July, 2009

...now browsing by month

 

How IBM is Helping Universities Develop 21st Century Workforces

Monday, July 27th, 2009

Most leading corporations work with universities. They work closely with key schools to recruit students, enlist professors and graduate students in research initiatives and, often, fund scholarships, fellowships and awards.  A growing number of corporations also work closely with local universities to prepare students to work in new or expanding corporate locations.

A few companies are integrating all of these, plus a range of complementary activities into comprehensive university or academic initiatives. IBM’s Global University Program is one of the oldest and most comprehensive of these efforts.

IT Education

IBM began working with universities back in the 1940s and 50s, initially to help schools recognize the need for and actively develop Information Systems departments, create courses and curricula around the new discipline, and fund university research in key areas. These university initiatives have continued and expanded over the last half century, with new technology courses and research partnerships and expanded recruitment activities. Over the last decade, however, IBM has dramatically extended its initiatives to move beyond information systems and technologies to help universities prepare themselves and their students to the needs of an IT industry/community that can more effectively apply IT to addressing pressing business needs.

The company, for example, currently provides hardware and software for high schools, colleges and universities to use in teaching. Some tools, such as IBM BlueGene supercomputers are given to universities that work with IBM around mutually agreed upon research areas, such as pandemic tracking, HIV treatments, hurricane tracking and solar cell development. It also provides pre-designed, instructor-led and self-paced courses that span a broad range of technologies such as service-oriented architecture, IT management and social computing. In addition, it works with customers to help universities create more focused, skills-based programs that will help address the customer’s hiring needs, as in a Wal-Mart/University of Arkansas program to teach mainframe software skills.

Beyond IT

IBM, however, itself hires, and also sees rapidly growing market needs for its partners and customers to hire people with skills that transcend IT. It is proselytizing the concept of the “T-shaped person”, one with deep skills in a particular discipline, but enough of an understanding of complementary fields to understand concepts, appreciate requirements and constructively participate in interdisciplinary dialogs and teams. For example, it is working with more than 250 universities to design courses and entire inter-department research initiative it calls Service Science or Service Science, Management and Engineering, SSME for short. This field, which combines fields including computer science, operations research, engineering, management sciences, business strategy, and social and cognitive sciences, is an effort to redefine a broad range of services-based processes and tasks to make them more efficient and scalable.

The company is in the process of dramatically expanding its inter-departmental university initiatives in an effort to engage professors and students around its Smarter Planet initiatives. It is, for example, developing courses and curricula that combine business, IT, civil engineering and urban planning disciplines to help prepare students to design Smarter Cities and similarly diverse combinations around Smarter Healthcare, Energy, Food and other “Smarter initiatives.”

IBM is particularly intent on helping universities train students to apply sophisticated analytics to all types of business needs (from protein folding to supply-chain optimization) and to ensuring that business school students can work more effectively with IT to address business needs, such as by using modeling tools to quickly define, test and optimize business processes. And since a number of these students are avid gamers, IBM is attempting to speak to them in their language, as though its interactive, INNOV8 Business Process Modeling (BPM) game.

Although these forms of cross-disciplinary university programs are still relatively small compared to its IT-specific efforts, they are becoming increasingly critical to its future, as evidenced by the fact that IBM named Dr. Jim Spohrer, director of IBM’s SSME research (http://forums.thesrii.org/blog?blog.id=main_blog), as director of the company’s Global University Programs.

Beyond IBM

Although many of these initiatives are specific to IBM, the company does enlist vendor partners in some initiatives. These include a partnership with Google to co-develop a university program to teach requirements for developing for new, open, cloud-based environments. It is partnering much more broadly around its huge SSME initiative.  For example, it partnered with competitors, including HP, Oracle, Microsoft and EMC to create the Service Research & Innovation Initiative and established links with a number of complementary organizations including IEEE, the Conference Board and the Kaufman Foundation.

Why is IBM devoting so much effort to training the employees of the future? Who better than to understand the needs of the workforce of the future, than an employer of the future?

