Breaking up at Bunker Hill

Two years ago, administrators at Bunker Hill Community College in Boston made a radical change. To focus on emerging technologies, they split off the school's business- and industry-focused IT program from the traditional computer IT program. "I think we're the first community college in the country to divide its IT program in two," says Andrea Lyons, chairwoman of the IT for Business and Industry program. "We realized we had to respond more quickly to the needs of business. We had to be able to add and drop classes and even whole programs much faster."

To get that rapid turnaround, Lyons says, each area of study needed its own industry advisory board, instead of having just one board for the whole IT department, as is customary. "Our networking program was not going to get reactions on what is cutting-edge from a broad-ranging board that included programming, database and Web development people," she says.

The new advisory boards can give focused advice. For example, when Lyons recently questioned whether to drop a NetWare course in favor of one on Linux, she had access to the views of six executives in local networking companies. Lyons, who has been teaching at Bunker Hill for nine years, says she depends on these newly formed boards to keep her up to date.

"Security and IP communications have really come to the forefront in networking recently," says Dave Hart, executive vice president and chief technology officer at Networked Information Systems LLC in Woburn, Mass., and one of Lyons' industry advisers. "How are you going to be aware of that if you've been out of the workforce nine years and spend all day teaching? That's why I think it's a brilliant move on her part to reach out to the local business community. After all, we're her customers. I'm relying on those students to help make my company better."