Information Sciences and Technology

IST professor embarks on India internship; will blog about experiences

Irene Petrick, a professor of practice at Penn State's College of Information Sciences and Technology, will spend the next two months based in Bangalore, India, studying issues related to global teams. Her observations on this and other topics will be the focus of a blog at http://eii.ist.psu.edu/blog/.

On a faculty internship with the Computer Sciences Corp. (CSC), Petrick will work closely with that company's India-based operations as well as CSC partners in the country. In addition, she will conduct seminars for or meet with representatives of Procter & Gamble, Honeywell and Kennametal. She also plans to confer with government IT officials in India.

The director of IST’s Enterprise Informatics and Integration research center (EII), Petrick will observe the operational and managerial differences in the Indian operations of American-based companies and their India-based counterparts. White papers and reports will be prepared.

Beyond that, she said, "At the end of the summer, I want to take a step back from the hype on global teams and really talk about some of the nuances underlying them: how they work, when they work, and when they don’t work."

Among the issues she hopes to probe are what constitutes management and what constitutes leadership in globally diverse teams. She also wishes to learn more about ways that globally diverse teams and global diversity can be leveraged to spur innovation.

Insights Petrick gathers will be of value to the work of her research center in the area of decision making. She also hopes to develop links for potential internships for IST students in India, including ones in government ministries; create foundations in IST for educating the international workforce; and lay the groundwork for future international faculty internships.

 

Last Updated March 19, 2009