Saturday, August 09, 2008 SSME targets 'next wave' cities
IBM Philippines encouraged Bacolod and other “next wave” cities to look at how emerging academic discipline can help address human resource concerns in the midst of the continuing growth of the information technology (IT) and business process outsourcing (BPO) industry.
Councilor Jocelle Batapa-Sigue, along with representatives from Iloilo, Davao and Laguna, presented the developments and initiatives in the off-shoring and outsourcing industry in their respective areas to about a hundred participants who attended the country's first service science, management and engineering conference last week with the theme "Service Science, Management and Engineering (SSME): Towards Philippine Global Competitiveness in Offshoring and Outsourcing (O&O)" in Quezon City.
The event was conducted by the Commission on Information and Communications Technology (CICT), the Business Processing Association of the Philippines (BPAP) and IBM Philippines to address concerns on the sustainability and competitiveness of the nation's talent vis-à-vis global workforce requirements.
SSME is an emerging academic discipline, a research area, and a framework for stakeholder collaboration. It is also a call for academia, industry, governments and R&D institutes to focus on becoming more systematic about innovation specifically in the services sector, which is the largest sector in industrialized nations and many emerging economies.
IBM introduced "computer science" as an academic discipline 50 years ago or at a time when nobody even knew there was such a kind of science. Fifty years later, IBM introduces SSME to the world in the hope of bringing together ongoing work in computer science, operations research, industrial engineering, business strategy, management sciences, social and cognitive sciences, and legal sciences to develop the skills required in a services-led economy.
The Bacolod-Negros Occidental Federation for Information and Communications Technology (BNEFIT) Inc. will soon be collaborating with IBM and CICT to bring the concept of SSME to Bacolod and the neighboring areas, said Batapa-Sigue, who chairs BNEFIT.
The SSME conference engaged participants from the academe, various ICT stakeholders and the business sector to become active partners in promoting SSME in the Philippines and at the same time develop a roadmap for service innovation in the O&O industry on ICT talent development.
Global SSME advocate, Dr. Guido G. M. Dedene, will be the main speaker and lecturer for the conference. He is a full professor in Management Informatics at the K.U.Leuven (Faculty of Economics and Business) and a professor in Development of Information and Communication Systems at the University of Amsterdam Business School.
Dedene is coordinating SSME for K.U. Leuven and received an IBM Europe SSME award for his presentation at the first International SSME conference at IBM Palisades in New York. At the University of Amsterdam, he is also one of the academic supervisors of the Research Center for Service Innovation. Dedene has a PhD in Science (Mathematics), which he received at the Catholic University of Leuven (K.U. Leuven, Belgium).
Dedene said the lack of qualified human resources is still the largest blocking factor in the growth of the ICT-sector in Belgium. There are currently more than 15,000 open positions in the Belgian market alone and almost all of them require either enterprise architects, business consultants, networking architects and in particular system developers (not programmers).
During the conference, St. Louis University presented its course offering on Master of SSME which aims to enable current and future business professionals to be able to investigate and formulate strategic business cases for the deployment of new service activities.
The course also aims to develop the necessary skills that are required to manage service activities both on the demand side as well as the supply side of services activities.
It also wishes to build up a deeper knowledge of the structure and challenges in the contemporary service economy by combining theoretical foundations with best practices from industry and provide the techniques that are needed to manage the human resources and other assets that drive service activities in practice.
