Education: The IBM Way

IBM Smarter Planet initiative notes that the world continues to get smaller and flatter, and now the planet needs to get "smarter." It highlights the need to solve some of the most pressing problems of the world by leveraging technology.

Education is one such domain which is getting "smarter" by technology and has intricate relationship with the overall improvement of quality of life. IBM's approach to develop Education for a Smarter Planet emphasizes that "smarter education will reshape learning not around administrative processes, but around the two key components of any education system: the student and the teacher." This is important as it suggests that next wave of efficiency in education will come from adaptablity of learning processes instead of inflexibility of unversity administrative systems.

The Future of Learning paper identifies five key challenges (see Figure) which impacts students, workers and institutions.

One of these five challenges is preparing talent for the service economy. While the economy and technology is changing at a fast pace education systems and learning processes have lagged behind. This is resulting in gaps between the knowledge and skills required by the economy and what is delivered by the education system. According to a McKinsey report "The growing complextity of economic activity seen in, for example, global supply chains, just-in-time production, and increasingly precise customer segmentation and channel strategies, has led to higher demand for advanced skills." It adds that "Education is the most important mediator of future labour and supply and demand."

In line with meeting the demand for the future skills and talent for the service economy, IBM is also advancing an interdisciplinary initiative of Service Science, Management, and Engineering (SSME) which focuses on “the application of scientific, management, and engineering disciplines to tasks that one organization (service provider) beneficially performs for and with another (service client)” (Spohrer, et al.).

As a part of my PhD dissertation, I developed a competency-based curriculum for a master’s program in SSME. Here I surveyed industry professionals and faculty members to identify a competency model for service science professionals and developed a curriculum blueprint that may deliver required comepetencies.

Education is integral to the human capital development and increasingly technology is catalyzing the process of change. IBM Smarter Planet initiative for education focuses on improving quality of learning and talent, and raises important issues, and proposes relevant solutions. However, it would be interesting to see how IBM brings the change and implements its approaches to create a smarter planet.