IBM announces collaborative SSME intiative with ISB and other schools in India

IBM, at the first India Service Science, Mangement and Engineering (SSME) - 2007 conference held in Banglore announced collaborative SSME curriculum initiatives with leading business and tech schools in India.

The company had signed a memorandum of understanding, earlier this year with Indian School of Business (ISB), Hyderabad. While signing the MoU, Professor Rammohan Rao, Dean, ISB said, "A strong industry academia partnership is extremely important for us to provide management education that is relevant and current. I am sure that IBM and the ISB together can conduct cutting edge research that will be immediately applicable in India, and also successfully replicated elsewhere in the world. The ISB is proud to be associated with IBM for pioneering this research in India."

"The aim of this agreement is to support ISB to open the SSME Program which includes high-end research, development of case studies and curriculum for the Executive Education and the Post Graduate Program in Management with the help of IBM so that the discipline of service science can be developed and lead to nurturing specialized human resources," said Dr. Daniel M Dias, Director, IBM India Research Laboratory.

Professor Viswanadham, Executive Director, Centre for Global Logistics and Manufacturing Strategies (GLAMS) at the ISB said, "With 30 % of our economy dependent on it, the service sector plays a very important role in the Indian economy. The Centre for Global Logistics and Manufacturing Strategies will explore innovative possibilities to streamline, transform and automate processes and develop human resources to deliver services more efficiently. The study will focus on service chains connected with ITES, Retail, Textiles, Logistics, Supply Chain Finance, Human Resource Management, Business Services and others."

IBM is working closely with IIM, Banglore, IITs, and Indian Institute of Science, Banglore to advance SSME research in the region. Dr. C. Mohan, IBM Fellow and Chief Scientist, IBM India, said, "The new academic initiative is designed to prepare graduate students for careers in the evolving multi-disciplinary field of services management. In the 1950s, IBM made a similar effort to help establish computer science as a new academic discipline."

S. P. Jain Institute of Management and Research, Mumbai (SPJIMR) has partnered with IBM to study IT deployment services management model. The study results will help SPJIMR and IBM to develop a courseware in services design.

Nirma Institute of Management (NIM), Ahmedabad, has teamed with IBM to study managed deployment of eGovernance services. The study result is expected to provide guidance in managing the IT-based system deployment of eGovernment projects particularly in the area of citizen services and to contribute in developing a courseware on the eGovernance services.

The new programs draw on research and teaching in the fields of computer science, computer engineering, business strategy and management sciences to help students develop the skills required in a technology-based, services-led economy.

IBM said many leading universities across the world have begun exploring and investing in the field of service science, also called service sciences, management and engineering (SSME), to develop exactly these cross-disciplinary skills. University of California, Berkeley, Arizona State University and North Carolina State University are among a handful of universities in the United States that have established programs in service science. Universities in Europe and Asia are also creating programs in this area.

The goal of the SSME discipline is to drive productivity, quality and sustainability of services, while making the learning rates and innovation rates more predictable across the service sector, especially in complex organization to organization services including business to business, nation to nation and government to population.This new academic discipline brings together ongoing work in fields of computer science, operations research, industrial engineering, business strategy, management sciences, social, cognitive and legal sciences, to develop skills required in a services-led economy. The global SSME research community is aggressively laying the groundwork for this challenging new research area.

Complete Source Articles:-

• IBM Announces Collaborative SSME Curriculum Intiatives in India - itnewsonline - 24-06-2007
• IBM and ISB Launch Major Services Initiative in India - ZDnetindia.com - 07-02-2007

Textbooks free for developing countries

In an attempt to meet the needs of university students in developing countries, Richard Watson, director of the University of Georgia’s Center for Information Systems Leadership, has teamed up with leading professors to create a series of “$0” textbooks.

The goal is to create a free library of 1,000 electronic textbooks. A prototype is already complete, and the first official release will be this month (January). While the initial books will be business related, Prof Watson and the other Global Text professors are recruiting volunteers to write texts for the full range of university topics. The texts will be translated into Spanish, Arabic and Chinese with the assistance of faculty and students around the globe.

The Global Text Project uses a modified version of the Wiki software that powers the website Wikipedia. The project enables students to get free access to the Wiki-based textbooks, each of which will come in pdf and other formats so that it can be inexpensively printed for students without internet access. The Wiki software has also been modified so that only the book’s editors can accept readers’ changes.

The first GTP book will focus on Information Systems. Each book chapter has been assigned to a different academic which means that 17 professors from five different countries will be involved in the process.

Source Link : Textbooks free for developing countries - The Financial Times