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IBM’s Plan to Transform University IT Education And Spur Student Enthusiasm in the Process—Summary

Sunday, May 2nd, 2010

This week’s blog is an overview of the findings of my new report, “IBM’s Plan to Transform University IT Education: And Spur Student Enthusiasm in the Process” in which I examine how IBM’s university alliances have evolved to emphasize education in areas that transcend IT skills, and the long-term benefits that IBM is likely to derive from this approach.

IBM started its Academic Initiative in the 1950s when it helped universities create Information Science programs. It extended this program around specific IT and engineering skills and then, in 2003 added a Service Science, Management and Engineering (SSME) initiative.

This SSME initiative went way beyond the university efforts of IBM—as well as most other vendors—that traditionally focused on “hard” science and technology skills, such as around programming, database design, electrical engineering and physics. SSME, in contrast, emphasizes the needs for universities to encourage multi-disciplinary education and the need to develop T-shaped skills, which combine deep skills in one or more fields, plus a high-level understanding across many others. IBM worked with universities to help professors expand the focus of their own courses and departmental curricula and, most importantly, to coordinate curricula across multiple schools within a university.

It, for example, encouraged and helped schools refocus engineering education around real-world problems and train engineers to work in multi-disciplinary teams. It also challenged business schools to evolve their traditional focus on management of manufacturing companies (which now accounts for less than 20% of developed-country economies) to developing a similarly rigorous management science around services (which already account for about 60%). Some 40 universities have are going further, creating truly integrated curricula that cross traditionally sacrosanct boundaries—integrating courses across schools including management, information science, engineering and social science. A few have even begun offering new cross-school degree programs around SSME-related themes.

Smarter Planet—Using SSME to Change the World

IBM’s huge, corporate-wide Smarter Planet initiative is, in many ways, the application of SSME to critical, real-world problems. SSME, after all, is an effort to create a science around decomposing and recomposing service-based processes, optimizing service supply chains and value chains and creating interdisciplinary research centers to design and optimize complex “service systems”—combinations of people, organizational networks and technologies that are aligned around a specific objective, such as designing and managing more livable cities, more effective healthcare systems and more efficient energy networks.

This effectively transforms SSME from an academic discipline into an instrument for addressing societal needs. It provides universities with the tools required to create education tracks and, eventually, degree programs around social goals—thereby attracting and making it easier for students who want to “change the world”. Moreover, IBM’s efforts to help shape educational curricula across Smarter Planet initiatives now transcends traditional information science, engineering and business schools to reach into areas including mathematics, architecture, healthcare management, public service, urban studies, and others.

Although such programs may not attract those students who are driven to become hedge fund managers or musicians, they do have the potential of attracting and providing “employment-ready” educations for millions of other students with similarly strong drives in other fields.

Engineering a Path to an IBM Job

Virtually all corporate university education programs share a common goal—to facilitate the education of students with the skills and perspective required to address the talent needs of the sponsor corporation, its customers and its partners. It’s easy to see the direct benefit that IBM can gain from programs that teach System z mainframe skills, that Intel can gain from multi-core architecture design programs or that Wal-Mart can derive from the University of Arkansas’ supply-chain optimization program.

But what benefits will IBM gain from encouraging universities to launch broad, non-vendor specific programs like SSME, healthcare management and transportation system design? The company’s logo isn’t on or necessarily associated with these programs, nor is IBM the first place most newly-minted graduates would look for a job to solve world hunger—unless, perhaps, you know about IBM’s Smarter Food program and its projects to increase agricultural yields, improve sustainability, reduce waste through the optimization of supply chains and improve food inspection processes.

That’s where some of IBM’s multiple university outreach programs fit in. The company has 4,000 University Ambassadors, typically IBM domain experts, who volunteer to work with universities to engage with faculty members, develop classes around real-world problems, deliver guest lectures, participate in seminars and otherwise engage with professors and students. The company also provides education tools, such as its INNOV8 Business Process Modeling (BPM) simulation game and is adapting many of its other courses to new learning methods, as through support of community portals and wikis, discussion forums, blogs, and Facebook and Twitter communities.

