QAI and Bill Curtis announce launch of Center of Excellence for Global Workforce Strategy and Development
Released on = October 9, 2006, 2:03 am
Press Release Author = Supriya Kulkarni/Neeti Rastogi/QAI India Ltd.
Industry = Management
Press Release Summary = QAI India, a process improvement firm for operational excellence today announced the launch of first of its kind "Center of Excellence for Global Workforce Strategy and Development" in Bangalore. The Center of Excellence will be set up in collaboration with Bill Curtis, Guru, and Co Author of People Capability Model® (People CMM®), the Capability Maturity Model® (CMM®) and Business Process Maturity Model (BPMM).
Press Release Body = Bangalore (9 Oct, 06): QAI India, a process improvement firm for operational excellence today announced the launch of first of its kind "Center of Excellence for Global Workforce Strategy and Development" in Bangalore. The Center of Excellence will be set up in collaboration with Bill Curtis, Guru, and Co Author of People Capability Model® (People CMM®), the Capability Maturity Model® (CMM®) and Business Process Maturity Model (BPMM).
The Center of Excellence has formed a strategic partnership in the area of research, innovation and publications with the Indian School of Business' Centre for IT and the Networked Economy (CITNE). This strategic partnership is designed to leverage the research orientation of CITNE and the real world experiences and deep expertise and process capabilities of QAI, along with the thought leadership of Bill Curtis.
The Center of Excellence, with an objective of addressing the area of workforce strategy and development and talent-based innovation, will leverage the widely acclaimed People CMM® framework by:
Undertaking activities such as research, publication and product and IP creation.
Helping create a global community of practitioners, linked by a knowledge repository of best practices.
Providing People CMM® consulting, training and assessment services to organizations across industries worldwide.
The launch of Center of Excellence will be followed by a series of events and trainings slated for October, 2006 in Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, Bangalore, Chennai, Delhi, Mumbai, and London along with Bill Curtis.
Underscoring the need for such a platform, Navyug Mohnot, CEO, QAI India said, \" I am delighted on the formation of the Global Centre of Excellence. I am convinced that an initiative such as this one will contribute to the organization\'s ability to create an agile and innovative workforce. Given the structure and the dynamics that are shaping organizations, redefining the meaning of work and reshaping the flow of talent, the issues that the Centre will address become not just relevant, but critical for success and long term well being of organizations.\"
Commenting on the launch, Bill Curtis said, " Center of Excellence gives us an ability to organize the talent required to support the global roll out of People CMM®. Over the next year we will be bringing new products and services to market to support organizations in using the People CMM® to improve their workforce strategy and practices. In addition, we will undertake research in critical areas to advance our knowledge of the most effective strategies and practices for improving workforce capability."
In a further joint initiative CITNE at ISB will introduce a graduate (PhD) student residency program designed to provide outstanding researchers the opportunity to pursue rigorous applied research that benefits the Indian ICT industry and is targeted for publication in top journals.
Speaking about the strategic partnership, Dr. Ravi Bapna of ISB said, "we have ignored the knowledge creation or research aspect of our educational system for too long. Creating a culture of research and innovation requires a significant commitment and a long-term view from all stakeholders. This is a fantastic example of an industry-academia linkage necessary to create the next generation of knowledge workers."
Need for an Innovation Ecosystem
Nations, societies and organizations realize that widespread, institutionalized, structured and repeatable Innovation leads to enhanced competitiveness, a higher standard of living and accelerated development.
We all know that there are several facets of the Innovation Ecosystem. Importantly there are several determinants of how these facets get created, why certain groups of people are more innovative than others, and why we know often where in the world the next great idea is likely to come from.
Some of the principal determinants of the Innovation Ecosystem are - Investments, Infrastructure and the People. Copious research has been done on the affects of a conducive Infrastructure, notably the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) infrastructure. And plenty of capital is readily available today to invest in innovative ideas and approaches. However precious little is being done to understand and enhance practices in the area of creating organization cultures that encourage a culture of research and innovation in the workforce. Through a deep understanding of the competencies required for an innovative workforce, through scientific workforce planning, through creating the teams and the coaching/mentoring mechanisms, and by building research focused industry-academia linkages we can enhance the ability of people to innovate and achieve the desired results.
In summary, we need to be able to Attract, Develop, Motivate, Organize and Retain the right Talent for Structured Innovation, and more importantly understand the causal relations and equations for creating and nurturing such abilities and capability.
The widely acclaimed People Capability Maturity Model® (People CMM®) framework developed at Carnegie Mellon University, USA is the first global initiative to bring about an institutionalized, standards-based approach to addressing the 'people' part of the Innovation Ecosystem.
