ASUG (Ontario SAP User Group) - Industry & Academic Partnership ROI v final

Good morning. Before I get started, I’ve been asked by the conference organizers that those participants who paid registration fees using BitCoin, could you please see the registration desk at the next break. All kidding aside, isn’t it an interesting reflection on how much things have changed, and the implication of digital technology and disruptive change, that 6 years ago a failure at an exchange brokerage, in that case Lehman Brothers, nearly cast the world into an economic abyss that to this day we still really don’t understand the depth of, contrast to recent events where now one of the largest exchange brokerages for BitCoin fails, yet the digital currency holds most of its value in trading. There is some difference in scale, and probably maturity of investors – or depending your perspective risk takers – but it is, I think, highly relevant to the discussions you are having today. My name is Mike Sparling, and I have one of the world’s greatest jobs; that being the Dean of a very large business school. Every day I get to come to work and spend time with very intelligent and committed faculty, passionate students, skilled business operators in our administrative leadership team and strongly aligned partners and industry groups. So thank you for chance to be here today and share some of what we’re working on within the business programs at Seneca, to share my appreciation for the partnership we have with SAP, the University Alliance and companies such as yourselves in the user community. I’d like to take the next 30 minutes to provide you with a sense of some of the initiatives we are undertaking that could be opportunities for us to work together.

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Except Where Noted ©2014 Seneca College – All Rights Reserved

ASUG Ontario Chapter Meeting – Industry & Academic ROI

There could be few more appropriate days than today for me to have a chance to share with a group such as yourself what we are doing as a business school. February 26th is a very interesting day in history, a day quite aligned to the core themes of my talk. Forgive me if this all sounds a bit like a Dan Brown book, but you’ll see how the parts come together in a moment. 402 years ago today the Catholic Church, and the knights of the inquisition, declared Galileo Galilei a step short of being a heretic; while formally serving notice that hence forth all research into the field of heliocentrism was heretical, that heliocentric books would be banned and that Galileo was ordered to refrain from holding, teaching or defending heliocentric ideas. This is interesting for two reasons. First, this being a technology based event, more then a few of you I’m sure heard Monty Python and the famous “Nobody expected the Spanish inquisition” when I brought that term up a moment ago. It’s ok, you can admit it, you’re with friends. But more to the point, Galileo was being persecuted for something very important to any modern corporation, and in my case to the work of the Seneca business programs and to our College at large.

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About 80 years earlier Nicolaus Copernicus had furthered the notion that the earth and the planets rotated around the sun not the other way around. He isn’t credited with the origin of the concept, but he is the modern father of the principle and he did extensive work on proving and refining the theory. The modern college system, Seneca included, is going through a Copernican shift. In some cases the post-secondary education system lags the corporate world by a number of years in this shift, and in other cases we are ahead. No longer does the customer orbit the enterprise - through technology and a shift in expectation - the enterprises (note the plural) be it Seneca College or your firms and companies, orbit each individual customer or student or stakeholder, use the appropriate term. This shift of central anchor, while not accompanied by inquisition and torture, is no less disruptive and challenging to many in my industry.

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As many of you in the room have experienced I’m sure, technology-based disruption has influenced or shaped most every industry. This is a major change; and major change impacts large organizations in different ways. By all measures Seneca is a large organization. Our total enrollment as a College is 25,000 full time and over 70,000 part time students. We are by far the largest College in Ontario and in the top couple for size in Canada. Business is the largest faculty within Seneca, we are as much as 1/3 again as big as the next largest faculty in the College and our reach in faculty numbers, programs, courses and the need to link student passion and desire to learn to industry expectation is equally large. So throw in significant disrupters like the internet, social media, empowered customers, the deep layering of technology into every business and you see the magnitude of the challenge we face as we pass through this Copernican shift and realign in my case around 10,000 helical centers to deliver service to. Suddenly some days I long for my distant past in software start ups I’m sure many of you have similar tales of the same forces and the impact they’ve had on you. They’re the same forces, reshaping every industry.

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It used to be that a Dean would assemble the student population in the auditorium each term and sternly instruct them to “look left, now look right. By the end of this program two of you won’t be here any longer.” Fear is a powerful motivator, but it’s a pretty sad one to inspire academic achievement. Our world is increasingly networked, cross-disciplinary and interconnected. We now know that in a room of students, the orbits intertwine, and people become business partners and customers, suppliers and advisors, board members and even spouses. It’s funny that a room full of adult students, I always get a few nervous chuckles when I bring up spouses Connections are the fabric of our business world, our society and judging by the usage numbers on Facebook, Pintrest, Snapchat and other services connections are core to our very being.

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Yet as much as technology permits for connection, it also is forcing us to rethink a lot about what is employment and where employment is found and how it is retained. There’s a joke often shared to illustrate how deeply advanced technology is now embedded into every industry. The joke goes something like this. In a modern textile mill in the southern US, the entire operation is now run by a man and a dog. The man is there to feed the dog, and the dog is there to make sure the man doesn’t touch anything and screw it up! That’s what’s exciting about partnerships like the one we have with SAP, the SAP user community and some of the companies in the room today. You help us ensure our students are learning meaningful, current and future proofed skills. You help us, administration and faculty, ensure we continue to reinforce that learning “how to learn” is THE crucial skill, not just learning some steps or actions. You help us prepare our students for their future, not business’s past!