It also has an active university research program through which it funds professors and graduate students to conduct specialized research and all types of fellowship and internship programs in which it works with professors to identify high-potential students. It also partners with universities on IBM’s annual Battle of the Brains competition, the most recent of which attracted more than 28,000 students from 2,000 universities worldwide. These competitions engage interdisciplinary teams to tackle real world problems. The theme of these competitions? Would you guess they are typically aligned around one of IBM’s 21 (and growing) Smarter Planet themes?

IBM will certainly not attract or hire all of the graduates from SSME and Smarter Planet-theme programs. Nor does it want to. Although it hopes, and is positioning itself to identify and recruit some of the most talented graduates, its ultimate objective is to seed the world—its businesses, governments, NGOs and universities—with people who think about the world’s needs (and solutions) in much the same way that IBM does, who have been touched by IBM Ambassadors and programs, who understand IBM products, and who recognize that IBM is dedicated to addressing the same types of needs as are they.

This all leaves me with two questions. When will other corporations recognize the long-term payoffs of this broader approach to partnering with universities? And, how will they reach professors and students in the myriad fields that will be increasingly reshaped and redefined by IT?

Posted in 21st Century Careers, Business Trends, Corporate Social Responsibility, Creating the 21st Century Workforce, Education System and Institutions, Globalization, Immigration and Offshoring, IBM, IT Company Strategies, IT Industry and Companies, IT Industry Role in Education, Job and Career Opportunities, Skills Requirements, STEM Careers, Technology's Impact on Job Skills, Universities and Grad Schools, Workforce Trends | No Responses »
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Universities as Catalysts for IBM’s National Roadmaps

Sunday, December 20th, 2009

My December 13 blog, IBM National Roadmaps: Creating National Workforce Development Strategies, described the process by which IBM works with countries to create national roadmaps—detailed development plans that identify the types of services in which countries, regions, states or cities have the foundation for comparative advantage and the steps that must be taken to realize these plans.

Although these roadmaps provide detailed recommendations and timelines for achieving them, what will prevent the roadmaps from “enjoying” the same ignominious fate of so many other consulting studies? 

Two things. First, when the study is a prelude to a potential investment by IBM, the initiative is formalized in a Memorandum of Understanding in which each party commits to defined investments and schedules.

More importantly, IBM has at its disposal a not-so-secret weapon—its University Alliances Program. As discussed in my October 2009 report, IBM’s Effort to Create the Workforce of the Future, IBM has made a huge investment in and is actively partnering with universities. It draws heavily on these relationships to turn its National Roadmap visions into reality.

The Batteries of Nations

IBM sees universities as “the batteries of nations”—the primary vehicles for creating and storing a country’s knowledge. Therefore, it selects clusters of some of each nation’s top research universities and partners with them to help:

  • Create the talent required under the roadmap by helping sufficient numbers of students develop the required skills;
  • Pioneer the services systems that will insure that the services developed in the nation will be effective, efficient and sustainable in a global services economy; and
  • Facilitate the creation of the national infrastructure that will be required for the country to achieve its development goals.

Talent development is the most fundamental of universities goals. IBM’s role is in helping these universities identify the types of skills that will be most required for tomorrow’s jobs, helping them create the curricula for teaching these skills and, where appropriate, volunteer IBM domain experts as advisors or adjunct professors. (See How IBM is Helping Universities Develop 21st Century Workforces for a specific discussion of IBM’s University Alliance program and its talent creation efforts.)

Developing the people required to man a world-class services center is a necessary first step. However, as mentioned, producing service delivery providers (and eventually managers and executives) for these centers provides little real value if the center is not capable of maintaining a long-term advantage relative to other countries with lower cost structures.

IBM, therefore, also helps local universities develop the skills required to design and continually upgrade the processes, technologies and organizational models surrounding the services that will be delivered in the country. It works with these universities to create Services Science, Management and Engineering, or SSME curricula, helps prepare professors to teach and lead research projects around these areas and helps the universities create the type of interdisciplinary research centers required to coordinate and drive research around these systems. And since no university (or even cluster of universities) is an island unto itself, IBM also helps create links among universities in other countries with complementary research focuses.

