Five years ago, Howard Frank joined the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business as dean. He had recently ended a four-year tenure with the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency, which invented the technology that became the Internet, and the wide-eyed technologist was looking forward to his next challenge: He wanted to make the Smith School the premier technology-oriented business school in the world.

"We had the raw material here, and I had the support of the president of the university and the faculty," says Frank.

To reach his lofty goal, he rejiggered the curriculum so that it now emphasizes courses in e-business, supply chain management, business process integration and global knowledge management. He also hired a slew of new instructors?55 in the past four years.

While the curriculum shifted in response to the business world’s need for tech-savvy graduates, the school’s IT infrastructure remained a relic of the past. It was ironic that a business school trying to turn out tomorrow’s tech leaders should be hobbled by such a dated system.

The fact was that the school lacked the proper infrastructure to support its 3,500 students and faculty on both its main campus in College Park, Md., and at its satellite campuses in Shady Grove, Baltimore and Washington, D.C. Users on the satellite campuses could not get the same level or quality of access to applications and systems that students on the main campus received. And students and faculty on the main campus could run applications only from a networked PC; they could not access the Smith School’s systems remotely.

"We have large financial databases that our faculty in the finance department uses," says Sandor Boyson, the Smith School’s effusive information strategy chief and director of its Supply Chain Management Center. "When they leave this institution at night, those [databases] are no longer accessible to them because they’re physically contained behind the firewall."

In addition, students and faculty were forced to use e-mail to share ideas and edit documents, which created all sorts of headaches when it came time to synchronize document versions, never mind the tax it levied on the network.

Further complicating students’ lives was the problem of identities. Students had to memorize as many as 16 user names and passwords for each online course and for each system they used on a regular basis. They also complained that they didn’t have access to a centralized calendar and had to look in as many as four places to get information on social and academic events on campus.