Article No.7 IMPROVISATION REQUIRED IN USE OF TECHNOLOGY IN MANAGEMENT EDUCATION - A THIRD EYE VIEW Gopalan Ramachandran Sr.Vice President & Project Director, Polaris Consulting Services Ltd, Hyderabad Abstract: The main objective of this Research paper is to provide an overview of the existing level of technology penetration in providing the management education by Management schools in India and to take a deep dive in the immense scope and potential available in the Technology space including identifying a host of open source tools & accelerators that can supplement in making the class room sessions more interesting, realistic and tech-savvy. Capitalizing untapped analytical & software development skills vested with our Engineering & Non- engineering graduates getting into Management streams will go a long way in developing software tools for Operations Research (Simulation, Queuing system), Finance (Portfolio Performance, What-if analysis) Strategic management (Evolve Strategy, Cap Investment) to name a few. The students may be encouraged to contribute for developing newer Software tools and accelerators as part of their Course work / Project Assignment in any of the management topics duly guided by an IT team that will fold under the Institutes‘ IT Department. Given the ever growing expectation of the overall Industry in general and IT Industry in particular from our Management Graduates to have strong analytical and problem solving skills, involving our students in sharpening their programming & Software Development Skills, IT Project Management skills in this approach will equip them to meet the job- demands when they move into Corporate sector. In this fast-growing IT world where Capital Investments in Hardware, Licensed Software are becoming a thing of past and replaced by SaaS (Software as a Service), Pay and Use Model Licensed tools, Cloud Computing, Environment Virtualization et al, Management Institutes will be in a comfortable position in developing their in- house Software & Tools for meeting the management course pedagogy, Data Analytics, MIS Reports etc. With this change-in-mindset of our academicians & Management Boards, our management institutes will be able to proliferate into IT space and exploit the potential available both internally within the students‘ community and externally from whole lot of open source tools & technologies through Internet. Ignited by the above thought process & out of the box approach, a sincere attempt is made in collating the responses from the IT professionals with management back-ground, recent pass-outs from management Institutes, through formal discussions and questionnaire and a research analysis is done to share the research findings on: a) how to make the existing management education system more technology centric, b) how to make the learning of management concepts simpler and getting aligned to real-time, problem solving situations of the Corporate world. Keywords: SaaS, Cloud Computing, Environment Virtualization 1. Introduction Current System of Management Education in India AIMA Journal of Management & Research, May 2016, Volume 10 Issue 2/4, ISSN 0974 – 497 Copy right© 2016 AJMR-AIMA Page 1 Management education has seen a shift from class room based monologue teaching to tools aided mode of teaching in the last 10-15 years more specifically after the advent use of Microsoft Office (MSO) tools, that has opened up a vistas in our management education in using power point, MS word, MS Excel to name a few. While MSO supported tools still support richly our class rooms in the management education, not much dent has been created in utilizing the vast Information Technology enabled tools available in the market nor our have management institutes spearheaded any tangible initiatives towards building the same internally for their own use or consumption. Given this backdrop, the author having vast experience in the IT arena for last 2 decades, attempts to bring out the scope and potential available both internally and externally that would open up new vistas for management institutes to improvise our management education and make it more lively, pragmatic and bringing the board room to the class room situations, thereby contributing towards creating a host of IT enabled tools & accelerators that will aide our management teachers in the coming years by reaping the benefits of vast potential of IT available around. Current system of management education as prevalent in most of the management schools including top notch institutes can be depicted as below: Evaluation of existing system by the respondents : 2.25 / 5 (1 being lowest and 5 being highest) Drawing a parallelism with integration of IT in Banks 2 decades back AIMA Journal of Management & Research, May 2016, Volume 10 Issue 2/4, ISSN 0974 – 497 Copy right© 2016 AJMR-AIMA Page 2 Commercial Banks in India were challenged with the same situation in the early 90s, when IT was creeping into the Banking sector at which time Banks had neither expertise in developing IT nor were the Bank staff receptive for