IBM also helps these universities address the host country’s infrastructure requirements by identifying the region within the country that will be most appropriate for a large service facility—typically an urban center with a critical mass of top universities, talent and the foundations for the required IT, communications and transportation infrastructures. 

It helps them identify the infrastructure enhancements that will be required and works with the universities to create research centers (such as around energy, communications or transportation) to focus on these needs. It even participates in programs designed to help countries implement such systems, as with India’s Great Mind Challenge, in which students (under the guidance of professors) donate time to help local governments automate traditionally manual functions.

Conclusions

IBM provides all these services worldwide and uses the same type process for helping design SSME curricula and services centers in all countries, including in the U.S., as for its new Iowa service center.

However, while IBM does appear to have more formalized models than most other companies for handling more of the pieces for helping countries execute on national roadmaps, it is certainly not alone. Many leading management consultancies perform similar analyses for national and regional governments and for corporations. Meanwhile, any large vendor preparing to make the huge investments associated with creating a large service center in a new country or state, will perform similar analyses and establish similar (albeit typically more narrowly focused) alliances with local universities.

Some such studies have even been performed for the U.S. A few have gone beyond studies, generating bi-partisan support and culminating in laws, such as the National Innovation Act of 2006. But given the incredible level of partisan controversy surrounding the last such study and law (The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009), it is unlikely that we will see many more such studies, not to speak of broad-based support of any type of meaningful plan, in the near future.

That’s a shame. While the U.S. is currently preoccupied with the need to create jobs, it appears that in our current state, we will be satisfied with virtually any job. We can worry later about whether that job will yield high value, provide a viable career path or be sustainable in an increasingly global economy and workforce.

Oh well, perhaps it is better not to have a plan. After all, if we don’t have a plan or a specific goal, any path will get us there. 

Posted in 21st Century Careers, Business Trends, Corporate Social Responsibility, Creating the 21st Century Workforce, Economic and Political Forces, Economic Forces, Global Forces-General, Globalization, Immigration and Offshoring, IBM, IT Company Strategies, IT Industry and Companies, IT Industry Role in Education, IT Industry Trends, IT/Business Consulting/Outsourcing, Job and Career Opportunities, Political Forces, Skills Requirements, STEM Careers, Universities and Grad Schools, Workforce Trends | 1 Response »
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IBM National Roadmaps: Creating National Workforce Development Strategies

Sunday, December 13th, 2009

I’ve written a lot about IBM workforce development efforts over the past few months. My July 27 blog, How IBM is Helping Universities Develop 21st Century Workforces, specifically examined the company’s Academic Initiative. My October 11 blog, IBM’s Role in Creating Tomorrow’s Workforce, as well as in a more detailed report, I assessed the company’s broader approach to workforce development.

IBM’s workforce development efforts, however, extend well beyond helping universities and its own employees prepare for the careers of the future. The company’s National Roadmaps, and associated Innovation Roadmaps, help entire countries develop and jumpstart broad, national workforce development programs.

National Roadmaps

National Roadmaps (and their state, local and regional corollaries) are government-backed economic development plans that define specific development objectives and identify the requirements for achieving them.

Although government bodies can create their own roadmaps, IBM’s Governmental Programs office can help. This integrated corporate group draws on resources from across the company to help governments create and lay the foundations for achieving long-term economic and societal strategies.

These roadmaps, on which IBM has worked with more than 15 countries (including the U.S., U.K., India, Brazil and Australia), can be initiated as a means of addressing current or anticipated needs, as part of an integrated economic development strategy or, more tactically, as a means of attracting IBM and other technology companies to increase hiring in their countries.

The first step in preparing these roadmaps entails working with the government body to identify the country or region’s unique advantages, their primary development opportunities and their highest-payoff approaches for developing sustainable jobs. IBM then uses its Global Business Services’ Component Business Model to identify the region’s current assets, gaps, hotspots (in which investments will yield the greatest benefits) and key performance indicators (with which to measure and assess progress).

