I would like to take this opportunity to extend my sincere wishes for a happy new year.
The year has already given us our first shock. We lost to Korea in an international competitive tender for a nuclear power plant in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). While the two Japanese companies emphasized their high technology, France and Korea collaborated to create presentations that looked at the project from the buyer's point of view. And that was the decisive difference, according to advice that the top manager on the buyer's side given to the top manager of the Japanese group. Korea has long recognized the importance of systems engineering, and I am reminded of how its government and private sectors have worked together on systems approaches. I would like to underscore and share with you my sense of crisis at this defeat.
What we are attempting to do at the Graduate School of System Design and Management is to acknowledge the weakness that we Japanese have of losing sight of the forest through the trees; we want to train people who are capable of designing systems that are optimized at the big-picture level. Since our founding in 2008, we have served as the local chapter for the International Council on Systems Engineering, have built and strengthened ties with a number of foreign universities and have also become a member of the Council of Engineering Systems Universities (CESUN), an international university organization. Today, we enjoy global ties with more than 40 universities in North America, Europe, Asia and Australia. Engineering systems is a multidisciplinary endeavor that encompasses systems engineering, technology and policy, engineering proper, corporate activities, operating research and product development. The Council holds international conferences, provide forums to discuss the development of engineering systems and to share educational materials and curricula.
In March of this year we were pleased to confer our first SDM Masters degrees and send our first class out into the world. There are great expectations riding on SDM, and we will also be subject to rigorous evaluation and critique. The faculty members at the graduate school are committed to taking on this challenge, and we look forward to your guidance and support.
Yoshiaki Ohkami
Director, SDM Research Institute
Dean, Graduate School of System Design and Management