Interesting Article:

"And Now a Syllabus for the Service Economy

By WILLIAM J. HOLSTEIN
NYT - Published: December 3, 2006

CORPORATIONS need to help prepare university students for the new services-based economy, says Irving Wladawsky-Berger, I.B.M.’s vice president for technical strategy and innovation and a visiting professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Here are excerpts from a conversation:

Q. Years ago, I.B.M. worked with Columbia and other universities to establish computer sciences programs. What are you doing on campus now?

A. Information technology is becoming embedded in all aspects of business, society and our personal lives. We see an increasing requirement to apply technology, engineering and disciplined thinking and design to the people aspect of businesses. That’s really what we mean by services.

There are no universities that have had programs in applying technology to the people aspect of businesses. So once more we are working with universities around the world to help create this emerging discipline that we call services sciences.

Q. Give an example of the skills you want to see being taught.

A. Assume that you want to design an end-to-end hospital management system. The back-office parts of the hospital, the pieces that process transactions and store information, are well understood. But if you really look at the things that go on in the hospital, there is a huge number of processes that take place between people. Patients have to be discharged; physicians show up. All those processes get done in a relatively ad hoc way. If we want to apply information technology and engineering discipline to improve the quality of the service, to reduce errors and to improve productivity, you need people who know how to design a hospital system.

Q. In effect, are you using the universities to create more demand in the market for your products and services?

A. I think of it as shaping the market for the good of all businesses and society. The more we can bring technology and structured engineering thinking to bear on this increasingly complicated problem, the better off everyone will be. You’re also creating the skills that are more and more required in the 21st century. The only way to improve the standard of living is through productivity gains. In advanced economies like those of the United States, Western Europe and Japan, perhaps 75 percent of the economy is services. You cannot really improve the productivity of the United States, for example, unless you tackle productivity in services.

Q. How much is I.B.M. spending on this?

A. We’re investing $100 million a year, including grants and free access to I.B.M. hardware and software. That’s up 30 percent over the past three years.

Q. Do you offer money in exchange for changes in curricula?

A. Usually we don’t have to offer money. That is the last thing they need from us. They need real-world information. They say: “Tell us about it. What are the real-world problems?”

We’re in dialogue with the University of California, Berkeley; Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; Georgia Tech; M.I.T., Oxford-Cambridge; Tsinghua University in China and others. We are encouraging them to start building courses and helping them in any way we can. Sometimes our own people can help them build curricula. There are times when our people are adjunct professors. By the way, that’s been going on for a long time. At M.I.T., we have organized an innovation lecture series to bring to the university real case studies about the kinds of problems that exist in business, health care and government. Q. Are other companies doing this?

A. Different companies call it different things. The members of the Council of Engineering Systems Universities (www.cesun.org.) are from all over the place — the Air Force Institute of Technology, Carnegie Mellon University and Cornell University are members, for example. They all use totally different names. But they are all doing things that in my mind are in the general area of services sciences.

Q. Why should companies have any role in shaping what is taught in academia?

A. There is a long tradition of having a relationship between businesses and universities, particularly with engineering schools and business and management schools. Money is part of it. But increasingly what the universities want from industry is some of the concrete knowledge that they don’t have. Universities are superb at the foundational courses. What they want is to make the theoretical become real. They want what they are teaching to come alive by having businesses share direct knowledge. We’re working with some of the top universities in the world. Think of M.I.T. or Berkeley or Oxford. They have very strong feelings about how they develop their curricula. They are willing to take advice, but at the end of the day the faculties run their own show.

Q. Aren’t you seeking a commercial advantage? Is this really a win for all parties?

A. You have to prepare people to innovate. Many companies, including I.B.M., find that an increasing portion of what they do is services. That’s true for almost every company. If you want that company to become more productive and to improve its profitability and quality, you cannot ignore those processes that are services. Every company has to think about how do you apply tools and processes and disciplined thinking. It’s not unlike what happened in manufacturing 25 years ago. Manufacturing is an example of how painful it is when a country does not take leadership in a particular area. I’m not sure that Detroit has ever recovered from that.

William J. Holstein is editor in chief of Directorship magazine."

I am not sure the 19th C. Arts and Crafts, and 20th C American Craftsman movements didn't have the right idea.

Rob

And make it sustainable. That means not only making it flexible enough to change with changing needs but making the hardware literally recyclable.

If nothing else then homeland security should make it clear that we need to get a better handle on what happens to the unuseable by-products of high technology.

Who would want the equivalent of advanced hardware or pollonium 210 being randomly distributed into the environment?

Follow the practices of the best free-market manufactureres: tag-it and follow it as much as possible. It can be a business advantage (taking responsibility for the long-term quality of ones product) as well as a national security asset.