NWC News Network, May 12 2008, 1830 hrs
IBM and the Indian School of Business have recently entered into an agreement called the Open Collaborative Research Agreement, which is aimed at improving the competitiveness of the services sector in Asia. On completion, the research will enable companies to redesign their project management structure, reduce attrition and help high performance groups to move up the value chain. Services form a larger part of the economy of developed nations and are a growing sector in developing countries.
The research which is a joint effort between the Global Logistics and Manufacturing Strategies at the ISB and the Indian Research laboratory at IBM India will initially focus on Indian companies and later extend to the rest of Asia. Using tools such as modeling and forecasting techniques, data mining, social network analysis and stochastic optimization it will study mathematical modeling techniques and social networks to enable organizations to improve the way people work.
The benefit of this research is that its results will be openly available for use by students and faculties of any and all universities, companies, and institutions. It is free from the constraints of corporate-sponsored research at universities that involve intellectual property rights issues. The research is multidisciplinary with variations existing within the domains of management, operations research and economics. The focus will be on business to business services rather than business to consumer services.
“IBM and ISB research teams will develop new ways to improve the delivery of service, not just taking into account how the service gets delivered to a client, but how that delivery can be improved through better collaboration and communication between all the people involved in the transaction. The applications of this research will be widespread, from small and medium to large companies can benefit from this study,” said Professor N Viswanadham, Executive Director, GLAMS, ISB.
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