Need for People CMM®
The industry needs to adopt a standards-based approach and create an inter-linked system of processes and best practices that transform the organization's capability for managing its workforce.
While we accept that most of today's service and knowledge businesses are talent driven and that people are our biggest assets, historically, many organizations have focused more on proactively improving their delivery processes and their investments in technology. In addition, their approach workforce management too often incorporates practices from a labor relations orientation that do not represent best practice in managing knowledge workers.
In fact, the current global concern of talent shortfalls and high attrition rates in IT/ITES-BPO Industry are only a tip of the iceberg.
At the business level, there are imperatives like improving productivity, moving-up the value chain, enhancing competitiveness and getting closer to the customers.
At the organization level, issues like managing a multi-cultural and multi-geography workforce, managing rapid growth and creating "cool" work cultures continue to take a large mind-share of business leaders and HR professionals.
So, it's not good enough to win the "talent wars". It's also not enough to try solutions (like Business Process Reengineering, Employee Stock Options, Assessment Centers and 360-degree appraisals) in a piece-meal manner.
Instead, the need of the hour is to take a holistic view of the organization's business, culture, technology and talent needs. And adapt solutions based on an integrated and proactive approach towards developing & engaging talent, growing the business, delighting the customers, and increasing the probability of Innovation. In essence we must develop an integrated system of workforce practices that provides staged foundations on which more sophisticated practices can be implemented over time.
People CMM® has successfully guided work force improvement programs in many global organizations such as Boeing, Wipro, ZTE, Alcatel, TCS, Satyam, Honeywell, Novo Nordisk, Nokia, L&T, HCL BPO, Covansys, CSC, NIIT, Accenture, LG CNS, Hughes Software Systems, IBM Global, Siemens and many more.
For Further Information please contact:
Supriya Kulkarni QAI India Ltd. Phone:+91-80-25506386 Email: supriyak@qaiindia.com
Neeti Rastogi QAI India Ltd. Phone:+91-11-26219792 Email: neetir@qaiindia.com
About Dr. Bill Curtis Dr. Bill Curtis is the architect and co-author of the People CMM® developed at Carnegie Mellon University, USA. Bill is also the co-author of the Capability Maturity Model® (CMM®) and the recently developed Business Process Maturity Model (BPMM). BPMM provides a foundation for contemporary management approaches as it goes via the analysis of business processes to the roots of an organization. He is a former Director of the Software Process Program at the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, USA. Bill has co-authored four books and has published over 150 papers.
About ISB, Hyderabad:
The Indian School of Business, ISB (http://www.isb.edu), is a world-class research-oriented independent management institution that grooms future leaders for India and the world. The ISB is a collaborative effort of eminent business leaders, entrepreneurs, and academics from around the world, and has formal affiliations with the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, the Wharton School, and the London Business School.
The ISB\'s faculty body is a combination of visiting and permanent resident faculty members. Visiting faculty members come from the partner schools and other top schools around the world. Permanent faculty members have previously studied and been on the faculty at the top schools around the world, and publish their research in top journals.
About QAI India Ltd. (QAI):
QAI (www.qaiasia.com) is a leading global consulting organization addressing knowledge intensive industry sectors such as the IT/BPO space and delivers multi-faceted interventions to enhance the innovation and competitiveness of organizations.
QAI is Asia's largest and amongst the world's leading firms in the enterprise wide deployment of process initiatives that contribute to 'Operational and Business Excellence'.
Set up in 1994 as the Asia-Pac hub, QAI's mission is to facilitate enhanced competitiveness in Software, BPO and other knowledge intensive organizations through multi-faceted interventions in the areas of Process Improvement, be it business, engineering, people management, or IT, through our services in Consulting, Training, People, Process and Operational Assessments, Benchmarking, Certification, Conferences, Resource provisioning & Quality Outsourcing and e-Learning.
This unique blend of services focusing on the triad of People, Process and Technology, enables clients using one service to benefit from QAI's experience, knowledge base, network, and learning in other services.
QAI's regional bases across the globe-in the USA, Singapore, China, Malaysia, London and India-help innovatively distribute and manage engagements across multiple locations.
Over 300 organizations (including the Fortune 500, governmental organizations and nodal agencies) worldwide trust QAI as their consulting partner. QAI has conducted over 150 assessments and appraisals, provided training to over 1000 organizations, certified over 9000 software and BPO professionals, trained over 75,000 Software & BPO professionals in over 25 countries across the world. The QAI Consulting Team aggregates over 800 man-years of experience.
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