Comments on: News 5/7/08

By: Degreed

Degreed — Thu, 08 May 2008 05:42:38 +0000

Re: “MBA studies have real-world relevance”

I worked at a top 25 B-school for nearly a decade. While not all programs are the same, the part-time “executive” programs are about the piece of paper. Students pay a lot for that piece of paper, in money, not effort.

By: John

John — Wed, 07 May 2008 16:40:28 +0000

Disagree with you on the advance degree. I have one but it really doesn’t provide much and I can’t even begin to tell you how many people I have met in my career with MBAs who had absolutely horrible business sense. There are some things you just can not teach and far too often I see folks look at someone’s educational pedigree and automatically think: Well, he/she has an MBA/advance degree so they must know what they are talking about. That is actually more the exception than the rule.

By: DrM

DrM — Wed, 07 May 2008 16:25:08 +0000

Saying anything about advanced degrees for CIOs is the equivalent of making an executive hiring decision based on a fraction of a resume. In other words, it simply shouldn’t happen, and anyplace that would do that deserves whatever they get out of it. The CIO should have prior relevant experience, a track record suggesting they can do the job, and fit in with the culture and goals of where they’re getting hired. All of that (each of them, actually) is more important than the degree after their name. And in the end, some people will work out and some will not, and not because of their degree.

Also, any MBA you can acquire “nontraditionally and inexpensively” is probably not very good. They have some good ones, but those are highly competitive, and even they have pretty stringent time commitments and a pretty high cost. If you have no business experience or acumen, an MBA may be what you need to catch up, but if you’ve gone to the school of hard knocks, you really have to balance the incremental value of that time and money against what the “book learning” would actually add to your skillset at that point. Proven experience is always better than a degree; a degree is a proxy for knowledge, but if you can prove the knowledge you don’t need the proxy.

I have an advanced degree (MD), and one saying that we learned early on, and turned out to be pretty much consistently true, is that your degree matters for about 6 months after the date you acquired it. After that, what you actually do is what matters.

By: HISReader

HISReader — Wed, 07 May 2008 03:51:44 +0000

HealthConnect maintenance: Again, you jump on the number but forget the mammoth scale of an organization that is running about 60,000 concurrent users (over 100,000 trained users). And, maintenance includes datacenters, power, telecom, desktops, people, everything. Plus, all hospitals are live now on the basics. 13 maybe be paperless or completed, but they are all live and have been live for a few years on core systems. I’d keep an eye on what they accomplish over the next several years. I think we’re going to see them make some pretty impressive breakthroughs in managing care for their members. Rail away if you want, but I suspect we’ll see some pretty impressive innovations and improvements in care.

By: Bostonboy

Bostonboy — Wed, 07 May 2008 02:18:35 +0000

WOW = Whip ‘Em Out Wednesdays, an unofficial weekly observance created by the Opie and Anthony show which suggests female viewers should remove their tops for motorists who have the WOW sticker.

I know you have mentioned being a Howard Stern fan (as am I), but growing up in the Boston area this was the first thing I thought of when I saw the WOW mobile.