September 2000, MIT Sloan website

MIT Sloan cuts the connection

Like high-tech surveyors, two technicians this summer quietly combed every foot of the MIT Sloan School of Management campus. Moving methodically and mostly unnoticed, the pair tested the radio wave connection between a laptop and a nondescript box plugged into the MIT Sloan computer network.

Inconspicuous as it was, the technicians' work was significant. For, they were preparing the School to take the next leap in the Information Age—to cut the network connection and go wireless.

MIT Sloan took that leap with the start of classes last month. The School activated a wireless access network that enables students, faculty, and staff to connect through their laptops to the MIT wired network and the Internet from anywhere on the MIT Sloan campus.

MIT Sloan is not the first school to provide wireless access. After having tested wireless products in the mid-1990s, Carnegie Mellon provides extensive wireless access, and a number of other colleges are beginning to provide it. But MIT Sloan is one of the first business schools to embrace the technology as a way of stimulating innovation, and questions remain over how wireless access influences learning, communication, and communities.

Living laboratory
MIT Sloan is an ideal living laboratory for tackling those questions. The School has a rich history of innovation, and many of its graduates move on to shape the technologies and management strategies that drive changes in business and society.

Also, the School last year was a model for how unprecedented wired connectivity affects a community. It was the first business school to require online applications, and the incoming MBA class built a website that forged a virtual community before students arrived on campus. Where last year's class was heralded as "the most wired class" in an article in Business Week," students this year come to a wireless campus. How they react will offer a window onto the greater societal changes that experts say are sure to come as the wired world becomes increasingly wireless.

Wireless access should indeed change the MIT Sloan community. Throughout the day, students can now access the Internet for up-to-date stock and company news. They can communicate instantaneously with project team members. They can secure a bench on the MIT Sloan plaza, bask in the sun, and still be connected. Once tied to their desktops, faculty and staff too should emerge as more mobile members of the community—still connected to their electronic lifeline.

"Our flexibility in sharing data has improved tremendously," says Dan Ariely, an MIT Sloan assistant professor who set up his own wireless network for research. "We can take the laptops to a different location and set up temporary labs."

"Your work is not constrained by the availability of an ethernet connection," adds Rod Garcia, director of admissions for the MBA Program, who tested MIT Sloan's wireless access over the summer. He sees tremendous benefits for students, who are mobile throughout the day and for whom the Internet is integral to their studies.

"This will allow me to have at my fingertips the information of MIT Sloan's backbone network without having to carry a wire," says Philip Kong, an incoming MBA student who is a lawyer and a native of Jamaica. "My response time to time-sensitive information will be faster and I will have a lot more accessibility in my work."

How much is too much?
As with any new technology, the lasting effects of wireless access are hard to foretell, says JoAnne Yates, a professor of management who studies how new technologies change communication in organizations.

"When a new technology comes in, there is a period of uncertainty and there is a period of great enthusiasm," she says. "As with cell phones, norms will have to be established about how this technology is used."

Faculty are likely to restrict Web surfing during class, for example, and a sound denoting incoming email on a laptop might become a symbol of excessive connectivity — as resented as a ringing cell phone during a meeting.

Members of the MIT Sloan community will also have to determine where and when they need — or want — to be connected, says Yates. Like cell phones, constant access to email and the Internet encroaches on privacy. MIT Sloan's wireless experience will yield evidence of where people draw the line between privacy and the need to be connected.

"It is important for us to be out there deciding how to use new technologies," says Yates, "but we should also decide explicitly whether technology is getting beyond our needs."

Out front in the wireless revolution
It might make little difference whether consumers at this point feel a need for greater wireless connectivity. Experts point to Europe and Asia, where Internet access through hand-held devices is hugely popular, as evidence that greater wireless access is the next revolution in communication.

Wireless access through laptops is a transition to that revolution — to the world imagined by wireless experts in which everyone will be able to access websites, receive and send email, and conduct online transactions through cell phones and other hand-held devices.

MIT Sloan's move to provide wireless access puts the School at the heart of that transition. In fact, the larger MIT community will be watching the MIT Sloan experience for ideas on how to implement wireless access across the entire MIT campus, which is planned for sometime in 2001. Meanwhile, Yates and others will monitor the MIT Sloan experience for clues on how society will adopt wireless access, and there is a buzz among incoming students, who relish the opportunity to be at the forefront of the wireless revolution.

"This is a very significant step in the development of MIT Sloan's technology infrastructure," says Kong, who plans to study new product venture development, with an emphasis on telecommunications. "This is where the world is going. It's going mobile."