The next step is to reach agreement on three primary requirements for achieving the roadmap’s goals. These requirements are the:

  1. Talent, people and skills that will be required;
  2. Infrastructure, including the educational, IT and communications requirements; and
  3. Investment, to ensure the availability of funds to address the agreed upon talent and infrastructure development commitments.

Innovation Roadmaps

An Innovation Roadmap is the necessary first step in any National Roadmap. It specifies the types of services that the country is aspiring to develop, the number of people that must be trained, the “services systems” that will be required to effectively and efficiently deliver services and the role that the government, IBM and other corporations and local universities will play in developing these service systems.

Services systems are the critical component of any effective service-based model. These systems consist of the combination of people, processes and technologies (either within individual, or across multiple organizations) for producing and delivering a service. It ensures that each service process is specifically defined, consistently performed and measurable.

This type of “scientific” service design ensures that each service instance (wherever, and by whomever it is performed) is consistent and that deviations can be immediately detected and addressed. Just as importantly, it allows each service to be continually evaluated and optimized to improve effectiveness and efficiency. This creates the potential for a type of continual improvement (something of a Moore’s Law of services) and for allowing individual countries to maintain comparative advantage relative to competitors with lower cost structures.

Where’s the Beef?

Interesting concept, but what keeps these Roadmaps from being just another academic study—a presentation to which all participants eagerly nod their heads and a nicely bound report that sits on the shelf to collect dust?

That is the subject of next week’s blog.

Posted in 21st Century Careers, Corporate Social Responsibility, Creating the 21st Century Workforce, Economic and Political Forces, Economic Forces, Education System and Institutions, Global Forces-General, Globalization, Immigration and Offshoring, IBM, IT Company Strategies, IT Industry and Companies, IT Industry Role in Education, IT Industry Trends, IT/Business Consulting/Outsourcing, Job and Career Opportunities, Other Schools, Political Forces, Skills Requirements, STEM Careers, Technology's Impact on Job Skills, Universities and Grad Schools, Workforce Trends | 1 Response »
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Preparing for Careers in Cloud Computing and Technical Analytics

Sunday, November 22nd, 2009

My last blog, Business Analytics as a High-Value Career Opportunity, examined the growth and career opportunities inherent in using analytics to improve business functions and processes. However, analytics applications—and the increasingly powerful tools that enable them—are also creating incredible new opportunities for graduates in a broad range of technical disciplines.

Two leading technology vendors, IBM and Google, in cooperation with a government agency, have taken an important step in helping students prepare for careers in these promising new fields. Not coincidentally, this work will help these vendors enhance the IT architectures, create the application development skills and build a base of developers that will instrumental in creating new-generation computing infrastructures and applications on which these vendors hope to build their own futures.

Building the Foundation for Large-Scale Internet Computing

There is nothing new about large-scale technical computing. Scientists and engineers have long used the world’s most powerful supercomputers to perform complex calculations on huge data sets—the type of computations required to model and visualize complex interactions and simulate outcomes.

What is new is that a growing portion of this work is migrating from huge, expensive and traditionally proprietary supercomputers and software, to distributed, cloud-based architectures that consist of clusters of hundreds or thousands of standard PCs, connected through open standard interfaces, and applications developed with open source tools.

In October 2007, IBM and Google partnered to create the IBM/Google Cloud Computing University Initiative, which provided several universities with access to a large cluster running the Hadoop open source distributed computing platform. The companies provided the required hardware, software and services and recruited six leading computer science research organization (University of Washington, Carnegie-Mellon, MIT, Stanford, U of C Berkeley and University of Maryland) to participate in a pilot program. Then, in February 2008, IBM and Google partnered with the National Science Foundation (NSF) to provide grants to academic researchers to explore large-data architectural issues and create applications that could take advantage of this infrastructure.

Technical Analytics Enablement

As of October 2009, the NSF had awarded $5 million in grants to 14 universities for various research projects.. Most of these projects have a dual goal of:

  1. Improving computer science students’ knowledge of highly parallel computing practices; and of
  2. Spurring research into specific aspects of large-scale, data-intensive cloud cluster architectures and application development.

