Business Excellence thorugh Value Addition February 15, 2008
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An engrossing talk was delivered on the afternoon of 12th February 2008 to the students of VGSOM, IIT Kharagpur by Mr. Siddhartha Dasgupta, Emeritus Quality Expert, Philips Electronics. He spoke to the gathering on “BUSINESS EXCELLENCE THROUGH VALUE ADDITION”. (more…)
Workshop on Globalization, Strategy and Leadership! February 12, 2008
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After MIT and Harvard, Partha Ghosh now at VGSOM..!
VGSOM students will soon have the privilege of taking leadership lessons from Mr. Partha S. Ghosh who is a world renowned strategist, consultant, author and the chairman of board of Boston Analytics. Mr. Ghosh, ex-partner of McKinsey & Co., will be delivering a lecture series at VGSOM, IIT Kharagpur from 14th to 17th Feb 2008 after having conducted the same at Harvard University and MIT, which will also be his first at an Indian B-School, on the issues of strategic problem solving, leadership and globalization. (more…)
Fresh MBAs, Just SHUT UP and LISTEN! February 12, 2008
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This was the succinct advice given to students at VGSoM by Mr. Radhakrishnan Nair, Chief of Corporate HR, Tata Steel. He said this while telling the students about his experience with fresh recruits under him all these years and advising on things to keep in mind before stepping into the corporate world. (more…)
Turnaround Management- Crisis.. Survival.. Revival.. Renewal.. January 23, 2008
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Sharing decades of his diverse and rich experience with the budding managers was one of his ways of giving back to his Alma matter. Capt Mohan Ram, an ex-naval officer and a business veteran- the man behind the historic turnaround of TVS Motor Company, and an ex- IIT-Kgpian of the batch of 1953 returned to deliver lectures on “Structured Product Development” and “Turnaround Management”. A man in his 70s, he spoke at both sessions with such passion, enthusiasm and energy that we 20-somethings were totally awe-struck. A series of power packed lectures infused with a healthy dose of wit and humour with the help of anecdotes was truly stimulating.
Discount, Differentiate or Die! April 10, 2007
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A day in the life of a ‘glorified dukaandar’
The above headings give the essence of what the students of VGSOM learned from one of the experts of the Retail game on 31st March, 2007.
Mr. S.S. Sheikhawat, VP Marketing, RPG Retail Pvt. Ltd. delivered a truly enlightening guest lecture at the institute on the domain of ‘Retail Marketing’ along with excerpts from his own experience in the field of marketing in general. (more…)
Brand it ! January 30, 2007
Posted by theginsoakedboy in Guest Lecture.5 comments
The weekend of 20th and 21st Jan saw some hard-core gyan on the “Art and Science of Brands” by the pro Dr. Sunder M.P. – Group Manager, Brand and Communications – Infosys. Dr. Sunder has a PhD from Harvard Business School, under the legendary marketing guru of this era Dr. Philip Kotler.
From Brand perception to execution through case and M-plan discussions, moving towards rural marketing and touching base with IT marketing and the niches of brand hijack and cult brands, the 2 day workshop spanned the entire spectrum of Branding, with some great interactions, ideas and thoughts flowing across the space.
It ended with a fact-of-life statement by the Doc – “Never Talk in Absolutes in the field of Marketing”. Digest that!
Games People Way – the Road Map to Web 2.0 – MMORGP January 24, 2007
Posted by shaunak in Guest Lecture, Kerberos.1 comment so far
Kerberos, the Systems Club at VGSOM organized a lecture by Dr. Prithwis Mukherjee, Head, Learning and Knowledge – Global Delivery, IBM, on 6th September, 2006. The talk was on “Games People Way – the Road Map to Web 2.0 – MMORGP”
Residents of one of the Internet’s most populous virtual worlds shop, attend class, and even run businesses. Soon you may do the same – Second Life
Second Life is a 3-D virtual world entirely built and owned by its residents. Since opening to the public in 2003, it has grown explosively and today is inhabited by 342,944 people from around the globe. Massively Multi-user Online Role Playing Games (MMORPG) like Plane shift, Second Life represents a new genre of rich 3D applications that are going to dominate the contours of emerging internet techno scope.
Dr Prithwis Mukherjee, introduced the audience to this new field, a novel experience. He explained how one could exploit this opportunity for learning, for doing virtual business, for evaluating an employee’s team skills and so on. He himself is an active member of the Second Life community, and gave the audience a brief introduction about the history of Second Life and how it evolved from an era of online games to Plane shift to Second Life.
He described Second Life as “A community that is free to be joined by any one, which will earn you a certain Linden dollars (that can be exchanged for real dollars) and where one can be anyone, anywhere and do any task wished by him or her”.
On this community anyone can currently sign in for free at the link given at the end of the article and create his own AVATAR, in short be whom ever he or she wishes to be.
