The MIT Center for Digital Business (CDB) has entered into a three-year agreement with Cognizant (News - Alert) to fund research on the impacts of new technologies in the communications, information, media and entertainment (CIME) industries.
Lacking a playbook to guide their strategies, business leaders in the CIME industries have faced tremendous uncertainty in the face of industry-shaping technologies. Enabling them to more effectively produce their products, serve their customers, and compete with other companies, this program will conduct comprehensive research on the transformative effects of social networks, virtualization, collaboration, and other technologies in the CIME industries, the company stated in a press release.
The research program will focus on "Trends in Technology, Work, and Leadership Development in the CIME Sector: Emergence of the Social Workplace."
"Companies in the CIME sector, by their very nature as content creators and distributors, have been permanently transformed by digitization and the advent of powerful new communication tools, bringing deep changes to processes, products, revenue models, pricing, internal organization, and customer relationships. Our work with MIT (News - Alert) will help our CIME clients understand the emerging social workplace by providing frameworks and insights to address these new competitive challenges," said Francisco D'Souza, president and CEO of Cognizant.
Along with Dr. Erik Brynjolfsson, director of the MIT Center for Digital Business; and Dr. George Westerman, research scientist; Dr. Andrew McAfee (News - Alert), principal research scientist and author of Enterprise 2.0, is the principal investigator of the research team. Along with their expertise in the organizational aspects of technology innovation, all three are experts in the strategic potential of information technology.
Recently, the company revealed its plan to present at the Jefferies Global Technology (News - Alert), Internet, Media & Telecom Conference. This conference is scheduled to take place from May 10-13 in New York City. Held annually, it is said to highlight over 200 technology, Internet, media and telecom companies in a comprehensive format. The three-day event will feature concurrent tracks of over 200 presentations from leading US-based and international companies.
Raju Shanbhag is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of Raju’s articles, please visit his columnist page.