Fall 2006: Technology

“It would appear that we have reached the limits of what it is possible to achieve with computer technology, although one should be careful with such statements, as they tend to sound pretty silly in five years.” That’s a quote from John Von Neumann, the famously brilliant mathematician, uttered, by all accounts, sometime around 1949.

It may seem funny to us to read his remarks now, almost 60 years later. But they still hold true, don’t they?

Every day we witness new miracles in the area of technology. And those advances are growing more miraculous with every passing moment. In fact, technology is advancing at a more break-neck speed now than ever before and there is no reason to think that this ever-increasing acceleration will stop.

To some, this may seem intimidating, but to those with vision and leadership skills, it is empowering. We know that ideas will always be the fuel for change. And those ideas will always be the product of the human imagination. Technology is merely a catalyst for the manifestation of these ideas.

And what a catalyst it is. The emergence and convergence of various technologies, just in our lifetime, has changed the way we spend our leisure time, the way we shop, the way we communicate, the way we solve problems, the way we monitor and measure, the way we manage, even the quality of our health and the ways in which we live and understand our world.

And yet, it all comes down to human imagination and will. We see so many examples right here at Hankamer. Students from business, sciences and engineering are teaming up to bring new innovative products to market. Professors are pioneering thought in subjects such as virtual teams, cyber warfare, healthcare administration, RFID in operations management and many others. Alumni are leading the most powerful corporations in the world toward their vision of the future.

People drive the vision. Technology enables the vision to become tangible.

Terry S. Maness

Dean

 

 

 

Baylor Business Review, Fall 2006

by Eric Krell

In the business world, technology matters – even if some highly influential thought leaders might say, or write, otherwise.

Former Harvard Business Review editor Nicholas Carr did just that three years ago, when his article, “IT Doesn’t Matter” sparked heated debate among chief information officers (CIOs) and business executives from some of the world’s top companies. Actually, it was Carr’s company that raised hackles. Readers brave enough to venture into the article discovered a premise that is difficult to argue with today: IT’s core functions within a business – the processing, storage and transmission of data – have become less expensive and more easily replicated, and they should be measured accordingly.

In the late 1990s through early 2000, many technology and business executives subscribed to what Carr describes as the “IT changes everything” school of thought. “In the height of the dot com boom, we felt that the Internet was changing the rules of the game,” notes Baylor University Assistant Professor, Information Systems, Hope Koch, CPA, MBA, Ph.D. “Many companies put aside the traditional rules of the game or ways that they evaluated business investments and invested in Internet initiatives. We saw many of these initiatives fail with companies loosing millions in the process. As connectivity increases and technology advances, organizations have to stay abreast of the possibilities, consider how it can help the company achieve value, and in cases where it will, they need to adopt it.”

To effectively conduct the evaluation Koch describes, executives should understand the recent important technological breakthroughs, the implications of those breakthroughs on how companies conduct business and the other elements that need to be in place for the technology to make good on its promise.

Big Breakthroughs

Brett Moore, CFO of the McLane Group, in Temple, Texas, can recall when his company introduced the first personal computer to one of its operation divisions in 1985. Since then, Moore says, technology developments have dramatically changed how the company, which focuses on grocery distribution among other offerings, interacts with its customers and, ultimately, makes decisions.

“The amount of data that [current] systems can generate is incredible,” he notes. “The systems can flesh out trends in your business that might not otherwise be obvious. Ultimately, however, somebody has to know the business well enough to understand how to use that information to identify problems and opportunities.”

Moore has worked for McLane since 1983. In addition to witnessing the company’s first PC, he also worked closely with Wal-Mart, as the giant retailer developed its innovative supply chain management processes, which are supported by technology, in the 1990s. One of his company’s non-grocery offerings includes software developed for the U.S. Army that helps that institution mange its supply chain processes more effectively and efficiently.

Moore points to three technological advancements in the past two decades that have greatly improved business processes: information standards, e-mail and workflow possessing.

