The Centre for IT and Networked Economy (CITNE) hosted two conferences, bringing together IT industry practitioners and academia. The first covered various aspects of Information Systems, and the second was on the topical issue of DEA and Performance Management. Both conferences were aimed at fulfilling the objective of CITNE which as Professor Ravi Bapna, Executive Director, CITNE said, is to be a “research landing ground”, which would help manage talent and innovation for the IT industry.
The First International Symposium of Information Systems was hosted, along with the Fox School of Business at Temple University, Philadelphia, in December, 2006. The meet facilitated discussions and presentation of research papers on all aspects of Information Systems. The focus was on the role of IT in enhancing global competitiveness and economic development. A variety of research topics, as varied as auctioning online advertisements to designing a social network based electronic market, tackled functional and relevant themes of academic interest. On the ‘Industry-Academia Day’, leading IT business leaders and the academic crème de la crème exchanged experiences and ideas.
Keynote speaker Kiran Karnik, President, NASSCOM, highlighted an urgent yet neglected area - the Indian education system. “Our educational system does not impart soft skills like communication and team work. One is not encouraged to raise issues and question the given,” he said. He pointed out that in a country like India with three million graduates per year, there

was a shortage of nearly half a million in the IT industry alone. As solution, Karnik suggested a four month training in soft skills, particularly in articulation, something like a finishing school.
The symposium saw participation from several universities from the USA, namely, Wharton, Universities of Penn, New York, Georgia, Texas, Minnesota, Connecticut, Florida and Carnegie Mellon, among others. Also in focus were academics from UK, Singapore, Norway, and Brazil
The month of December also saw the 5th International Symposium on Data Envelopment Analysis and Performance Management, being hosted at the ISB campus. Theoretical and empirical papers on DEA and other related fields for efficiency and productivity analysis were presented during this conference. DEA is an increasingly popular management tool. It is primarily a performance measurement technique, which can be used for evaluating the relative efficiency of decision-making units in organisations. A series of panel discussions, involving academic researchers and industry leaders, provided insights into different performance management and decision- making techniques. Practitioners discussing challenges in the implementations of DEA or performance measurement systems were particularly encouraged. Some sessions of interest were–Innovative Management Practices in Banking, Performance Management in Technology driven companies, retail and service management, Performance Analysis in Manufacturing Industries and Fuzzy DEA.