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Our future is looking very different then our past. And different is exciting and scary to all of us. The photo on the left is an actual sign. The idea that you have to encourage personal safety over communication seems a bit daft to me, but it does indicate the hold that the social media movement has over society. Big companies today want to be more like startups - innovation is vital to future profits. Big companies like Facebook, the source of the postcard on the right, want to encourage "organized chaos." They recognize that disruption will happen, it’s a question of it being self imposed to the value of the firm or externally imposed to their detriment. Disruption is required to be a part of the systems of the collaborative economy. Companies realize that their entire ecosystem, from suppliers to customers, has become highly fragmented, distributed and mobile. The world outside is messy, unfortunately or I might suggest fortunately, so must become our world inside. The new norm is change. And Education is the heart of the opportunity to lead that change. Or as the great military strategist Sun-Tzu reminds us “In the midst of chaos, there is also opportunity.” I’d like to share with you now a video that sets out some of what we are doing to remake business education at Seneca to address these opportunities, the opportunities partnerships like the one we have together create for our students. <<< PLAY BUSINESS VIDEO >>>

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http://youtu.be/IdpWplDZD3U

Becoming the Seneca Business School is a bold course of change for us. Our vision for this organization is simple – “We will change the way applied business education is conceived, prepared and delivered to better prepare students for employment in a world of incredible opportunity, disruption and change.” We are undertaking this dramatic transformation in support of our College strategic plan which opens with the statement “A different kind of School, a different kind of graduate”. Our students have unique skills and knowledge through their time with us at Seneca, and they bring a hunger for learning to our global classroom every day. Our focus on experiential learning is key. We focus on knowledge that can be brought to task on current and future business problems. To achieve that we have to understand that business today – and as the video highlighted, everything we do in society has an aspect of business to it – is collaborative, based on technology and deeply cross disciplinary in nature. Business education has a bit of an identity crisis – if everything is business, then at its heart nothing is just business. As a 25 plus year veteran of the technology space, I can make this statement with at least a bit of credibility. In my personal opinion, in the next 10 years we will effectively see the end of an employment role focused on Information Technology, simply because every job has become an IT job not because the problem has been solved and everyone can go home. Thus experiential and cross disciplinary are priorities for student, and I’d argue corporate, success. Our students are schooled in this, and they are available as co-op students, as applied research project members and as graduates to firms such as yourself. And I know that within this room there will be organizations who have benefited from our focus on being a different kind of school with a different kind of graduate.

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Applied research is an integral priority in Seneca’s 2012-17 Strategic and Academic plans. We are expected to support cross-disciplinary projects that create experiential learning in support of our core literacies. Applied research is dependent on external partnerships, and community outreach opportunities. Applied research focuses on creating current value to organizations and society. It answers the “how” question while theoretical research focuses on “what if”. The two require each other. Colleges predominantly focus on applied research that is relevant to industry. Lead by faculty and driven by students. Most importantly, Seneca research projects contribute solutions to real world challenges. Companies that engage in Applied Research find they have improved organizational capacity and capability. They have increased their competitive advantage and developed new ideas that have the potential for commercialization. They have increased the economic prosperity within their operating regions. Any company can engage with Seneca in Applied Research. In the fields of data, analytics, ERP, supply chain and business optimization we see big potential for Applied Research, and we are actively looking for companies that want a cost effective way to create competitive advantage for themselves through partnering with Seneca.

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I’m excited today to also share with you some directional work we have underway to launch a new Centre for Big Data and Business Analysis, anchored in the Seneca Business School. Everywhere we look we see data and the importance of analysis in business operations and management. Tom Davenports new book, “Big Data at Work” opens with a couple of eye opening references he readily admits are estimates on his part – that the average company stores 427 times the amount of data found in the Library of Congress in their databases; that Facebook has more photographic data than all the pixels ever published by Kodak; or that more digital video is captured every day then was produced in the first 50 years of television combined. They may be estimates, impossible to calculate in truth, but they are eye opening none the less. The beauty of Mr. Davenports writing is that he quickly peels away the “gee whiz” of the big numbers to focus on what and how big data is used to create competitive advantage for companies now and as a prediction into the future. If you haven’t read it, it’s well worth the digital space on your eReader. Our new Centre will focus on the business application of data management principles, of data visualization and the alignment of the “why” to the “what and the how”. In my career I have often found it easy to find people to work on the “what and how”, it may cost a considerable sum if they people are in demand but they are available. What’s always been the hardest to find is the “why” side, the why does this business event happen, why does this course of action make sense, why optimize this supply chain vs that. Expressing the “why” in a way others can turn to action is business leadership, it requires deep cross-disciplinary skills and it builds on experience, the root of experiential learning – the Seneca way if you’ll allow me to be so bold. We are so committed to these ideas, to the importance of the “why” question, we’re hard at work to launch two new baccalaureate degrees in management, one for technology folks who want a management base and one for health sciences students also looking to add the business “why” to their skills matrix.

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Seneca is committed to being a different kind of school, producing a different kind of graduate. Through partnerships like the ones we have with companies represented in the room today – be they relationships that influence our curriculum or that engage our faculty and students - we will meet the College’s vision. The proof, as our present advertising says, is in our graduates. The students who leave our programs are prepared for the challenges of our world today and into the future. These students benefit from our partnerships and we seek your continued collaboration to ensure the employees you need for your future are the graduates we are producing. Thank you for your time today, and I will take any questions you may have in the time we have remaining.

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