Universal Product Code (UPC) represents one of the most important information standards in the retail sector. The common item number enables companies to track and store large amounts of data related to each product. “Basically, the way that we structure a retail business is largely driven by that data,” Moore notes. There is a hitch, however: different product code standards exist in the U.S., Europe and Asia. More recently, the electronic product code (EPC) represents a standard that enables the transmission of data through radio frequency identification (RFID) systems, of the sort that large organizations, including the U.S. Department of Defense and Wal-Mart, have embraced and asked or required their suppliers to also embrace. Other standards, such as XML and HTML, have also fueled technological benefits. Connectivity requires standards.

The introduction and nearly ubiquitous acceptance of e-mail has helped many companies lower costs. “We recently went completed a major closing on a loan package, all of which was performed electronically,” notes Moore. “Twenty years ago we would have been burning up the fax machines or Fed-Ex-ing the documents at a much greater cost.” Similarly, utility holding company PNM Resources saved at least $300,000 by (from a $40,000 investment in enterprise collaboration software) by electronically sharing more than 6,000 documents during the purchase of Texas-New Mexico Power, according to Ziff Davis Media’s “Innovations 2006” publication.

Workflow processing technology, a capability within may enterprise applications, guides automated processes in accordance with business rules. Back-office finance and accounting systems have automated large amounts of transaction processing, enabling companies to eliminate positions once assigned to highly manual activities (such as comparing invoices to purchase orders) and to reassign those employees to areas where their contributions can add more value (such as financial analysis). Workflow processing also identifies when manual interaction is necessary; if the discrepancy between a purchase order and an invoice is less a dollar, it probably is more cost-effective to let the discrepancy zip through the automated system. However if the discrepancy is $10,000, an automated alert can immediately appear in the e-mail in-basket of a manager, vice president, or even the CFO.

The breakthroughs that Moore describes spill into other breakthroughs. For example, the accounts payable (A/P) automation once consisted of stand-alone applications operated by A/P clerks in an isolated of the finance and accounting department. The emergence of enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems blended A/P automation with many applications that support many other back-office processing and even customer-facing applications. “Before ERP systems companies would often have separate systems for each functional area,” notes Koch. “This created several problems. Employees entered the same information multiple times into multiple systems. System updates like customer address had to be entered in all the different systems. Companies could not get a unified view of their operations, customers, and the customer’s profitability.”

Within companies, it is important to keep in mind that different forms of automation can, and frequently do, integrate. “There are a lot of technologies fighting for attention out there,” says Baylor University Assistant Professor, Management & Entrepreneurship, Pedro M. Reyes, Ph.D. “And you have all of these different champions who espouse a specific technology to solve a particular problem. Leading practitioners are starting to realize that it’s not just one technology that will solve problems, there will be a convergence of different technologies that addresses the next big challenges.”

Business Impacts

Since its inception in 2002, San Francisco-based Pay By Touch has demonstrated a commitment to integrating new technologies to help its customers. The company provides “biometric authentication, loyalty, membership, and payment solutions.” When enrolled consumers check out at a Pay By Touch customer’s grocery store, they simply slide their finger into a small device that scans their unique print, enter their access code and then select their payment mode (electronic check or a full range of credit and debit cards) from the “electronic wallet” on the screen in front of them. Many of the grocery stores link the customer’s purchasing history to their loyalty programs through another Pay By Touch offering (“personalized marketing”).

The offerings reduce identity theft risks and free consumers from having to fumble with checks, credit cards and loyalty cards, which speeds the payment transaction. Pay By Touch customers have benefited by using the system to encourage less expensive payment channels (electronic checks), greatly increasing the redemption rates on their loyalty program offers and, in the process, boosting their consumers’ shopping frequency and their own revenue growth.

“We think that this will be a $100 billion market-cap company,” says Bill Townsend, Pay By Touch executive vice president and a graduate of the Hankamer School of Business. “It will be just like a Visa or MasterCard, and people will just expect that when you walk into a store, you put your finger down to access your account.”

It’s a bold claim, but, so far, a legitimate sounding one: customers have embraced the technology, and the company’s venture funding is off the charts.

