (such as who went to work at that company, what his or her resume looks like, and past salary information) and provides a hyperlink to the company's home page.
Interview Bidding
Similar functionality among business school intranets.
Course Bidding
While different business schools have different course bidding processes, students at all top schools can conduct course bidding on their intranets.
All schools have a system like Pine e-mail, but only some (including Michigan, Harvard, Chicago, and Wharton) have integrated e-mail into their intranets like M-track. M-track's e-mail integration is important because it allows the automatic creation of groups by class and year automatically based on student data in the database. At other schools without e-mail integration, groups must be created through a manual data entry process in X.500 (a form of e-mail address book). M-track's integrated e-mail also enables "lifetime e-mail," which can be forwarded to any e-mail account that a student or alumnus holds. At other schools without intranet e-mail, unless a graduate decides to pay a fee to maintain their e-mail on Pine, they are cut off from business school e-mail.
Alumni Research
Because the data is not integrated on a single database, other schools must periodically upload alumni information from other sources to make it available to students. M-track's alumni data is more timely because an alumnus change instantly updates that alumnus's information across the integrated system available to Development and students.
On-line Resume
Other business schools use third-party packages (such as ResumeExpert or ResumeLink) which is are DOS-based and do not integrate with the intranet. As a result, after a student bids for an interview, that student must then drop off a paper copy of his or her resume for that company. In addition, all of the data captured when creating resumes, such as interests and previous work experience, must be manually added to the intranet through additional data entry. If you have experienced problems with M-track resume, it is probably because it is the only portion of M-track written in Javascript. As I discussed in a previous article, all browsers do not yet translate Java in the most efficient way. Computing Services expects reduced resume problems as more people become familiar with how to set-up their browsers for Javascript.
Calendar
Similar to differences in "Company Research" (described above), other business schools show events as "static pages" while M-track's postings are more "dynamic". This means that only M-track allows calendar events to be sorted by data other than date, such as by room. Integrating events into the database also means that an event's placement on the calendar is triggered either when a room is reserved in Facilities or when the event is scheduled with Career Services. As a result, M-track's calendar has more timely and complete information.
Course Information
This may be the only area where M-track lags behind other schools. Other business schools allow the dynamic movement among courses, syllabi, class schedules, and class announcements. Michigan only allows downloading the entire course information booklet. The University of Michigan is developing a system with the dynamic course information functionality for the entire University (similar to Wolverine Access). The Business School is participating in this new system's development, and has held back developing an independent course information system to assure the integration of M-track with the University's system.
Technology and Performance
Other schools use the same technology (basic HTML) for their intranets. Apparently, all want to avoid the risk of using more leading edge technologies for applications upon which their students and others depend. One exception-Harvard's investment has put it on the leading edge in its use of "streamed video." Harvard now videotapes every class and then posts the video on the internet. The jury is out on what value Harvard gets for this costly perk. Harvard's video aside, since all schools use the same basic technology, the performance of all intranets (for better or for worse) should be relatively similar.
The University of Michigan Business School's integrated database of information has enabled the creation of an intranet system that is far superior to that of all other top business schools, except Harvard. M-track allows students to conduct tasks in a more efficient way and administration to better manage the business of the Business School. It's not surprising that what seems every day to us at Michigan would "blow away" the students at other business schools.
Author's Note: Special thanks to Ed Adams, Director of Computing Services
and Maureen Shannon, Career Resources and Technology Coordinator for their
help in writing this article. 
