I started to look closely at some IT focussed MBAs today. It's interesting to me because I'm working in conjunction with a university that is setting up a professional Masters degree in Technology Management, and we wanted to look at the opposition.
In fact I'm rather converted to some of the NBAs we looked at, and felt that they were clear in their focus, but gave a generalist background that could be used by someone who had spent much of their working life in a specialism. So as a good addition for business administration they really seemed to work.
In fact we worked out that this kind of MBA is not competition for what we want to do; for us pure management is more the issue, and so we would look for a different kind of candidate. Interesting though, and we need to be sure that our potential students see the two products as something very different.
Many MBA programs have specialisms that allow you to study business administration as it applies to your area of management. For instance there are MBAs in Finance, in Human Resources and in IT. There are also MBA programs that are geared towards specific kinds of organisations. It's possible to study MBAs for Health Administration, for Education and for Non-Profit Making Organisations.
These specially focussed programs do not neglect the generalist nature of an MBA program. They still give a background of all the management functional areas, and work on a practical basis. But they concentrate on the area that they are dealing with and allow students to work out the special relationships they need to forge in order to work in their chosen areas effectively.
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