MIT - University of Kelaniya

r Milo Wolf a visiting Fulbright Scholar who pioneered the setting up of the Faculty of Science at the University of Kelaniya promoted the concept of teaching management to students following science subjects for the first time in Sri Lanka. Dahanayake played an important role in the setting up of the new department. Their pioneering efforts were aptly supported by local experts from the private sector, Dr Anton Balasuriya and Dr Ranjith Cabral of Unilever Ceylon, and Mr Mahinda Karunarathne who guided the Department in the absence of full time senior academic staff. Dr. David C Dellinger from the University of North Carolina, another Fulbright Faculty, initiated the Special Degree program in 1980s. Dr Lalith Goonatillake, gifted with wide international academic and industry experience became the first Professor of the Department and contributed aggressively to move the Department into a wider spectrum of activities, extending to international arena. The number of staff who were skilled in varied professions enabled the department to become aggressively extrovert in the 1980’s. We can be proud that, today, we have a combination of highly qualified academic staff trained in both management and in information technology areas which is unsurpassed anywhere in a single academic department in the country. The Department moved into the novel areas of training and consultancy, and collaborated with many agencies to provide new vistas to our stakeholders: UN, UNIDO, UNESCO, The World Bank, OECD, SIDA, and the Asian Development Bank, to name a few of them. We have achieved national recognition by being selected to house the Center for Enterprise Management Information Services (CEMIS) in Sri Lanka. This center that was funded by the UNDP and managed by UNIDO has the Ministry of Industrial Development and the Ceylon National Chamber of Commerce & Industry (CNCI) as partners of the project. We also have gained recognition by SIDA as an authorized trainer of small-scale entrepreneurs in the Asian region. Our students enjoy a very high employability level and are most sought after by the industry as a productive human input to their organizations. Our staff aggressively pursues novel endeavors to benefit the industry through collaborative, application oriented research, and work with international agencies to ameliorate the professionalism of managers and entrepreneurs. These activities have enabled us to develop a long-term productive relationship with our clients that mutually benefit the industry, the department and most importantly the student population. Academically, we have progressed from the mere offering of Industrial Management as a single subject for fifteen students as part of the general degree in science, to introduce a special degree, enlarge the domain of learning into operational research and information technology, and to introduce three postgraduate programmes. We have fully transformed the conventional “one subject for the degree” concept into a separate degree in Management and Information Technology. Fifty selected students are provided with the opportunity to empower themselves with a degree which combines management and information technology, the mix of which makes students productive, modern in their outlook, and mobile. The most significant transformation of the Department since its inception is the blending of the two areas of knowledge and skills: Management and Information Technology, the combination of which provides a wide arena of conceptual and applied skills. The two postgraduate diploma programmes: Industrial and Business Management, and Information Technology, and our Masters Degree programme in Management and Information Technology are aimed at professionals and academics who aspire to acquire greater application skills in these areas. With our lineage on out-bound activity, we engage our students in participatory training programs, to develop their leadership and communicational skills in particular. These activities are mandatory for all of our students and trainees. Our out-bound activities include field experience, internship training and camp style interactive training.