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Systems Continuum 2005 held at SJMSOM, IIT Bombay The Systems Continuum 2005 on "IT - The Road Ahead" held at Shailesh J. Mehta School of Management, IIT Bombay on the 5th and 6th of February, witnessed a slew of corporate bigwigs sharing their experience and insights with management students of various eminent schools and industry delegates. CONTINUUM specifically focuses on the issues and challenges faced by a particular business function, and aims to draw insights from the knowledge and experiences of the participating speakers. The event has grown from strength to strength over the years, and is now very well acknowledged by both the industry and the academia. The event saw a healthy interaction among the people of industry, academia and the students populace, which led to a very generous tossing of ideas on an entire gamut of topics ranging from tapping new service lines to targeting high potential verticals to tapping product centric products to BPO success stories and growing in the inorganic way of mergers and acquisitions. The first in the series of Continuum, the systems continuum was inaugurated by Dr. D. B. Phatak, HOD, SJMSOM, IIT Bombay. Commenting on the road ahead for this integral branch of business, he emphasized on the increasing share of the services sector in the GDP. He stressed on the extraordinary importance of IT in conventional lines of business, but the need of the hour was to innovate into newer fields utilizing the vast pool of resources effectively. Taking the field of education as an example, he impressed upon the audience the use of IT to help run education like a business but felt business itself has not yet recognized this opportunity. The key note speaker Ranjit Samra who is Executive director at Morgan Stanley then started his lecture on a light note commenting on how his frequent visits to the IIT campus in the past 6-7 months might lead people to mistake him as an IIT alumnus. Mr. Samra introduced the audience to a client's perspective of IT services, the problems faced by his organization and possible solutions. According to him, the problems are inherent to the field of banking, as it requires the vendors to have expert domain knowledge when the business is not actually easy to understand. Moreover, most of the technology is proprietary and can't be shared with IT vendors. Quoting the example of JP Morgan Chase of how they had outsourced their services only to reverse their decision later, he told us that companies in this sector need to build on intellectual capital and in-house solutions to take a lead over competitors. He reiterated this fact commending the quality of human assets at Morgan Stanley. Contributed by - |
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