The MOU was signed by Professor Ravi Bapna, Executive Director for the Centre for IT and the Networked Economy (CITNE) at the ISB and Professor Steven Miller, Dean, School of Information Systems, SMU.

Upon signing the agreement, Professor Ravi Bapna, Executive Director, CITNE at the ISB, said, “CITNE’s mission is to pursue rigorous and relevant knowledge creation (research) and dissemination (teaching) targeted at taking the global IT and IT enabled services revolution to the next level. By joining forces, CITNE and SIS-SMU will create a virtual pool of world class IS management faculty that will tackle issues of importance to the burgeoning South Asian IT/ITeS industry”.

Professor Steven Miller, Dean of the School of Information Systems, SMU commented: “India and Asia are increasingly the leading edge sources of experimentation and innovation in the global IT service industry as well as in the way in which IT is used in end user business organizations. It is therefore appropriate and important for our respective universities, which are both highly regarded and visible symbols of the new wave of economic, business and technology growth in Asia, to collaborate in research and educational initiatives to guide the development of IT management in this part of the world.”

The agreement is for an initial period of three years starting July 1, 2007. Through the agreement, the Information Systems Management faculty at ISB and SMU will collaborate to develop new thinking and practices in areas such as Business Intelligence & Analytics, e- market design for emerging economies, the economics of software licensing and software as a service, managing the transition to new enterprise platforms, IS technology & management issues in the banking and trading sectors, next generation IT sourcing and IT governance.

Along with initiating joint research projects, ISB and SMU will conduct annual joint workshops and video-conference their research seminars both in Singapore and in India in order to share latest research findings in Information Systems.

“This is a great opportunity for us,” said M Rammohan Rao, Dean, ISB, “The ISB is committed to generating leading- edge research that addresses the specific challenges in high potential emerging markets such as South Asia. SMU and ISB share this commitment to contribute actively to Asian businesses.”