The first award, to the University of Washington, has the broadest, most foundational goal. It is intended to help jumpstart the widespread teaching of large-scale cluster computing to large numbers of computer science and software engineering teachers and students across multiple undergraduate universities. It is creating a 2.5 day workshop that provides course material and curricular support that professors at undergraduate universities around the world can use to develop their own courses.

Most awards, however, are intended to fund advanced research into specific particularly knotty problems that must be addressed for cloud to become a ubiquitous platform. A number of the initial grants focus on search—the primary horizontal application of cloud technology and the foundation of Google’s market position. For example, Carnegie-Mellon, University of California-Santa Barbara and University of Massachusetts-Amherst were each awarded NSF grants for developing more efficient methods of searching and managing queries across the Web. University of California-Irvine received one for research intended to improve the efficiency and accuracy of fuzzy search queries on large text repositories.

A number of awards were focused on issues that underlie a broad range of high-performance, technical computing problems. Examples include grants to:

  • MIT, Yale and University of Wisconsin-Madison for studies of tradeoffs associated with using different approaches for analyzing and extracting information from very large collections of data across large-scale clusters of parallel computers; and
  • University of California-San Diego for improving the performance of dynamic provisioning of data-intensive applications.

But while most grants focused on broad, infrastructure-related issues, a few delved directly into specific scientific analytic applications. For example:

  • One of the University of Washington’s three projects focuses on astrophysics, particularly the analysis of astronomical images, space-time overlaps and the simulation of collisions of galaxies;
  • University of Washington and University of Utah each won grants for projects that will allow ad hoc, longitudinal query and visualization of massive ocean simulation results at interactive speeds;
  • University of Maryland-College Park is conducting a project to develop parallel algorithms for analyzing DNA sequencing; and
  • University of California-San Diego’s aforementioned dynamic provisioning research will include a focus on protein matching in bioinformatics.

Helping Students—Helping Themselves

The IBM/Google Cloud Computing University Initiative, as mentioned, has an immediate objective of stimulating research into areas that will be instrumental in establishing cloud as a ubiquitous computing platform. A few are intended to promote research into specific technical disciplines—some of which may have direct commercial application, others not.

But regardless of the immediate commercial opportunities, many of these projects will serve as platforms for subsequent research by hundreds of other universities and corporate research labs. Research findings, for example, will be published in scientific journals, and be disseminated though conferences and by graduates who move to other universities and into the private sector. Some of the projects will result directly in usable products, such as code that will be available under open source licenses.

All of these projects, however, address another of the supporting vendors’ longer-term goals—to create a generation of students that understand the value and application, and will help drive the adoption of cloud-based computing.

Some of these students—particularly those in disciplines such as computer science and software engineering—are training to become the systems and application architects of tomorrow. IBM and Google will work with professors to identify the most promising of these students, offer them scholarships and internships, and attempt to recruit them into their organizations. (See my November 11 blog and report on IBM’s Academic Initiative (IBM’s Role in Creating Tomorrow’s Workforce) to understand how such efforts fit into that vendor’s broad employee development strategy.)

But only a small percentage of those students who benefit from the Cloud Computing University Initiative efforts will end up working for IBM or Google. Many are likely to end up in working for IT organizations or for other vendors—including competitors of IBM and Google. Meanwhile, students who learn to apply parallel computing tools to other disciplines, such as astrophysics, biochemistry or environmental studies, are likely to apply these techniques to their own private and public sector careers.

All of these graduates, however, can provide at least indirect benefits to the founding vendors. Those who work in customer IT departments will help drive demand for cloud-based solutions. Even those who join competitors have the potential of helping to expand the overall cloud market.

In the end, however, the founding vendors, and all private and public sector participants in all types of technical research, are likely to gain the greatest value from those students in non-IT-related technical disciplines—those that learn to apply high-performance, cloud-based computing clusters to drive innovation in their own fields. Their work, combined with the expansion of the IBM/Google Cloud Computing University Initiative into other academic departments—everything from finance and marketing, though metallurgy and nanotechnology, to architecture and urban planning–will spur new applications, and new innovation in all types of fields.