Posted in 21st Century Careers, Business Trends, Corporate Social Responsibility, Creating the 21st Century Workforce, Economic and Political Forces, Education System and Institutions, Globalization, Immigration and Offshoring, IBM, IT Industry and Companies, IT Industry Role in Education, IT Industry's Role, Job and Career Opportunities, Skills Requirements, Societal Forces, STEM Careers, Technology's Impact on Job Skills, Universities and Grad Schools, Workforce Trends | 1 Response »

The Impact of Offshore R&D on America’s Technological Competitiveness

Thursday, July 9th, 2009

The Conventional Wisdom

There was no debate. The diagnosis was virtually unanimous. Although the U.S. remains the overwhelming leader in technological innovation, its lead is declining. First there was the Japan challenge of the 1970s and 1980s; then the Asian Tigers in the 1980s and 90s; now it is India and China. Both are huge countries with educated populations and demonstrated strengths in different, but complementary technological areas—software development and manufacturing, respectively—with both in the process of building world-class R&D capabilities in critical technologies including IT, pharmaceuticals, nanotech and in many segments of GreenTech—especially around critical, potentially foundation technologies such as lithium-ion iron phosphate batteries.

 

The high-level prescriptions had been similarly virtually unanimous. First, the U.S. must dramatically increase educational quality and quantity (number of graduates) in all types of technical disciplines (science, engineering, math, IT, or SEMIT). And it should do so at all levels of the educational spectrum, from secondary schools, through trade schools and community colleges, through the leading research universities. Second, the U.S. must dramatically increase the amount of high-level R&D investment—both directly through government spending and indirectly though tax incentives for corporate investment.

 

The debates had been on the details—how much, which technologies, what should be the level of government involvement, how to accomplish each goal and so forth.

 

A Radical Rethink

Columbia Business School Professor Amar Bhidé, however, has recently made a heretical argument that fundamentally challenges the conventional wisdom. He argues that not only will the commonly accepted prescriptions not work—they will end up damaging the U.S.’s long-term technological competitiveness. He argues that the U.S. should encourage a proliferation of high-level, global research that results in scientific publications and patents.

 

He further suggests that rather than encourage our children to grow up to become PhDs, we should encourage them to develop solid foundational SEMIT skills that they can apply to business disciplines. Why? Because high-level scientific information increasingly passes seamlessly across borders and is available at a relatively low cost. The real economic value is created not by the high-level concept, but by the “mass productization” of the concept, the commercialization of the offering and, especially, by its productive use by its customers. Therefore, the U.S. would get a much greater bang for its technological buck by offshoring much of the high-level R&D and focusing domestic efforts on developing, commercializing and applying this technology.

 

Beyond IT Recommendations

This hypothesis, while running counter to the accepted wisdom, has profound implications. The U.S. must certainly improve our own SEMIT education and all levels through university. Although we must do all in our power to sustain the supremacy of our graduate research programs, we should accept the fact that these programs will continue to be populated largely, if not predominantly by foreign-born students. Contrary to current government policy, we should make it easy and attractive for these graduates to remain in the U.S. while assuming that a growing percentage will find it more attractive to return to their home countries.

 

As a national priority and corporate necessity, the U.S. must domestically control its overall high-level research agendas. However, some key technology research should not only be allowed, but encouraged to be performed offshore. But while offshore research should be allowed to expand significantly, U.S.-based companies must control their own long-term agendas, either through captive offshore research arms or though close guidance or collaboration with partners.

 

However, although we should allow growing portions of our basic research to be performed offshore, the U.S. must continue to own a number of other links of the R&D value chain, Our focus, rather than on training huge numbers of pure scientists, should be on training two other types of SEMIT-savvy people:

 

  1. Mid-level solutions engineers that are focused on applying technology to addressing market requirements. These engineers would pick-and-choose among basic research innovations to determine those that are best suited to addressing customer needs and create marketable products.
  2. A much larger number of business architects who would tailor these new solutions of the unique requirements of particular companies.

 

Successful utilization of these new professionals will require new and different training and management programs, and career paths.

 

Potential Gotchas

Every approach, including this one, has risks. As I see it, there are three particularly big potential pitfalls in relying on offshore sources for basic innovation:

 

 

  

  1. A country that develops key “chokehold” technology refuses to make it available to foreign companies;
  2. The U.S. is slow to adopt, and therefore loses ground-level leadership in critical applied technologies, such as CleanTech; and
  3. U.S. companies focus on applying technologies to the needs of rich, developed markets, and leave the application of technology to emerging companies to other companies—thereby forgoing high-volume markets and allowing non-U.S. companies to build secure beachheads from which they can attack developed country markets.

 

The good news is that each, as discussed fully in my report,The Impact of Offshore R&D on U.S. Technological Competitiveness, has different levels of risk and each can be proactively remedied.

