Lancaster Centre for e-Management and e-Science

The proposed Centre for e-Management and e-Science will accelerate the understanding of e Management through multidisciplinary research activities. E-Science promises to open the door to new business models that will improve the effectiveness and competitiveness of UK PLC. Business urgently needs the new tools, skills and the perspective to forge the business strategies and collaborations needed to meet the demands of ever changing global markets.This is a joint proposal between staff of Lancaster's Management School (LUMS), Centre of e-Science and Computing Department. This unique combination has a track record in delivering high quality research projects. The latest global ranking of the world's leading business schools, published by the Financial Times on Monday 24th January 2005, confirms Lancaster's Management School's position as one of the UK's top 3 schools, and amongst the world's top 40. The LUMS Department of Management Learning (ML) is the leading academic centre in Europe, solely committed to the critique and improvement of learning processes for managers and organizations. ML will be involved in the development of our training and resource discovery materials.The Lancaster Centre of e-Science had a fundamental role in creating e-Social Science and now seeks to apply what it has learnt to help develop our understanding of the emergeing field of e-Management, which we interpret here as the intersection of Management and e-Science. The Director of the Centre for e-Science is joining the Management School and the Centre will be across the Management School and the newly formed Faculty for Science and Technology. The Lancaster Computing Department was awarded a rating of 5A in the 2001 RAE. It has a strong emphasis on collaboration both with other departments in the university and with leading organisations world-wide. The department is an international centre of excellence in Computer Science and an intergal part of InfoLab21.The proposed Centre will support the increasingly national and global collaborations emerging in many areas of Management research. These activities will eventually transform the business environment by enabling organisations to respond more quickly to changes in the nature of global markets and related customer expectations. The presence of easy to use high power, highly reconfigurable e-Management tools will enable more efficient access to resources and combinations of resources and services in a way that was not previously possible. It is likely that these tools will include more adaptable and comprehensive models of supply and consumer satisfaction. The proposed Centre has the additional goal of developing easy to use e-collaborative, e-information and other Grid enabled tools appropriate to e-Management. These tools will be supported by approppriate training and resource discovery materials. It is very difficult for many SME ICT staff and senior managers to attain the desired skill levels in computing to deal with the complexities of contemporary Grid platforms. The combination of research into the potential for large scale e-Management applications, the scoping and development of e-Management tools and the provision of training and resource discovery in e-Management make this proposed Centre for e-Management and e-Science distinct.