Although not all this work will directly benefit IBM or Google, it will certainly help to jumpstart the cloud computing market. This will not only provide indirect benefits to the two vendors, it will also create new career opportunities for thousands of IBM/Google Cloud Computing University Initiative graduates plus millions of others that end up in new jobs that will be created by these graduates’ innovations

Posted in 21st Century Careers, Business Trends, Creating the 21st Century Workforce, Education System and Institutions, Google, IBM, IT Company Strategies, IT Industry and Companies, IT Industry Role in Education, IT Industry's Role, Job and Career Opportunities, Skills Requirements, STEM Careers, Technology's Impact on Job Skills, Universities and Grad Schools, Workforce Trends | 4 Responses »
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IBM’s Role in Creating Tomorrow’s Workforce

Sunday, October 11th, 2009

My October 5, 2009 blog, Technology Vendors‘ Roles in Addressing the College Conundrum,  assessed some of the primary changes that colleges and universities must undergo to help prepare their students to find and to succeed in the knowledge jobs of the 21st century. It explained the critical roles the private sector can play in helping colleges make these changes and why IT vendors are particularly well suited to help.

My July 27, 2009 blog, How IBM is Helping Universities Develop 21st Century Workforces, provided a high-level overview of IBM’s Academic Initiative and Global University program. I recently completed a deeper examination of IBM’s initiative and wrote a more detailed report (IBM’s Effort to Create the Workforce of the Future) that explained these programs within the context of IBM’s employee development program. In this report, I spelled out the benefits the programs will deliver to universities, students, IBM partners and customers—and to IBM itself. The entire report is available for purchase on my web site. To whet your appetite, here’s a summary of the report’s primary findings.

IBM has been one of the leaders in partnering with universities and other organizations to ensure the availability of the type of IT professionals required to build, run and optimize the types of IT infrastructures and solutions that have become the foundations of 20th century organizations. While it is continuing with these efforts, it is now focusing its primary efforts on partnering with universities and adapting its own employee development models to ensure the availability of a new type of professional—what it calls a “T-shaped person”.

These T-shape people, whether IT professionals, business professionals or public service professionals, must be interdisciplinary generalists, rather than narrowly-focused specialists. Although they must certainly have deep skills in specialty (the vertical axis of the T), they must also have sufficient understanding of a broad range of related disciplines (the horizontal axis) to allow them to see contextual linkages, to constructively participate in interdisciplinary teams and to continually adapt their visions and their contributions to rapidly changing conditions and needs. But whatever the individual’s specialty (whether IT, business, scientific or any other field) all must understand how to apply IT tools to the needs of their profession.

Therefore, IBM is adapting how it works with universities to leverage its traditional relationships with IS, engineering and business departments, into all types of disciplines, from psychology, through public affairs through medicine. These new relationships are multi-faceted, including everything from help in designing courses and curricula; providing required hardware and software; funding research, scholarships and internships; and helping to create interdisciplinary research centers that bring together academics, businesses and government officials to address gnarly problems in areas including transportation, energy, food safety and environment.

IBM’s initial goal in creating T-shaped professionals and research centers is to feed the company’s own need for qualified people. It selects future employees from among this expanded pool of graduates and is adapting the company’s internal employee development programs to transform these interdisciplinary graduates into solution-focused professionals who can proceed through any of five broad career paths.

But if these efforts go as anticipated, they will accomplish much more. They will help promote independent research that is aligned around IBM’s primary market objectives, provide solution-focused employees for IBM customers and partners and ideally inspire a new generation of students to understand how they can use IT (ideally IBM’s IT) to bring new value to their own fields. Ideally, many of these fields will align with the rapidly expanding sets of market needs being addressed under IBM’s Smarter Planet initiative. It can, in other words, be a win-win proposition, helping everybody, with the exception of IBM’s competitors.

Posted in 21st Century Careers, Business Trends, Corporate Social Responsibility, Creating the 21st Century Workforce, Education System and Institutions, IBM, IT Company Strategies, IT Industry and Companies, IT Industry Role in Education, Job and Career Opportunities, Skills Requirements, Technology's Impact on Job Skills, Universities and Grad Schools, Workforce Trends | No Responses »
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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 »

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