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This week as CITNE celebrates its first anniversary, it’s natural for us to reflect on the past year and dwell on the immediate and medium term horizon. 
In reflection, the past year has really been about finding out who we want to be. Given our mission of pursuing rigorous and relevant ICT centric research and education that impacts business and society, we conducted a series of exploratory exercises to see how we can connect with our three core constituencies: the ISB student community, the Indian IT/ITeS industry and the global IS research community. It is fair to say that most of our initiatives have touched at least two, if not all three, of the above constituencies.
PGP Curriculum IT Track Restructuring
With the help of senior IS faculty, past year’s students and a sample of recruiters we revamped the IT core and electives offering to better focus on giving the students the theoretical and practical underpinnings of extracting above average business value from IT. While big-ticket IT spends are ubiquitous in global organisations, strategic differentiation attributable to those dollars remains elusive. Our new IT core course and electives are designed to connect IT to the strategy, marketing and finance functions of the firm, and in the process unearth the necessary organisational complements necessary for getting comparative advantage.
In the same vein, our newly launched executive education program “Aligning your Business and IT Strategies: Stability, Agility and Disruption” takes the same core concept and scales it up to the level of CIOs and functional heads of businesses.
Two World Class Research Conferences
The December 2007 and January 2007 period saw approximately 200 international researchers and Indian IT/ITeS industry thought leaders present their ongoing research and interact with each other as a part of the 1st International Symposium on Information Systems (ISIS 2006), 2006 and the 5th International Symposium on Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA 2007). It is our view that CITNE serves as a landing ground for the global IS research community to connect with the burgeoning Indian IT/ITeS industry. The above mentioned conferences have set the stage for this notion to materialise; some collaborations have been seeded and we expect this trend to grow.
Thought Leadership on Issues of National Importance
CITNE researchers continue to work on cutting edge research that directly impacts business and society. In the past year, our views have been influential in helping the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) decide in favor of using an auction mechanism, as opposed to a beauty contest, to price and allocate the upcoming 3G spectrum in India. Our work on developing a market layer for Grid computing is soon to be published in the leading Informs Journal on Computing. Similarly, our expertise in the area of business intelligence and data mining has led to new real-time predictive techniques in the context of multi-unit online auctions. The relevance of the research is reflected in the fact that findings from it have been carried in outlets such as Knowledge@Wharton, Economic Times and Business Today, among others.
Our research capacity is going to significantly increase this year with two outstanding colleagues, Nishtha Langer (PhD Carnegie Mellon University) and Gireesh Shrimali (PhD Stanford University) joining us in the coming months.
CITNE Business Technology Club Partnership
Starting this academic year we are dove-tailing our industry outreach with the ISB’s student run Business Technology Club (BTC). This synergy was evident in June 29 panel discussion on multi-sourcing, a form of offshoring where one client works with multiple vendors to optimise their IT and process outsourcing needs. Most of the panelists were drawn to the ISB by the members of the PGP class and it was a perfect example of an industry relevant research topic that resonates with the academic community and the student body. We will continue this model for the Convergence panel on Sep 29 and the ISIS 2007 industry day on Dec 21, 2007.
Empowering the Local IT/ITeS Community with Current Research
We at the ISB are fortunate to have an outstanding series of researchers present their ongoing work through the course of the year. Starting this year, we are striving hard to open our doors to the local Hyderabad based community of knowledge workers. We are making a conscious effort to share our research seminar series announcements with the HR departments of the companies that we have contacts with. If this is of interest to you, I encourage you to request your company’s HR head to contact CITNE’s Anika Wadhera (anika_wadhera@isb.edu) to get onto our mailing list and post the seminar listings on your respective intranets.
Looking ahead, I'm happy to report three forward looking initiatives:
CITNE Academic Fellow Professor V Sambamurthy
We at CITNE are delighted to announce that Professor V Sambamurthy has accepted our invitation to serve as a CITNE academic fellow for 2007-08. V Sambamurthy (PhD, University of Minnesota, 1989) is the Eli Broad Professor of Information Technology at the Eli Broad College of Business at Michigan State University. Among other things he is the editor-in-chief of Information Systems Research (our top research journal) and the founder and Executive Director of the Center for Leadership of the Digital Enterprise (www.bus.msu.edu/clode), a new research center at Michigan State.
Professor Sambamurthy has already been involved deeply with CITNE on the research, education and outreach front. On the research front he is working with us on the "IT function 2020" project, an initiative aimed at projecting the emerging role of the CIO. On the teaching front this coming year he will be teaching a part of the IS core, an elective in Term 6 and will help us with our executive education initiatives. In addition, he has agreed to help develop CITNE in its outreach to the industry and to form its board.
It is a matter of great honor for us to have Professor V Sambamurthy as the CITNE Academic Fellow for the year 2007-2008.
CITNE and Singapore Management University's School of Information Systems (SMU-SIS) in a Research Tie-Up
With an objective of developing a strong IS research community in the South Asian region, Dean Steve Miller of SMU-SIS and I recently signed a three year pact to foster research ties with their IS management group. Along with initiating joint research projects, ISB and SMU will conduct annual joint workshops and video-conference their seminar series both in Singapore and in India. Through the agreement, the Information Systems faculty at ISB and SMU been will collaborate to develop new thinking and practices in areas such as business intelligence and analytics, e- market design for emerging economies, the economics of software licensing and software as a service, managing the transition to new enterprise platforms, IS technology & management issues in the banking and trading sectors, next generation IT sourcing, IT governance.
ISB to Host the Pacific Asia Conference on Information Systems (PACIS) 2009
I'm happy to report that my trip to the City of Sails (Auckland, NZ) was fruitful and we are now the official hosts of PACIS 2009 at the Indian School of Business, Hyderabad. PACIS 2007 attracted 240 scholars from the APAC region. I'm sharing the current year's program http://www.pacis2007.com/conference_program.asp The PACIS executive committee was impressed by the strength of the team and the thoroughness of the proposal. This will be the first IS research conference of significant international stature in India.
I’ll conclude by reiterating a common theme echoed at the ISB, which I first heard Dean Rao mention during one of the many Mirror Pool dinners. He said, “While we have achieved a lot in a short period of time, it pales in comparison to the opportunity and potential we have.” It is with that mindset we look forward to developing CITNE’s board this year and finding industry partners who will support the agenda of pursuing world-class ICT centric knowledge creation and dissemination in India at the ISB. As always, I encourage you to write to me in case you are interested in developing value-adding industry-academia linkages.
Sd/-
Professor Ravi Bapna
ravi_bapna@isb.edu
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