Kogod School of Business Wireless Solution

The Kogod School of Business has implemented a BlackBerry and RSS wireless solution to provide students with real-world learning tools. The university aimed to make academics interactive by providing students with the training and expertise in the latest business tools. The goal is to make students more competitive in their careers, enhance networking opportunities, and improve student engagement.

CASE STUDY –Strategic Planning for Information Systems
The case study concerning the use of ‘Blackberry’ mobile devices describes the development of the
mobile business model of The Kogod School of Business, which is a college located in Washington D.C.
This business school serves both undergraduate and graduate students and is said to be one of the top
wireless campuses in the US. The case study gives you some indication of the Kogod School of
Business’s business processes and applications of mobile technology in an education environment.
Students were offered Blackberry 7100t phones and can stream self selected media content, news, job
offers, lecture notes, assignments, project guidelines as well as conventional email and web browsing
access.
New Academic Experience Pioneered with BlackBerry and Content
Streaming Solution – The Kogod School of Business
Executive Summary
Subject: The Kogod School of Business, American University, Washington, D.C.
Industry: Education
Environment: Lotus® Domino
Applications Deployed: Real Simple Streaming (RSS)
Situation: A leading business school wanted a way to engage students in a more vibrant educational
experience and offer valuable information to them beyond traditional email and web communications.
Organization Profile: The Kogod School of Business is ranked as one of the top business schools in the
US, and American University is one of the top 10 wireless campuses in the nation. Located in
Washington, DC, the school attracts students from more than 60 countries for undergraduate and
graduate programs in business.
Solution: Kogod offered a BlackBerry device to every new enrolled student, which is equipped with
streaming technology that pushes self-selected, “spam-free” content to the student about news, jobs,
administration and campus life. An initial roll out of 150 devices paved the way for a roll-out of 300
devices by the end of 2005.
Results: The school plans to ultimately roll-out 600 to 800 devices by 2010 and to offer every student
access to wireless and streaming technology. The solution is already improving campus communication
about events, augmenting classroom teaching by sharing current events, and promises to offer students a
competitive edge in the marketplace.
The Kogod School of Business
The Kogod School of Business at American University is ahead of the curve when it comes to its
curriculum, real-world approach to learning, and understanding of the role technology plays in business.
Ranked as one of the top 10 wireless campuses in the US, the school had already proven its visionary
status by supporting the value of mobile technology on its campus. In 2005, it made the next leap forward
by becoming the first business school in the world to provide BlackBerry devices to 300 graduate
business students and faculty.
“First and foremost, we are in an academic business – the business of sharing, distributing
and creating knowledge,” says Bill DeLone, Acting Dean. “Our community includes students
anywhere in the world. Anything that enhances our ability to move information amongst our
stakeholders is very important to us.”
Their goal was to extend the BlackBerry Enterprise Solution™ beyond email to engage students
throughout their academic experience. They chose Real Simple Streaming (RSS) as a way to push out
student-selected web content to BlackBerry® devices, including coursework, admissions, job listings and
news media. With a pilot project complete and the full roll out now underway, the school is making a
powerful statement about the ways wireless technology can be used to change and enhance the
educational experience. Some of the benefits they expect include:
• Attracting new students with leading edge technology;

• Engaging students to build a sense of community;
• Giving students a competitive edge by using real-world technology;
• Sharing and publicizing campus news and events to create a more vibrant student experience;
• Providing an interactive learning environment where current events areintegrated into the
classroom;
• Linking students with recruiters to promote career building.
Engaging students in a meaningful way was the initial goal of the wireless strategy at Kogod School of
Business. With students based around the world, the school wanted a way to endear their student body to
the university before they arrived on campus. They decided to offer a BlackBerry to every admitted
student who accepted and gave their deposit.
The Connected Campus: Business Goals Evolve
But something happened as they moved further into their wireless strategy – a marketing plan turned into
a way of revolutionizing the educational experience. Building on the advantages of being a leading
wireless campus, the school’s leaders saw an opportunity to give students an edge in their studies and as
future business leaders. The idea inspired the Kogod Edge, a program designed to use innovative
technology to enrich the academic process. “We’re looking at the use of wireless technology to give us,
and our students an edge in terms of their preparation for professional business careers,” says DeLone.
They realized that students needed to see administrative content such as the school’s calendar and
schedules. That notification of events, social gatherings and speakers was key to a student’s life on
campus. That a teacher’s ability to focus on real-world scenarios could improve by the ability to share a
headline from the day’s media.
“Email is a big concern,” says Bob Ranson, Kogod Technology Consultant. “We all know how
much email we get, and spam filters are preventing a lot of information from getting through. As
well, not every student is going to pull out a laptop to see if there is any breaking news. So we
started to think about what we could do, as a technology leader, to bridge this – and we looked at
the national media and how they were using streaming media.”
RSS technology on BlackBerry devices became the basis of their plan to push valuable content out to
students according to user preferences. RSS is based on a traditional web model for viewing content, but
combined with BlackBerry, it becomes a way to push syndicated, spam-free content according to the
user’s specifications. Many news organizations, such as the Washington Post, use this on-demand
approach to send content to its subscribers.
On-Demand Content Improves Communications and Builds Community
The school is currently linking up several streams of content, such as RSS readers for admissions and
calendar updates; graduate streams that include career feeds from the nation’s top job sites; and
newsreaders for publications such as the Washington Post and New York Times. One of the first things
that changed was the ability to communicate current updates to schedules and learning opportunities in a
student’s day. Previously, if there was an event or a speaker of interest, the school sent emails or put
notices on the plasma screen televisions located throughout the School.
“That required them to be in the building or have access to a laptop to get the information,”
says DeLone. “With BlackBerry devices, they can check when events start, and have
information sent to them from various departments or clubs and organizations so they are
always in-the-loop.”
When the BlackBerry devices were piloted with a selected group of first-year students, the university
gained valuable feedback on the ease of using the device and the kind of content the students wanted to
see.
“They gave us the idea of the student calendar or making our graduate business association –
which was basically the information on the web site –available through a stream,” says