But Townsend also understands that technology is a double-edged sword for companies that sell technology. Townsend was part of the founding management team at Internet search engine Lycos, Inc., and has launched and managed several companies including YouthStream Media Networks (now Alloy), GeoCities (now Yahoo!), NewsAlert (now MarketWatch), Deja News (now Google and eBay), and voice-over Internet Protocol (VOIP) pioneer Really Easy Internet (now Hey, Inc.).

Connectivity and other technological advancements have greatly lowered the barriers of marketplace entry: someone with a $12.99 per month DSL connection and a $500 PC can set up shop on the dining room table and become an eBay success story. And today’s market leader can quickly lose ground to new competitors.

Today’s market leaders can also fall prey to fast-changing customer sentiment and preferences. “It used to be that you would start a company and then spend five to 10 years building your brand,” notes Townsend. “Today, brands are made in a matter of months.”

Koch agrees that the speed of numerous business dynamics has greatly increased, but she also points out technology has not altered the essential rules – or objective – of business (see “Same Objective, New Means”).

Elements of Success

Since technology continues to evolve, simply adopting the latest technology will not automatically give an enterprise a sustained competitive advantage, says Koch. On the other hand, the failure to adopt important technology has hurt numerous companies.

“Wal Mart was one of the first adopters of inter-organizational systems,” Koch notes. “Because they were sharing information easily with their business partners, they were able to deliver products to consumers at lower prices. K Mart did not pay attention to inter-organizational systems and by the time they did, they had lost most of their market share to Wal Mart. K mart eventually filed for bankruptcy.”

There are several non-technological factors that separate Wal-Mart from K-Mart, Dell from Gateway, VHS from Betamax or, more recently, MySpace.com from Geocities.

In some cases it is timing. In other cases, it comes down to marketing. Most audio/visual experts agreed that Betamax was a superior technology, but VHS out-marketed Betamax.

Reyes has studied RFID for years, and he noticed a significant spike in interest and acceptance of the concept after an IBM television commercial – one that simplified the benefits of the technology by explaining that the boxes in a trucker’s load can talk – appeared on the airwaves.

Inside organizations, two elements absolutely must be present for a new technology to make good on its promise of helping a company add value to its customer base: people and processes. Technology is an enabler, but a needy one: people must use the technology to make existing processes better, or the technology will not succeed.

One of the primary challenges of RFID, Moore notes, is that it poses significant integration challenges: companies need to essentially reverse-engineer the technology into their existing business systems.

“A mentor once told me that you do not solve problems with computers,” Moore recalls. “You use people to solve the problems and computers to help you do it. A common mistake businesses make is that we think by putting in a system it’s going to solve our problem.”

What truly solves problems, he adds, involves a more comprehensive change-management effort: putting best practices in place, implementing technology to support those processes, training employees to properly execute the new processes and technology and then establishing internal controls and quality controls to ensure that the people, processes and technology are performing as designed.

Adapting the company’s processes, people and technology is vital, particularly in today’s fast-morphine marketplace and global business climate.

“You may have a wonderful idea for a business that is highly dependent on what is happening in the marketplace today,” Townsend explains. “But if you don’t build a culture that can adapt to the changing marketplace, you’ll just be another ‘dot.bomb.'”

To avoid that fate, Pay By Touch has invested in proven technology, a strong intellectual property (IP) portfolio and talented employees. “And we have adapted the business model and the product offering almost on a quarterly basis while still maintaining our vision of making Pay By Touch the most trusted, secure way to pay for goods and also to be a trusted intermediary of a consumer’s personal information,” he says.

Technology matters, but it matters most when it is embraced by people to support and strengthen business processes.

 

 

Baylor Business Review, Fall 2006

by Beth Barbee

In the ever-evolving world of Information Technology (IT),career possibilities are no longer limited to programmers writing code, fighting viruses or encrypting personal information. All companies from restaurants and retail outlets to universities and hospitals must use technology for direct communication with their customers, clients and employees to stay competitive. The faster the word gets out, the better. This urgent need has created a whole gamut of niche IT professionals and the demand has made these opportunities quite exciting and lucrative. Baylor Business alumni J. Martin, Don Kersting and Ben Lamm are riding this new wave of highly concentrated IT. Everyday they are behind the screens of e-learning and interactive marketing.

