Global Changes
With globalization, local economy is becoming global. Many local businesses are moving to the global market. At the same time, global businesses are also moving into the local market. During this transition, local companies have to adjust the way they do business to accomplish certain levels of productivity, quality, and revenue to survive. To do that, they must adopt new thinking, new business model, new innovation, and hire new workers with new skills.
From Information Technology (IT) perspective, changes are needed to take advantage of the globalized market. For example, today most budget for IT is still using to manage existing infrastructure, existing servers, data storage, and maintain existing projects therefore there is nothing left for new idea or innovation that can bring in new revenue to the business. To generate results, companies must change their priorities from hardware to software. Hardware is spending and software is making money. Companies must change the IT budget to focus more on innovation, new ideas, new projects and limit the maintenance to minimum than things will improve.
With globalization, IT projects should make money, not spend money. They must be used to create new efficiencies, new ideas and bring in new revenue. To do that, IT managers must focus on a new thinking, new mind set by starting to focus more on e-commerce, e-service, e-marketing, e-government, mobile technology applications instead of buying more hardware, more servers or infrastructure. All of these projects can be achieved faster and at lower cost through the use of cloud computing rather than through in-house development. As the market is changing, companies should start to focus on making significant improvement to prepare for more competitions as they come. For example, company could eliminate paperwork and bureaucracy by move everything into digital forms or electronic record. (e-Business project). Every owner would prefers to see better services and more efficiency that can bring in revenue rather than spending on costly hardware. With cloud computing, it is relatively easy to reduce hardware costs and focus on what can bring additional revenues to the company. As technology drives the global economy, IT is becoming more important and that means company must have new vision, and the right set of new skills to meet new challenges. In an increasingly interconnected and interdependent global economy, all managers must learn new skills to take advantage of new and emerging opportunities, wherever and whenever they happen.
Many things have changed since we entered the 21st century. Machines automate many things and replacing workers in factories. (i.e., robots) Computers are getting smaller and can be put in a pocket (i.e., smart-phone). People can find almost every information that they want (i.e., over the Internet). Companies do not locate in one place but relocate to many places, all over the world (i.e., manufacturing outsourcing). People do not have to move to find jobs but jobs have to go where skilled people live (i.e., IT outsourcing and virtual workers). Hardware companies are moving into software as a service (i.e., IBM, HP). Computer price goes down but phone price goes up (i.e., Dell, Asus, HP and iPhone, Androids) Students can go to school from home (On line university). All these things require significant changes in the way people think and operate.
To prepare for the future, training students to participate in the emerging global opportunities of tomorrow is essential. It means students must change the way they learn to adapt to the realities of the global economy. It is no longer whether the education system will change or not but when does it change and how much it has to change. Today students must understand that they need new knowledge and skills to survive in this job market because they will have to compete with students from another country for the same job. They cannot depend on the training based on local market's needs. They cannot rely on what the local market demands as things will change. They need to go beyond local needs to get to what the global market's needs. They need new thinking, new innovation, new ideas to succeed. From IT industry perspective, they cannot rely on limited skills such as coding, testing anymore. They must have broader software development life cycle and large scale integration skills. They must know at least one or two foreign languages because they will work in teams where members come from many countries and speak different languages. To succeed, students must be active in their own learning. They must follow the global industry trends and focusing more on strategic skills need. If the school does not provide these trainings, they must learn them via other media such as technical books, engineering websites, technical forums, on-line tutorials etc.
Sources
- Blogs of Prof. John Vu, Carnegie Mellon University
