About MARC³  

  

 

     The Midwest Academic & Resilience Cloud Computing Consortium (MARC³) is a non profit group of  colleges, universities and industry partners investigating all aspects of Critical Infrastructure (e.g. CYBER SECURITY, Energy, Waste, Water, Telecommunications, Financial, Education etc..) resilience-sustainability, and the impact on same through the leveraging  of cloud computing infrastructure. The goal of our members is to make MARC³ a regional-national hub of academic and industry expertise/excellence in resilience-sustainability best practices across all critical infrastructure. Proper use of cloud technology will improve resilience against natural/manmade catastrophe, in addition to enhancing sustainability of the local-regional-national-global economy. MARC³will continue its stewardship of fostering creative thought leadership through the collaboration of its diverse membership makeup including enterprise, small-midsize business, academia, and government.  

       Job creation, and economic prosperity is an immediate focus of MARC³. We are seeing measurable results(Created Thousands of Jobs, and Tens of Millions of Dollars in Savings) from a sustainable effort underway (underwritten by MARC³) to better synchronize-align (continuously changing) business requirements, with local-regional-national universities & community colleges. Economic sustainability can be realized through “Onshore Sourcing” driven through these educational institutions. Participating organizations can realize significant savings over their existing process of workforce acquisition, while enhancing the overall synchronicity of  business-technology requirements for participating enterprise, schools, and the thousands of Small Midsize Business (SMB) within the school districts.

          We continue to find new areas of opportunity for job creation including those that for years have formed the “Back Bone of The U.S. Economy”, and today serve as the critical lynchpin for the seamless operational sustainability of all commerce over the internet. Commercial Truck Driving, and all aspects that focus on Highway Transportation Safety, and Security are a strategic, and critical focus of our efforts.

         

 

Observation

      The U.S. faces a significant challenge being the continually growing “Skills Gap.” Technology is changing rapidly and our country is not producing the tech savvy 21^st Century workforce needed to meet evolving industry needs. Use of 3^rd party outsourcing providers makes economic sense for individual companies wishing to prop up their bottom line, while shortening the cycle time on technology introduction. This same technology requires levels of expertise that, in many instances, is argued as being in short supply due to a disconnect between business requirements and existing education processes.  This disconnect continues to grow as the leapfrog of technology innovation continues to accelerate, requiring jobs with levels of proficiency that (some argue) the existing education process is ill equipped to provide any time soon.

 

Approach

      In recognition of the above, and to better service our constituents (e.g. business, academia, and government), we attempt to provide a win-win for impacted stakeholders (of engaged organizations) by introducing a roadmap providing simultaneous, direct benefit to multiple “Organizational Silos.” These benefits are tied to a process that better aligns education and business, through a better understanding of their direct interdependency including:

Adoption Lifecycle of technology introduction within the market,

o   Corresponding impact across all job disciplines,

·        Accelerating Pace of technology innovation, and corresponding impact to prior point,

o   Time to Market requirements of technology users & manufacturers,

o   Impact on all job disciplines,

o   Cycle Time required to  train/educate a resource (e.g. worker) to service the required need,

·        Metrics to be used for enhanced recalibration/alignment due to continual change of all the above.

 

      As the benefits become better understood, MARC³ (with education partners) is looking at uniform approaches to provide “On Demand/Just In Time” education offerings pertaining to aggregated, global needs of participating firms and tied to job creation nationally. This would include developing:

 

   Process for On Demand/Just in Time Education provided through university, community college etc..,

o   Be more responsive to the requirement of the user,

o   As necessary invoke levels of customization including shortening duration of offering,

o   Be as innovative as those firms being serviced,

·        Tailor education/training to best leverage existing educational skills of existing (underemployed/unemployed) pockets within the workforce,

o   Post-Doctoral workforce (estimated at 100,000),

·        Provide customized education/training offerings through interconnected Centers For Professional Development (CPD),

o   Provided through university, community college etc…,

o   Customized course/curriculum offerings that can be adjusted in duration, and scope,

·        Process to better leverage/integrate schools within the corporate hiring process,

o   Approach to more closely integrate schools into the servicing of corporate hiring requirements versus 3^rd party vendors,

o   School involvement in uniform screening process corporations would use for candidates (globally),

·        Utilization of Service Level Agreements (SLA) tied to education commitments (e.g. Key Performance Indicators etc...),

·        Metrics tied to all the above to insure consistency in performance.

Role of Illinois HPC Innovation Cluster in Job Creation and Reform of STEM Education