J. Martin

Ben Lamm

Don Kersting

 

 

Baylor Business Review, Fall 2006

by Melanie Merrifield

There’s no question that technology has driven extraordinary innovation in medical science.However, while such advancement continues apace,the hot topic in healthcare today is information technology.

The sheer volume of data about patients, protocols, medications, utilization, billing and insurance has reached near-epidemic proportions. No part of the healthcare system is immune; hospitals, physician practices and laboratories alike are obligated to manage medical information with rigorous accuracy and accountability.

Hankamer School of Business responded to this need in 2003 by introducing an MBA Healthcare Administration program. “Healthcare information and its management is very important right now,” notes Scott Garner, preceptor coordinator of Baylor’s MBA healthcare administration specialization. “This is clearly an area that’s of interest to growing numbers of students.” A cornerstone of the program is a seven month residency, which falls for most students at the beginning of their second year. The experience provides “real world” experience healthcare providers value greatly when screening candidates. Garner explains. “By taking students through this type of experience, we’re positioning them to compete more effectively in the marketplace.”

TECHNOLOGY THAT STRETCHES FROM BEDSIDE TO THE BANK

With information technology a defining – some might argue the defining – force in healthcare, information technology is becoming central to everything from patient care to administration and medical records, and even blurring the lines in-between.

“A system like voice recognition charting improves accuracy that directly benefits the patient, and also has significant impact on an institution from an administrative standpoint,” explains Dr. Louis Martin, professor of Radiology at Emory School of Medicine and former chief of Interventional Radiology at Emory University Hospital. “The more accurate, easier to read and accessible that chart becomes, the more useful it is to all areas of the organization.”

Numerous other advances impact both care and management, and are quite literallychanging the face of healthcare. “Today, for instance, we’re seeing distance clinics emerge where patients are seen by a nurse practitioner instead of a physician,” observes Sean M. Haynes, Baylor MBA –Healthcare/MSIS candidate. “A physician can be patched in by video and do a distance consult. This is a cost-saving solution, especially in rural areas, and can make available to a facility specialists they could not afford to keep on staff.”

THE CHANGING FACES OF PATIENT CARE

As scanning and monitoring modalities like CT scans, MRIs, heart monitors and numerous others move from analog to digital,their data can be sent real-time around the world. “These images are no longer subject to location. They can be shipped off to be read and sent back.”

“Robotics is another big force on the horizon,” notes Haynes. “These minimally invasive procedures can have patients up and mobile in three days, not three weeks. That’s a significant development for both patient care and for cost management.”

Early detection is another area where technology, and the required IT underpinning will expand medicine’s future scope.

“Cancer, for example, is now considered a long term disease, as diagnosis is enabled by more granular imaging,” Haynes adds.

Close to home, at Dallas-Fort Worth’s Baylor University Medical Center, surgeons have developed a laparoscopic version of the gastric bypass for obese patients, enabling most to leave the hospital within 23 hours. This is a significant improvementover the complex open gastric bypass procedure, which requires several days’ stay, post op.

IT INNOVATION – AND COST

Not only does all this innovation demand new systems and approaches to data management, it also comes with a high price tag. Most institutions are actually earmarking between one and three percent of annual operating budget for IT. Small wonder the business world is taking the challenge seriously.

Senior hospital executives responding to a Modern Healthcare 2005 survey indicated their primary near-term IT priority to be the electronic health record (EHR). A key impetus in the increased interest in the EHR was the 2004 pledge by President George W. Bush to establish an interoperable system of health records within a decade. The total national cost of introducing this system has been estimated at $276 billion to $320 billion over 10 years. Some industry observers believe that the challenges of building such a national infrastructure are comparable to those of putting a man on the moon, and that the project is more likely to require several decades to complete. Much of the cost and complexity of healthcare IT management is a result of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), originating in 1996 and reaching final form in 2003. This ground-breaking legislation ambitiously proposed to simplify and standardize the transfer and storage of patient information, with a mandate to protect patient rights and privacy with carefully defined security protocols. However, even with stringent HIPAA regulations, there remains room for much subjectivity. It is in both system-building and management of compliance that finely honed management training and skills are essential.

