This morning’s session is from Gina Poole, Vice President, Innovation and University Relations at IBM.

IBM focus on 4 key areas in working with Universities:

Joint research
Creating skills required by IBM, business partners, clients etc.
Recruiting
Providing solutions for teaching, research and running Universities

This morning Gina is going to talk about 4 areas:

Key Driving Forces
Market Environment
Key Technologies
Innovation in Education

Key Driving Forces

Apparently we are now in an ‘innovation’ era – this is driven by

Network Ubiquity (more than a billion internet users)
Open Standards
New Business designs (driven by the other two)

At the moment performance of IT systems still growing, while costs drop. But this brings complexity as well.

A shift in where people are employed from agriculture towards services (via manufacturing) – in the US and UK, around 60% of jobs are in the service industry (which includes education of course). In services, the value is not by goods, but by the interaction between the service provider and client/customer/consumer.

China currently has the vast majority of jobs in agriculture – so, presumably we can expect this to change? There is a deliberate attempt by the Chinese government (Gina says) to move a large proportion of workers from manufacturing to ‘knowledge’ sector.

Gina suggests that we are entering a period where we will face shortfalls of professional skills (due to the baby boomer generation reaching retirement and the growth of demand for professional skills)

‘Services Science Management and Engineering’ (SSME) – “the marketplace requires innovation that combines people technology, value and clients”. Gina is saying that typically in a University, academic departments work as silos – with their own processes, and systems. There is pressure to move much more towards an inter-disciplinary approach.

Key Technologies

Gina is covering some of the key technologies affecting us – the headlines are
Computer Assisted Business Systems – transforming industries and the institutions of society – ‘Service Oriented Architecture’ – a framework of incorporating web services across and between enterprises. This is a concept that is talked about a lot by the likes of IBM, but I’m yet to see good practical examples – certainly in UK HE.

Social Networks, Highly Visual, Interfactive Interfaces
Usual suspects – Web 2.0, Online Multiplayer games (World of Warcraft, Guildwars), Second Life …

Gina mentions that her son has started to get involved in the ‘teen’ Second Life – and a drive to start a business led him to develop scripting skills. This is quite interesting, as one of things that I have occaisionally bemoaned is the lack of programming being done by teenagers – when I was at school I got into programming BBC Basic, and many others of my age group had the same experience – but this seems to be lacking now – perhaps we will start to see practical, real world, applications driving these skills in the future?

Information Integration and Analysis – unfortunately Gina leaves us hanging on this one – just saying that there is lots of unstructured information – how do we work with this?

Innovation in education

IBM believes in open standards – e.g. contributing to Sakai project
NC (North Carolina) Computing Lab – creating a virtual computing environment for a University – any member of the university can book, or use, a virtual environment at any time. This is being Open Sourced – now being taken up by other Universities, government, schools, etc. etc.