Ranson. “We realized that it was not just a question of academics. Students wanted all the
social and networking content available to them, too.”
Real-world Tools Offer Real-world Learning
“We want to make sure that we provide our students with the training and expertise in the latest
business tools so that when they go for their internships, they have a leg up on their competitors,”
says DeLone. “We chose this solution because BlackBerry is an important business tool. Among
the Fortune 500 companies, it’s increasingly becoming the tool of choice.”
Kogod’s visionaries see their wireless tool as an important success factor making academics interactive.
They are working on helping faculty members develop their own streams of information to augment what
is being presented in the classroom.
“An example would be a student in a finance class studying what is going on in a set of
companies,” says Ranson. “They will have a steady stream of information that will come to their
BlackBerry device on exactly what they’re studying in that course. Instead of having to surf
numerous sites, and all the time that’s involved with that, the content comes to them. It’s a
paradigm shift – a change in what students can expect from the academic experience.”
The team behind the strategy believes it builds on the university’s commitment to bring real life case
studies and events into the classroom. For example, if a particularly compelling headline appeared in the
paper, a professor could alert students on the BlackBerry device with a link to the RSS newsreader, to
read the article for discussion in the class later that day. They also see the BlackBerry and RSS solution
as a vital connection to career building. According to Ann Donahue, Associate Dean.
“One of the first questions the admissions office gets is how the school will assist with job
placements after graduation,” she says. “Our students are often coming back to school in order to
make a career change or move up the ladder. Part of the stream that we set out for them are job
and internship opportunities, so they can be alerted to an opportunity.”
Their future plans also include building on stakeholder relationships, with groups such as recruiters, using
the same technology. They may soon push out streams to recruiters that include student qualifications for
internship opportunities and feedback on the top choices for positions among the student body.
What is Required: Core Technical Components
The Kogod School of Business relied on the integrated components of the BlackBerry Enterprise Solution
to securely manage their wireless connectivity behind the firewall. It piloted the solution with a small
number of users, before an initial roll out of 150 devices. It will soon have 300 devices in place for
students and faculty, with a long-term goal of deploying 600 to 800 devices. It chose BlackBerry as its
device because it offered an all-in-one device for email, phone, web and organizer that reflected the
school’s forward-thinking image.
“We’re dealing with a target audience that is younger than the traditional business audience,”
says Donahue. “The BlackBerry® 7100 Series was much more geared to a cellular form factor,
which they are used to with text messaging. This device was the newest one out there and it fit in
with our thinking; we have a reputation of not necessarily thinking with the flow, but thinking
against it.”
This year, it will be upgrading to BlackBerry Enterprise Server™ v4.0 for Lotus Domino to handle the
anticipated number of users that will be placed on the server. To create access to RSS technology, it
enabled the Mobile Data Service (MDS) feature of the BlackBerry Enterprise Server. MDS allows mobile
applications to run smoothly on BlackBerry devices. The Kogod School of Business worked closely with
its network carrier and a technology partner, New Target, to build the RSS functionality. Since New Target
had been its web partner since 2002, it turned to them to customize a newsreader that would work on the
Java-based devices. The carrier partner offered technical support to send the content over-the-air.

An aspect of RSS technology that particularly attracted the School was both its ease of updating and its
customization. The school is able to make automatic updates to the content relatively simply using the
machine-readable formats of RSS.
“We want to make sure that we provide our students with the training and expertise in the latest
business tools so that when they go for their internships, they have a ‘leg up’ on their
competitors. We chose this solution because BlackBerry is an important business tool. Among
the Fortune 500 companies, it’s increasingly becoming the tool of choice”.
Bill DeLone, Acting Dean
Looking Ahead to the Benefits
The Kogod School of Business believes, based on early feedback, it is leading the way with a solution
that fundamentally changes the learning experience. As it rolls out more BlackBerry devices, and adds
more RSS streams, it anticipates a groundswell of support and are open to the possibilities.
“I think the beauty of being a pioneer is we don’t necessarily know what the next steps will be,”
says DeLone. “I think if you’re going to be a leading business school, you need to be out in front
exploring what technology can do in business. Our goal is to make people understand the bottom
line advantage of BlackBerry and RSS beyond the traditional model of email and web. We hope
that our students will actively take over the process and show us what we can create to help
them.”
Some of the benefits that the Kogod School of Business expects from its BlackBerry and RSS wireless
solution include:
• Supporting marketing efforts by attracting new students with leading edge technology;
• Engaging students with the university before they enrol and throughout their education to build a
sense of community;
• Giving students a competitive edge by using real-world technology in their day-to-day lives;
• Improved ability to share and publicise campus news and events to create a more vibrant student
experience;
• Providing an interactive learning environment where current events can be shared wirelessly and
integrated into the classroom;
• Linking students with recruiters during their education to promote internships and job opportunities.
Available at: http://www.blackberry.com/products/pdfs/KogodSchool_CS_v1.pdf
Accessed on: 22nd February 2010
See also:
http://kogod.american.edu.
http://newsweaver.co.uk/kogod/e_article000352652.cfm?x=b11,0,w