MAJOR CHALLENGES AHEAD: ACCEPTANCE AND COMPLIANCE

Another key issue in this brave new world of medical technology management is the varying degrees of acceptance among practitioners. Clearly, technology is a younger folks’ game, with older practitioners sometimes only embracing technology in a rudimentary way.

“Physicians are using more healthcare information technology in their clinical practices, but in some cases the use may well be fairly rudimentary, such as looking up information about drugs and unfamiliar diseases on the Internet vs. a printed reference” reports Joseph Conn in Modern Healthcare. “But many of them lack sophisticated systems.”

Michelle Nelson, Baylor MBA Healthcare candidate, recently spent her residency at Bearing Point Healthcare Group in San Francisco as part of a Change Management team.

“It was such an enlightening experience. Our challenge was to oversee our client’s adoption of electronic medical records system,” states Nelson. “Because I worked as a nurse for many years, I can see the advantage of all this technology from the caregiver perspective. But there is a sharp learning curve, because this kind of technology assumes and requires a certain level of technical savvy from its users.

“The biggest hurdle seems to be getting everyone in an organization to buy in and take ownership of the change.”

One area where major advances in healthcare technology and IT are at the leading edge is in the military. Kevin Peck,a Baylor MBA Healthcare graduate, is now deployed to Iraq as Chief Information Officer of a field hospital there. He suggests that “the military will end up being a model for the health record, like it has been for so many other medical innovations. EMR development (electronic medical records) is moving forward far faster than in civilian life.”

“The EMR hasn’t been rolled out yet. It’s in field testing now. But there’s so much more standardization across the board compared to civilian life,” says Peck. “For instance, there’s just one form for requesting medication. It’s really much simpler than the various forms in civilian use.”

“Of course, security and privacy are much more guarded in the military,” he continues. “They just came out in April with new ARMY regulations regarding handling of medical records. If you’re negligent, it can end your career. You’re dealing with the uniform code of military justice. In effect, all medical records are the Commander’s possession. All medical records are kept in a records room and under lock and key at all times, with controlled access and afterwards immediately locked down. As CIO, I’m responsible. If anyone wants to see them, release of information must be through patient information division and LEGAL and HIPAA. Rules exist regarding may see records, what parts of records and under what conditions. Everything is documented.”

“Army deployed hospitals are mirror image of what you’d see here. Facilities are every bit as good as what we have here in the States. But in a tent.”

Some tent. It may just define the future of medical IT.

 

 

Baylor Business Review, Fall 2006

New technologies are changing the workplace. Data is mobile. Employees can sync up without even coming into the office. Is a revolution in workplace culture and environment just around the corner? Will working virtually cut costs and promote productivity or just present new problems?

View
“The technology is there so it must be our outdated ideas of how work gets done that need to be overcome.” -Editorial staff of silicon.com
Read this view

Review
“In our move into a world of “always-on digital data” we must look to our children – tomorrow’s employees and customers.” -Alan Standley, Chief Executive, TASK Executive Communications
Read this view

 

 

Baylor Business Review, Fall 2006

by Barbara Elmore

When the computer language BASIC emerged almost half a century ago, the phrase cyber warfare wasn’t in the dictionary and the word virus was often preceded by flu. Blackberries were a fruit, telephones didn’t play music and Spam came in a can.

Now, using spam as bait, computer tricksters “phish” online for new identities. Scam Web sites, purportedly charities, go up for a few days to take your money and run. Trojan horses carrying poisons try to invade your computer’s defenses. Someone out there just might be trying to capture your personal information by recording your keystrokes, and a new industry has developed around virus software and anti-spy ware.

Is there a solution to these technological difficulties, short of logging off for good?

Yes, say the experts who have grown their skills as the technology blossomed. They’re likely to advise us to be more wary of human error than human evil. After that, they emphasize the value of setting priorities on what we want to keep private. And to plan for inevitable surprises.

