Jason Frand appointed director GSM Computing
Services
July 1, 1980
In June 1980, then Associate Dean Bill Broesamle offered me
the position of director of the Graduate School of Management
Computing Services (GSMCS). July 1, 1980, I assume the role
and was given the explicit direction to work with Professor Ephriam
McClean, then head of the Information Systems academic area, to
prepare a proposal to HP for a computer. Broesamle related that he
had been at a lunch with Richard Knudtsen, UCLA MBA class 1968, who
was now
quite high in the HP organizational structure. Knudtsen had told
Broesamle that HP hired more UCLA MBAs than from any other school
and HP wanted to do
something for the school. Broesamle suggested a computer. Knudtsen
said, "give
us a proposal."
Two major fortuitous events occurred with my appointment and this
directive. Broesamle suggest that I call a few other business
schools to find out about their computing environments as that would
help our proposal. As it happen, within a couple of weeks of
weeks I received two different phone calls,
one from UC Berkeley and the other from Washington U in Saint Louis,
each
asking about our computing environment. I told these callers
that if
they shared their information with me, I’d assemble it into a report
for all
of us. This report, Software Trends and Issues in Business
School Computing,
appeared as an Information Systems Working Paper in June 1982.
In spring
1984, I was approached by an IBM executive requesting 50 copies of
the report
for a dean’s IT seminar. I indicated the report was
out-of-date as
so much had happen in the intervening two years. The IBM
executive responded
that the report was "the best information available," and he asked
for a
proposal to update the information. This was the beginning the
annual
UCLA business school surveys, which ran continuously for the next 16
years.
The second fortune event was that HP assigned a field manager with
responsibility for coordinating HP recruiting at the school, John
Mack, to coordinate the UCLA-HP computer efforts. Mack worked
with me to identify and configure the HP system that would be most
appropriate for our environment. Our proposal was submitted to
the HP Foundation in September 1980. However, the
request was so large compared to their usual grants of instruments
to engineering departments, that the Foundation required two funding
cycles to have the resources to fulfill the request. In spring
1982, a HP 3000
Series 44 systems with an amazing 240 megabytes of storage (2 120 MB
drives)
was installed. The Fall 1982 Managerial Computing Mgmt 404
course,
was the first session to utilize this new environment, moving the
School
from "stone-age" card punched programming to real-time, interactive,
database
assignments . Mack worked with GSMCS to install and
bring the
system online. However, this was the beginning of John Mack’s
importance.
He immediate saw the valuable use of the system so encourage me to
prepare
a follow up proposal to the HP Foundation. He suggested that I
write
the proposal with a three year horizon: what we need now and
what we
will need next year and the year after. For the next ten
years, the
UCLA Graduate School of Management submitted and received major
equipment
grants from the HP Foundation. The magic formula for each of
those
proposal was "this is our three year planning horizon." The
incredible
power of that planning formula was that a faculty IT committee
worked on
ideas for the use of technology in the school, and was rewarded with
the
actual arrival of equipment which could be used to enhance the
research and
instructional environment.
But HP was not the only granting opportunity of the 1980s. IBM
and Apple were other hardware contributors while Ashton-Tate,
Microsoft, and Novell
were major software contributors.
A core value that I brought to my role of director was that I saw
myself, and the Computing Services organization which emerged, as a
educational arm of the school. Training and educational
support were the driving force of what we did. When I assumed
the directorship in July 1980, there was one full-time staff person,
a key-entry operator, and two part time students programming
consultants. I recall that one of the first changes was
to have the consultants conduct training sessions and group help
sessions on the programming languages rather than only working only
one-on-one. Training was thus established as part of the
offering and continued until the present time.
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jason.frand@anderson.ucla.edu
November 1, 2002