According to Miller, the courses' greatest benefit stems not from content, but from an attitudinal shift. "The combination of analytical work, plus the cases, helps them orient their mindset," Miller says. For example, business managers "won't be great technical experts after two weeks, but this gives them a strong framework."

Collaboration with universities can come in a number of ways. Steve Finnerty, CIO of Kraft Foods Inc., recalls a cross-training effort that began with a book assignment and led to a program with Northwestern University's business school. In mid-1999, 10 to 15 top IT managers, including Finnerty, who was chief technology officer at the time, and Jim Kinney, who retired as CIO in March, met for a three-day strategy session, using Unleashing The Killer App (Harvard Business School Press, 1998), by Larry Downes and Chunka Mui, as a springboard for discussion.

To draw in business leaders, Kraft's executive committee, led by CEO Robert Eckert, then brought in Northwestern University business professor Anthony Paoni to lead a two-hour discussion of E-business strategies. That led Kraft to hire Northwestern to create a two-day E-commerce program in July for about 50 of its executives, including Finnerty and other top IT managers. "We had people surfing the Net together, conducting brainstorming sessions," Finnerty says. Managers who before thought of E-business only in terms of reaching consumers online to sell products now understand other strategies, such as business-to-business marketplaces.

Finnerty, who has an MBA, says the most important cross-training still goes on outside classrooms. Midcareer IT managers can take part in leadership programs that pair them with more senior mentors on the business side, such as finance or marketing, to provide them with real-life understanding of business issues. "Training programs only provide 10% of the growth; 90% comes from experience," Finnerty says.

In their haste to get managers up to speed, some companies are pushing universities to do more. Case in point: PricewaterhouseCoopers' strategy for putting 10,000 partners through a three-day, custom E-business strategy program. Rather than dictate a specific curriculum, PricewaterhouseCoopers went to six top business schools and asked them each to build a program focused on the characteristics an E-business executive needs, such as understanding how the Internet has increased the rate of change in business. "We want to make sure they get the message: E-business is different," says Chris Kinsey, a consultant in global E-business leadership who worked on the education program.

Last May, PricewaterhouseCoopers pushed the University of Virginia's Darden Business School to create the first course in two months, instead of a traditional six-month cycle for a new executive education course. The firm also insists that the schools--Carnegie Mellon, UCLA, University of Virginia, Insead in France, and the business schools of London and Melbourne, Australia--update the program after each session and share their courses with one another. In return, the schools get a steady flow of paying consultants and PricewaterhouseCoopers clients to the on-campus program, and the firm lets the schools sell the custom course to people unrelated to PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Traditionally, business and IT people have been on opposite sides of the room, says David Hernandez, executive creative director of consulting firm Quantum Leap Communications Inc. Hernandez is working with American Airlines Inc. to redesign its Web site using technology from BroadVision Inc. that provides customers visiting the site with personalized content. "Even to have credibility in a conversation with the IT department, you have to have a base level knowledge of what the IT people are using--so they can at least push back."

Sales and marketing executives at American Airlines are taking training with BroadVision products to keep up with the technology capabilities of their Web site, which services 32 million frequent fliers and occasional visitors. "They need to understand and manage the business rules involved in BroadVision," says John Samuels, VP of interactive marketing at the airline. "Once they can apply the business rules to the frequent-flier data in their Sabre reservation system and AAdvantage DB2 database, they can create personalized travel promotions." IT staff from US Web/CKS, which handles the technical side of the site, gets some training on the inner workings of the airline's business.

Not every executive views cross-training as a necessity in the move to E-business. Irving Miller, who was appointed VP for office of the Web at Toyota Motor Sales USA Inc. earlier this year, isn't sold on the idea. "I don't know if you need to do crossover training or not," says Miller, who comes from a business marketing background. His own approach to learning about IT involved "hours and hours and hours of surfing," and keeping up with IT publications. Of the businesspeople he's brought into his seven-month-old division, he says, "It's not a formal training that's required as much as a 'no-fear' attitude."

One of the biggest challenges of knowledge sharing is the language gap between business and IT. Surprisingly, the gap can be particularly wide at the CIO-CEO level, according to Northwestern's Paoni. CEOs tend to talk in broad strategic terms, while CIOs focus on implementation and turn to technical language. It's the difference between why do it and how to do it. "I've seen CEOs ask strategic questions and watch the CIO jump right into the how," Paoni says.

An environment imbued with change is a call to action. CIOs should be in line to become the next generation of CEOs, but executives from other areas--marketing, operations, and finance--are taking Northwestern's E-commerce executive education classes in greater numbers than IT executives. That's surprising--and it should be a wake-up call for IT professionals. "You can't get from the old economy to the new economy without a good CIO," Paoni says. "What a great time to be a CIO, if you're willing to learn."

--with additional reporting by Chris Murphy

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Illustration by Jon Conrad
Photo of Samuels by Steve McAlister