 

Posted in 21st Century Careers, Business Trends, Creating the 21st Century Workforce, Economic and Political Forces, Economic Forces, Global Forces-General, Globalization, Immigration and Offshoring, Innovation/Entrepeneur, IT Industry and Companies, IT Industry Trends, Skills Requirements, STEM Careers, Technology's Impact on Job Skills | No Responses »

Integrating Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) into the Global Knowledge Economy (GKE)

Sunday, July 5th, 2009

In my last 2 posts (Welcome to the Global Knowledge Economy and
Why the Private Sector Must Develop a Socially Responsive Workforce Globalization), I explain some of the huge impacts that the type of global knowledge economy (GKE) strategies that are required for corporate survival are likely to have on employees, students, families and communities. Although the vast majority of corporations want to protect these constituencies, most will find it incredibly difficult to reconcile their GKE business mandates with their corporate social responsibilities (CSRs).

But if the private sector can’t reconcile these increasingly irresistible corporate forces, the government may be forced to do it for them. And in all likelihood, it won’t be pretty.

There are, however, options. Although no corporation will be able to protect all of their current employees from the offshoring of jobs, they can play a much more aggressive role than most have currently played in identifying and in helping individuals prepare for the jobs that will not only be sustainable in a GKE, but will also provide the most interesting work and pay the highest salaries.

The private sector—primarily in the form of large global corporations—must become much more proactive in defining their long-term skills requirements, identifying the locations in which different types of skills are most likely to be deployed, and in preparing current and future employees for the jobs that will be most sustainable in each country. Ideally, they will go further to at least partially defuse what is certain to become a GKE time bomb.

global-knowledge-economy-ticking-time-bomb

Although such actions are desirable for all countries, they are particularly critical in the developed countries that are likely to face the greatest losses of existing jobs, and in which political ramifications of inaction are likely to be the greatest. And, if these corporations act properly, they can potentially do much more than just protect their employees and their reputations and stave off government mandates. They also have the potential of simultaneously sowing the seeds for more sustainable knowledge-based economies and, in the process, enlisting the support of some powerful government allies.

To do so, leading global companies will have to play much more proactive roles in:

  • Creating visions around and identifying roadmaps for building careers that will be both sustainable and lucrative in a global knowledge economy; and by
  • Designing curricula and mobilizing a broad range of educational institutions and private training companies to prepare current and future employees for the sustainable knowledge jobs of the future.

But before they can even begin to lay out such a vision, they must answer a number of critical questions. For example:

  • What type of jobs will be most and least susceptible to offshoring, and over what timeframes?
  • What will the most sustainable developed country jobs look like?
  • What career paths must companies provide to help current employees prepare for these jobs?
  • How should students prepare? What educational backgrounds and skills must current and prospective employees obtain?
  • Which schools, universities and training programs will be best suited to teaching these skills and what capabilities must they develop to do so?
  • What can developed countries learn from experiences of India, China and other countries in rapidly educating, training and mobilizing huge numbers of knowledge workers?
  • What can companies and governments do to insulate workers from—and when necessary, provide safety nets and retraining and placement programs for workers who fall between—the GKE cracks?
  • What must students and employees do to best prepare themselves not just to survive, but to thrive in the global knowledge economy?

While the private sector in general, and large global corporations in particular, must take a lead in answering these questions, a handful of large corporations developing plans behind closed doors are likely to engender more public suspicion than support. Although these corporations should probably begin evaluating options, testing solutions and defining proposals in small groups, they must expose their solutions well before they are forced to, and try to build support among key political and education sector constituencies. In the U.S., for example, leading corporations may, for example:

  • Coordinate work on and recommendations around these issues though organizations such as the Business Roundtable and the Research Board;
  • Share research agendas, findings and recommendations with appropriate government teams, such as the Middle Force Task Force (which includes leaders of the Departments of Labor and Commerce and White House National Economic and Domestic Policy, among others); and
  • Engage with education leaders to help identify the roles that different types of institutions can play in educating and training students and workers for these new roles, and what the private sector can do to help.

The private sector may certainly be tempted to delay publicizing the issues surrounding knowledge workforce globalization for as long as possible. After all, why should corporations voluntarily surface such potentially controversial issues before it is necessary—or before they have an opportunity to fully prepare themselves?

Although it may certainly be tempting to hide or even obfuscate the issues, it may not be wise. In the end, the private sector is likely to get a fairer, less heated hearing by proactively framing the discussion and proposing tested solutions than it will by being thrown, unprepared into a seething public controversy.

Posted in 21st Century Careers, Business Trends, Corporate Social Responsibility, Creating the 21st Century Workforce, Economic and Political Forces, Global Forces-General, Globalization, Immigration and Offshoring, IT Industry and Companies, IT Industry Role in Education, IT Industry Trends, Job and Career Opportunities, Societal Forces, Workforce Trends | No Responses »
Tags: , , , , , ,