Baylor professor and computer security guru Randal Vaughn puts the darker side of technology into perspective with the notion that both white hats and black hats populate the world, “and most people are kind of gray.” Much of the mischief done through technology comes from human error, he said, not deliberate evil.

Beware human error

Vaughn, professor of information systems, is well-versed in computer viruses, cyber warfare, phishing and the poisoning and destruction of data. His expertise comes from running the Baylor business school’s operating system years ago as well as spending time as a project engineer for the Air Force and working for Vought Aircraft and Mobile Oil. Experience has taught him that the most popular way of crippling a business is by “plain old human foul-up.

“In the security world we teach students that our number one vulnerability is our own people,” Vaughn said. “They just mess things up.” They make mistakes typing in data, or they accidentally delete key information.

He leads classes in the basics of technology and policy issues as well as a graduate-level course in cyber warfare. Computer security must cover three main areas, Vaughn noted. These include integrity in the system, or whether people trust it; confidentiality, or whose eyes see it; and availability, or how easy it is for users to access.

An operating system’s integrity can be compromised by the aforementioned human foul-up or by external attack, such as poisoning or destroying data. And whether the integrity is violated accidentally or on purpose, security checkers can look for ways to see if the data has changed. But tracking is difficult, he said, and sometimes impossible.

A failure in the second area, confidentiality, can mean multiple failures. For example, a confidentiality breach can also involve an integrity violation. “If you’ve accidentally leaked out your password, someone can violate the integrity of the information,” Vaughn said.

The standard definition of integrity involves trust, Vaughn added, and some technology attacks target that specifically. Thus integrity gets broadened to mean not just the validity of data, but a perception or suspicion about what’s going on. “If you come up with a phishing attack where you mimic IRS, or the Bank of America, and somebody exposes their credentials, now you have not only a violation but an element of distrust,” he said. This also happens with websites that look similar to the site you’re actually seeking but may be designed to embarrass it. “That’s a form of integrity violation,” he said.

The availability of a system involves its connectivity-whether or not you can get into it. Connectivity becomes a problem when a Web site is unavailable, or the e-mail doesn’t work, or you find yourself unable to log into an accounts payable system.

“Typically what you will see are denials of service against a system, and typically those are an attack that is connected with extortion,” Vaughn said. “The victims are sites that would be susceptible to extortion, like pornography sites, commercial sites, online gambling sites, the White House, the FBI, or any large company that may have some political enemies in the technology world–Microsoft, Apple, Sun.” The victim site could also be antivirus or spy ware sites, he said-“people who prevent unwanted activity.”

New career paths

The prevalence of such attacks has launched new careers for people like Bryan Palma, a former Secret Service agent who has expertise in computer forensics and has established Ponic LLC to help companies and organizations manage information risk.

Palma’s company focuses on security, privacy, compliance and risk management for businesses and associations. A common theme permeating this world of information is maintaining control of who gets access to what information, he said.

“It seems like a pretty simple question. But in reality, it’s difficult to manage inflow and outflow of relationships with managers, contractors and suppliers,” he said. That’s because there are people you want to exclude when you’re allowing access to information, and the exclusion factor gets in the way of allowing the right people access to the right things, he said.

Every organization struggles with security, Palma noted, and a common belief among companies is that they must secure everything. He tells clients that not only do they not have to secure everything, but that it’s costly, difficult and ineffective. Secure those things that are really critical, he advises-customer data, information, financial models, the way you do analysis.

Privacy is important to consumers who want to do business online, Palma said, and important to building the trust relationship that Vaughn talks about. “Citizens and consumers are saying, ‘If you want me to participate in online commerce™make assurances that you are protecting my data,’ ” he said. Once again, information risk concerns are related. “You can’t have privacy without security,” Palma noted. “Privacy can drive better security, and companies will take notice when customers say, ‘We aren’t accepting the procedures that we did before because we don’t think they protect our information.’ ”

He applauds the United States’ free-market approach to data collection as long as laws protect personal information like Social Security numbers. “People want different things online, and there are all kinds of things in between the 401K account and the chat room. To me that’s the place that the average person and a lot of organizations are overlooking. If you can fix the inclusion, it makes the exclusion a lot better as well.”

