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Vision Statement
By Howard Frank, Dean
Robert H. Smith School of Business
Netcentricity Laboratories
Netcentricity
is the power of digital networks to
distribute information instantly and on a
global scale. Netcentricity has changed the
world as we know it, from the way we live
our personal lives, our social and political
activities and choices, to our approaches
for conducting business and creating value.
To develop, test, and share best business
practices of this new networked world, the
Smith School of Business launched its
netcentric economy initiative of creating a
unique set of R&D and teaching test beds to
study the emerging netcentric world from a
variety of perspectives. The vision is to
create an integrated research and teaching
environment that links technology research
of the netcentric environment with business
research, and includes training in behavior,
policy, strategy, and finance.
Central to
this initiative are the Netcentricity
Laboratories, a sophisticated collection of
facilities for researchers, students,
government, and the corporate community that
also serve as a hands-on learning
environment. This networked environment
encompasses supply chain management,
financial trading, electronic commerce, and
applications and research in the behavioral
aspects of netcentricity. The Smith School
is partnered with several major companies to
develop and support the new laboratories.
Sun Microsystems has donated servers,
terminals, and software to create a
mini-version of the company's Menlo Park,
Calif., supply chain management laboratory.
Through its alliance with Sun, the school is
modeling the extended enterprise
relationships among suppliers, carriers,
distributors, and customers. Oracle Corp.,
Tibco Software Inc., and Manugistics have
contributed software, and companies such as
SAIC and Dell have contributed research
funding. Commercial software from the
Reuters Corporation provides the Netcentric
Financial Markets Laboratory with real-time
access to a variety of financial data.
Netcentric
Supply Chain Laboratory
The Netcentric Supply Chain Laboratory
provides an environment to build prototype
proof-of-concept IT projects to facilitate
adoption of an integrated system to manage
the supply chain of an extended enterprise.
The laboratory provides the environment that
enabled Smith School researchers to build a
prototype mega-portal to manage and operate
the F-101 engine for the U.S. Air Force. The
lab was used in the 2003-2004 academic year
to extend the prototype portal built for the
F-101 engine in a project for the U.S. Army.
The two
Supply Chain Laboratories focus on research
and teaching. The research lab builds
prototype proof-of-concept projects that are
incorporated into the teaching lab for
students to learn about state-of-the-art
systems and developments projects on a
rapid-development cycle. Several commercial
off-the-shelf software applications reside
in the teaching lab, as well as prototype
proof-of-concept applications developed in
the research lab. These software packages
and applications provide students with
hands-on experiences with applications
currently in use by major Fortune 500
companies, as well as applications that will
be commercially available in the next three
to five years. The hands-on experiences in
the teaching lab enable students to design
supply chains optimized according to one or
some combination of underlying business
objectives. Students can experience how
supply-chain executives take control of
their firm’s supply chains with the power to
release manufacturing work orders, as well
as purchase orders, to major suppliers.
These powerful tools allow the planners to
develop plans that optimize firm
profitability, on-time deliveries,
inventories, or some combination of these
objectives.
Netcentric
Financial Markets Laboratories
The Netcentric Financial Markets
Laboratories are a collection of people,
practices, software, hardware, and data
connected to traditional sources of data, as
well as to the Internet. The labs replicate
the functionality of computer workstations,
live international data feeds, and
sophisticated software of Wall Street’s top
trading firms, and provides an advanced
research and teaching environment to
investigate trading technology and market
microstructure, risk-management strategies,
financing and valuation of knowledge-based
companies, and other technology-driven
financial research areas. They give
participants the ability to value complex
securities and investment opportunities in
real-time, using the latest numerical
algorithms. While much research and
infrastructure development is required to
realize this vision, the schools and
researchers who lead the way will be able to
achieve international recognition and enable
their collaborators to exploit market
opportunities that their less-advanced
competitors cannot realize.
The Financial
Markets Laboratories provide an exciting
learning environment, as well as unusually
broad opportunities for research and
teaching in finance and related fields,
drawing on the interface between finance and
technology. The labs:
• Support and
enhance an academic research program by
bringing state-of-the-art computer trading
and financial technology to bear upon
cutting-edge issues in financial
engineering, corporate finance, financial
institutions, and international finance;
• Provide
support for courses in graduate and
undergraduate finance programs and
facilitates the development of programs in
contemporary issues in finance, such as risk
management, derivatives strategies, and
structured products;
• Stimulate
opportunities for cross-functional research
and teaching alliances that reflect the
horizontal merging among fields such as
logistics, operations research, accounting
systems, information systems, and finance;
• Serve as an
information repository for live data feeds
and financial databases needed for both
research and teaching.
The first
Netcentric Financial Markets Laboratory was
launched in Fall 2001 with the mission to
provide world-class teaching and research
opportunities in financial markets for the
Robert H. Smith School of Business at the
University of Maryland. The initial
laboratory was augmented in 2002 when a
second, larger financial markets facility
became operational. The labs emphasize
hands-on learning and utilize the latest in
technology. Real-time data and analytical
tools are provided by Reuters and displayed
on Daktronics’ electronic display boards and
on 20-foot electronic stock tickers.
Students are able to analyze real-time and
historical data to understand financial
instruments. They can also build and test
investment portfolios using professional
software packages.
Netcentric
Behavioral Laboratory
The Netcentric Behavioral Laboratory was
launched in Spring 2003 to provide Smith
School faculty and students with resources
to conduct experimental research on human
behavior. The lab includes both new
information-technology resources for
conducting computer-aided experiments and
traditional resources for conducting
behavioral research. The main lab space
provides videotaping capabilities, 18
networked workstations capable of presenting
multimedia stimuli, and several software
applications designed for conducting
behavioral research. Four team rooms each
provide a computer workstation and a
conference table for team interactions.
By
participating in faculty research, students
at the Smith School have the opportunity to
observe first-hand how experimental research
is conducted. In addition, the lab increases
faculty research productivity and
facilitates interaction among the school's
behavioral researchers. An example of a
behavioral lab research study is a project
that explores the tendency of consumers of
electronic services to become overwhelmed by
the large number of features often present
in such products.
The addition
of the Netcentric Behavioral Laboratory is
an important step in the Smith School’s
strategy to advance research excellence by
providing an infrastructure that stimulates
prolific, top-quality business research.
Researchers from across the school’s
academic departments, from Marketing to
Decision and Information Technologies,
utilize the behavioral lab to administer
computer-aided experiments, conduct
Internet-based behavioral research, and
videotape interviews and focus groups. One
typical study now underway is testing the
impact of adding features to high-technology
products on consumers’ satisfaction with the
products. Conducting this experiment with
virtual audio and video players on the lab’s
workstations allows the researchers to
record users’ click-streams as they interact
with the products.
The
laboratory’s technology allows researchers
to capture more fully the users’ experiences
with the products than would other methods
of data collection. In the lab environment,
researchers can carefully control the
stimuli users see and, therefore, can
measure the effects of small—but potentially
important—adjustments to the products on
user satisfaction. In addition to increasing
faculty and student research productivity,
the lab provides resources for teaching at
the undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral
levels. Instructors can use the lab to
conduct computer-aided demonstrations, run
simulation games, and videotape team
interactions. The laboratory also provides
students with the opportunity to participate
in research and observe first-hand how
experimental research is conducted.
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