introducing IT in their day to day operations. However, foreseeing their future at stake devoid of IT in their operations, Banks had ventured into IT, started setting up their own IT Departments, invested in infrastructure, resources considering their scale of operations and now are reaping the benefits of the same. Today‘s Management institutes are exactly where Banks were languishing 2 decades back, saddled with host of manual set of activities and reeling under constraints from financial investments and an urge to invest in IT not realizing the need of IT and the resultant benefits likely to accrue in the coming years. With small investment of 5-10 member from its own staff pool, involved in general banking operations, Banks ventured into IT Development, IT Systems maintenance, Back office operations automation etc and slowly started expanding to automation of its Head office, Zonal office functions through in-house developed desk top based applications and then expanded to Client-server technologies, then main-frame based applications for high volume data & transactions and then took up in-house developed Software applications or Market products like Finacle, Flexcube, B@ncs etc for their branch banking operations. Management Institutes may catch up with current impetus on Digital Transformation Strategy advocated by our Government of India as more often disruptions are coming through Digital routes and management institutes need to bend towards creating that disruption in the current situation. We should not forget that major disruptions that had happened in the past are: Steam power, Electricity and Information Technology and we are living in the current IT era hence every opportunity is available in front of us to catch up with this wind of change. 2. Scope For It Integration & Expansion In Management Institutes The author suggests with fast growing IT Industry especially in the Services & Product segment, academicians need to look for various 3rd party products readily available in the market and plan to introduce them in their teaching methods including research tools like – Euromonitor, Datamonitor. For Data Analytics – Nextgen tool like R apart from xls and should be leveraged for imparting education. Using R tool, a widely used statistics programming language, students will be able to do live simulations to make inferences from complex data sets in addition to better understanding of whole gamut of statistical concepts, data analysis, data interpretations etc. This not only helps in learning but also adding to their experience as organizations demand skill sets in such products/tools for working in real time Project implementations. Decision on Buy Vs Build Often management institutes may end up in a dilemma of whether to buy the tool or to build the tool that is required to supplement our teaching methods. While no straight forward binary response will fill the gap, based on the availability of lead time, resources, infrastructure and financial budget, a conscious decision may be taken on case to case basis. For some of the generic and widely used tools, it is apt to procure the tool as an off-the-shelf product, use it directly for our class room sessions and allow the students to have hands-on practice as the tool is available for use on 24*7 model. For Build option, institutes need to necessarily evolve a AIMA Journal of Management & Research, May 2016, Volume 10 Issue 2/4, ISSN 0974 – 497 Copy right© 2016 AJMR-AIMA Page 3 planned approach towards assimilating all the resources including budget approvals and then assign to a core IT team to work on the same with a planned delivery time line. 3.What Our Management Institutes Need To Achieve Institutes need to plan for developing the necessary software for enhancing the teaching methods in the class rooms by use of digital technologies. For example: Trade lifecycle cannot be taught theoretically. It has to be experienced via a live trading portal/product SAP covers 360 degree view of a business hence management schools will be able to use this to impart education in all areas of business Guest lectures can be easily conducted through the web Gamification of courses Set up data pools for Indian/Asian Businesses Use of device based real time collaboration tools Leverage social feeds to generate ideas and understand current business markets 4. How The Need To Be Achieved While IT Industry being a pioneer in the Services sector catering mainly to international clients around 83% revenue in IT Sector is from IT exports while paltry 17% revenue comes from Indian market. Management Institutes need to set up a dedicated IT Solution Centre (IT-SC) within the purview of their existing IT Department, that will own up for developing software and tools in addition to evaluating 3rd party products in the market and recommend to appropriate committee for procuring the tool that meets their internal requirements. PROPOSED IT-SC ORGANISATION STRUCTURE AIMA Journal of Management & Research, May 2016, Volume 10 Issue 2/4, ISSN 0974 – 497 Copy right© 2016 AJMR-AIMA Page 4 5.