Have a plan

If you want to guarantee technology’s best uses, plan it and test it, said Anita Knight, founder of the Knight-Star Institute. She saw the value of strategic planning after executing a year-long disaster plan within the New York insurance industry immediately before Sept. 11, 2001.

“I was a team leader for a cross-functional, industrywide team of insurance people,” Knight said. “We’d been in the process of creating a plan for the state of New York that ensured we could cooperate with each other and the state emergency response and regulatory community.” Her team had just finished the planning process when 9/11 happened.

The blueprint she helped create put her in charge of activating the emergency plan with the insurance commissioner of the state. She and one of his employees put it into action when the commissioner himself was “running for his life in Manhattan.” Insurance catastrophe specialists flew into Albany, and the group spent weeks after the attacks toppling barriers so that people could get the insurance they needed to live.

This was no small feat for the competitive insurance industry, Knight said. The planning made it work. After it was over, government agencies, trade organizations, and the state regulator’s office examined the response and rated it the best of its kind, she said.

Knight moved to Central Texas and opened her own Homeland Security consulting firm, Knight-Star, four years ago. Now the organization is using a FEMA grant and training fees to provide grassroots community education to ensure regional readiness. The firm employs trainers, consultants, critical event responders and advisers who are experts at thinking about catastrophes in advance so they can manage the aftermath. Knight-Star consults with schools, hospitals, police and fire departments on disaster preparedness.

Senior vice president and vice chairman of the Knight-Star board Robert L. Clark, a former military officer who has served worldwide, said he was attracted to Knight-Star by his concerns about terrorism. “I looked at what Knight-Star was trying to accomplish and found this niche, which includes developing programs for schools and hospitals.”

Clark is working with public schools on a program to analyze their emergency plans and conduct an orientation program to introduce the schools and community leaders to the National Incident Management System, which empowers government and non-government agencies to work together during domestic crises. Knight-Star is also helping the schools evaluate and test their emergency plans. The company offers a free “Masters of Disaster” teacher-trainer workshop to teachers and other school staff so they can learn how to implement a grassroots safety and preparedness curriculum for students. The workshops are based on a Red Cross curriculum.

“It’s part of the FEMA grant,” Clark said. “We train the trainers, teachers, train children, train families.” Knight-Star also leads workshops for nursing homes and residential care facilities and provides similar services to health departments.

Knight’s work on disaster planning brought her to Baylor when Anne Grinols, assistant dean of graduate programs, asked her to talk to students about crisis communications. “As we started talking, she shared with me that she wanted to get her students to Washington, D.C., and get more involved in government activities,” Knight said. “We realized then we could collaborate and do something fairly important for rural schools.”

Baylor student Tony Trippodo worked with Knight-Star as part of a Baylor Focus Firm project, Project Vigilance, that students presented to government officials in Washington, D.C., last April. “I was part of a team of 15 people,” Trippodo said. He studied logistics for preparedness, including emergency procedures for parents to know what to do when a disaster strikes, such as pre-designed places to pick up children who have been evacuated.

“We looked at best practices for school disaster plans,” Trippodo said. “They are pretty limited. This is a big plus for Knight-Star, to provide unique affordable services to help schools get their plans together. Most don’t know how to do it.”

Also employed at Knight-Star before graduating in August was Baylor student Douglas Franks, who worked on a U.S. Department of Education grant involving six different rural independent school districts.

Knight describes security preparedness as a growth industry and calls the need for it unfortunate. “Current events make it real clear that Americans are experiencing a kind of social awakening around disaster preparedness at all levels. Have a plan and have a kit-everyone needs one. That’s our motto.”

Vaughn, the Baylor professor, notes that attacks using new technology don’t reveal any new sociological issues. The technology is simply an extension of the issues, he said.

“We are actually in a competitive society. We kill off the dumb and only the smart remain, and the really smart develop new tactics against the method used to prevent their activity. It’s a lot faster– instead of a scam taking hours, now you can do it on the Internet with an email. But it’s a different form of the same old thing.”

 

 

Baylor Business Review, Fall 2006