He then logged in at the IBM’s own Island as “Kolkatta Prince“(his avatar) in his funky and colorful outfit as of a teenager. There he showed us his team’s hangout place (the island).He then showed off his virtual gizmo cycle built by him on Second Life, which was his college time dream. He also had a cool car gifted to him by an online friend of his, which otherwise would have cost him certain 1000 Linden dollars!!
On a serious note, he showed us the various business opportunities that are possible in this virtual world. These activities are not merely a business situation simulation but also yield certain Linden dollars in return. And these Linden dollars can be then converted into real money (US $).
Business activities like buying and selling of land on Second Life and earning a daily amount of Linden $ 250,000, selling a projector system for business meetings, selling of high fashion clothes for avatars, giving funky haircuts for them, all are conducted on second life. All these activities are made possible through computer programming using high level languages and customization is done for the respective customers. On the same lines, one of the IBM associates is thinking of opening up a boutique for Indian styled female clothes and is busy these days programming full time for it!!!
He also showed a live business conference that he and other IBM associates had at a virtual board room on Second Life. A live presentation was also given by one of the associates in this meeting. IBM also uses Second Life as a platform to promote creativity, to test leadership skills and team player qualities of their employees.
He ended the session by taking queries from the students.
So Second Life turned out to be not just a virtual zone to have fun in but also a real life business simulator and enhancer.
All in all it was an enriching and a learning experience about a domain we were uninitiated about.
Resources:
http://Secondlife.com for more information.
Article courtesy Kanishka Bhambhani, Batch of ’08, VGSOM
Service Oriented Architecture and Web Services January 23, 2007
Posted by shaunak in Guest Lecture, Kerberos.add a comment
This talk was delivered on October 14th 2006 by Mr. Gopal Bhageria of IBM Global Business Services.
The students of VGSOM, IIT Kharagpur attended a very informative and thought-provoking guest-lecture on ‘Service Oriented Architecture and Web Services’ on 14th October 2006. The lecture was a part of a series of lectures being organized under the auspices of IBM and Kerberos, the Systems Club at VGSOM.
The lecture dealt with business modeling and the increasing need for service oriented architecture of business and software in today’s world. In computing, SOA defines the use of loosely coupled software services to support the requirements of the business processes and software users. Enterprise architects believe that SOA can help businesses respond more quickly and cost-effectively to the changing market conditions. It can also simplify interconnection to and usage of existing IT (legacy) assets.
Mr. Bhageria also talked about SOA realization, SOA governance and web-services. He also made a suggestion that VGSOM could introduce a course in Enterprise Architecture as there was a great demand for good enterprise architects.
Mr. Gopal Bhageria is leading SOA initiative and Model Driven Business Transformation (an IBM Research initiative http://w3.webahead.ibm.com/w3ki/display/MDBT/Home ) based projects in GBS India. He is also a GBS India SOA and Web Services community leader and a member of TEC-IN an affiliate of IBM Academy of Technology. VGSOM takes pride in the fact that Mr. Bhageria, who has successfully lead teams in developing and implementing business solutions for IBM’s clients, is an alumnus of VGSOM.
SOA Resources
A great place to start is the wikipedia entry on SOA. Excerpts …
SOA is a design for linking computational resources (principally, applications and data) on demand to achieve the desired results for service consumers (which can be end users or other services). OASIS (the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) defines SOA as the following:
A paradigm for organizing and utilizing distributed capabilities that may be under the control of different ownership domains. It provides a uniform means to offer, discover, interact with and use capabilities to produce desired effects consistent with measurable preconditions and expectations.
…
Enterprise architects believe that SOA can help businesses respond more quickly and cost-effectively to the changing market conditions. This style of architecture promotes reuse at the macro (service) level rather than micro levels (eg. objects). It can also simplify interconnection to and usage of existing IT (legacy) assets.
Article courtesy Kanishka Bhambhani (Member, Kerberos), Batch of ’08, VGSOM.
Asset Management: Cost and Risk Modelling January 23, 2007
Posted by shaunak in Guest Lecture.55 comments
Dr Gopinath Chattopadhyay of the School of Engineering Systems, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia delivered a talk on Asset Management: Cost and Risk Modelling at the Department of Industrial Engineering, IIT Kharagpur on the 17th of January, 2007.
Dr Chattopadhyay spoke about systems developed by his team to evaluate risk and aid in the management of rail assets for a few Scandanavian countries. The talk was attended by quite a few students from VGSOM (myself included) and was very well received by the audience, especially by the management students since risk modelling and management is coming into its own as a profession for MBAs.
Dr Chattopadhyay was kind enough to get us in touch with a colleague of his who specialises in financial risk modelling and management. We hope to learn much from both of them.
Events @ VGSOM, IIT Kharagpur 