Yesterday, IBM's international program to encourage academic institutions to produce experts for services was presented to the academic staff of academic institutions in Israel
Yehuda Comforts, DailyMaily system, people and computers
This is not a typo; According to IBM's vision, similar to the IT industry that moved from hardware to services, IBM believes that the academy also needs to change its study patterns and in the future academic campuses will produce experts and academics in the field of services and service engineering.
The almost constant dilemma of training students in the academy is the always constant gap between the pure academic material and the reality in the market. It is true that academia can never catch up with the professions that exist in the market, but somewhere it is expected that the educational frameworks, departments and faculties will contain curricula that are in line with the trends in the global economy, if only to satisfy the natural expectation of academia, as the main supplier of personnel to the national economy.
One of the more prominent trends happening in Western countries is the transition to a production-oriented interface - conventional industry to services. This field is found in almost every sector of the private and public sector. The share of services in the nature of the activities of the organizations is increasing, and the IT industry naturally aims there.
It is an open secret today that almost 50% of IBM's revenues come from services, in any field. IBM was the pioneer in this field, but today it is not alone in the campaign. Take any large computer company and you will be able to identify a clear transition to services, in one package or another. Of course, no one is giving up the core assets, but if you scan the pattern of layoffs in the IT industry over the last decade, it is clear that it comes from the directions of operation and maintenance of legacy systems, traditional professions that are more related to hardware, and more.
On the other hand, there has been an impressive increase in the number of employees in the services sector. The global growth of the field creates a demand for experts, who come from different disciplines in academia, and understand the issue of innovation in services, including technology. The expectation is that the academic institutions will make a certain change in the dosage of the studies related to computer science, for example, and study more the field of services. The same goes for administration and specific professions.
This is not an easy task and it is not done in one day. IBM, on a global level, has taken it upon itself to deepen the cooperation with the academic institutions in each country, to promote the occupation in a new academic and professional field of service sciences and service engineering.
Yesterday (Thursday) a one-of-a-kind meeting was held in the IBM auditorium in Petah Tikva where dozens of lecturers and academics from academic institutions in Israel were hosted to hear from global IBM executives, who came especially for the conference, what can be done to deepen the capacity of service sciences in all university faculties , and even more so in computer science.
Finney Bortman, director of business operations at IBM's technology unit (GTU), said that this is a long-term process, which requires a lot of processes and changes in the academic concept. IBM's role, says Bortman, is not to teach the universities what to teach ("they know that better than we do"), but to give the heads of these institutions tools, knowledge and share relevant information with them, which will allow them to develop curricula, which will eventually be put on the market Graduates who can operate and manage the fields of technology-based services, as in all sectors and areas of life.
The CEO of IBM Israel, Meir Nissenson, said in his opening remarks that IBM operates in countries like Israel for the long term. "We came here in 1949 and the last thing we could be accused of is opportunism," Nissenson said. "Throughout all the years, the academy has been one of the main sources of the manpower we employ in the fields of research and development, and without the high level of the universities and the talented graduates who went to the market, we would not have been able to reach where we have."
Now, IBM again turns to the "suppliers of the raw material" - the human capital, and offers them to go hand in hand to train service scientists. Israel is not the first to go in this direction. This is a worldwide trend, it turns out, and at the conference it was announced to the academic staff that came, that a number of universities around the world have already responded to IBM's effort, and they are integrating teaching in the field of service sciences within various faculties - either as a course, as certificate studies or even as an academic degree. Experts in the field of services at the IBM Research Laboratory in Haifa are teaching courses on the subject for the first time this year at the Multidisciplinary Center in Herzliya, and at Tel Aviv University.
IBM, apparently, sees this field as a strategic issue. This is why it sent to Israel two of its senior officials from the headquarters in the United States - Dr. Stuart Feldman, vice president of IBM's global research division for computer science, and Gina Paul, who coordinates IBM's relations with academic institutions. Dr. Feldman said, among other things, that in an era when three quarters of the modern economy is based on services, and when in most countries the growing part of the economy belongs to information-based services - but it is logical that the future business focus will be on questions related to service engineering and service science.
"More and more problems will come from activities in the services sector. Issues of information optimization, management and data exchange will be high priorities. The work scheduling management of knowledge workers is fundamentally different from that of assembly line workers, on whom traditional industrial engineering focused - and therefore the need to train a new generation of experts who knew how to deal with these problems and use the best information system solutions in order to succeed in their roles."
He repeated that IBM sees the universities as the main partners in the effort to consolidate the new discipline: "This is the great opportunity for the teaching and research institutions to deal with the needs of the labor market in the next quarter of a century - and with the expectations of the students to find a job that will make use of the knowledge they acquire." As far as IBM is concerned, Feldman emphasizes, it is clear that there are plenty of opportunities in the service industry. "Many of the organizations we advise are interested in implementing new levels of technique, technologies and methodologies related to services". Like IBM, large consulting service providers will also be interested in the advancement of the scientific aspect of the field.
Another speaker at the conference was, as mentioned, Gina Paul, who coordinates IBM's relations with academic institutions. She stated that this is her third visit to Israel and every time she is amazed by the technological capacity of Israeli companies. "Innovation is a very common buzzword today," she said, "but the more I think about it, it's clear to me that it's a key keyword. It's impossible without her." One of the engines for empowering the issue of innovation is the Internet, Paul said. "The Internet, as the main avenue of technology, has opened up the whole subject of innovation to many, many fields. "In general, 80% of our business today is in the bathroom."
The bottom line
The transition to services is undoubtedly a trend that stands out in all sectors of the economy in Israel and around the world. IBM already moved to work in this mode a few years ago, when it began to take it upon itself to operate complete systems in organizations, such as payroll, personnel, procurement, and the like. The connection between the technological knowledge required in these cases and the professional knowledge was made by IBM with the help of 60 experts transferred to it from Price Water House, which was acquired by it. But even this inexhaustible reservoir needs refreshing. IBM in the world, and especially in Israel, understands that a large part of the graduates of the Faculties of Business Administration, Social Sciences and Computers, can easily transfer their expertise to innovation and management, just as the IT revolution penetrated the various faculties and today it is taught in almost every department. IBM believes that this will be the case in everything related to service sciences.
