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Seminar by Dr Siddhartha Sengupta

Industrial Engineering and Operations Research - seminar announcement

Title of talk: When do IT Investments Pay? Proposal for a way ahead in strategic ICT projects

          
Speaker:  Dr Siddhartha Sengupta (Principal Scientist & Head, TCS Innovation Labs Complex Decision Support Systems Group)

Date and time: Wednesday, 22 September, 2010, 4 p.m.

Venue: Institute Auditorium, IRCC building

Abstract: Business models are evolving rapidly. Many predict that, in ICT projects, soon HW, SW & services may all become free - recall the IBM-Airtel relationship. The leading ICT outsourcing companies of India, as elsewhere, are faced with this challenge of increasing numbers of trategic engagements where their earnings are linked to the actual benefits obtained by the clients.

Unfortunately, strategic ICT outsourcing is known for high risk with low benefits to both the provider and the customer. Failure to meet the goals is very common! In spite of all the attention and careful preparation, theworld of large & strategic ICT projects seems to have reached 'a crisis point' with 'even more cost, even less value'. Many attribute this to a lack of synergy between business and ICT, while they both continuously innovate & evolve. Unfortunately, the subject has received scant academic attention and we try to analyze the situation and propose a way ahead in strategic ICT projects, together with a case study.

This talk begins with the description of the problem, the crisis, acknowledging at the same time that modern globalized business has to depend enormously on ICT for excellence in planning, decision support and execution. The common response to improving the chances of success is by using one of the several structured approaches of "Enterprise Architecture" (EA), first introduced by IBM's John Zachman in 1987. The Open Group's Architecture Forum (TOGAF) is a very popular contemporary framework. The important concepts are explained & short tour taken of the better known approaches to EA. One of the approaches is from CISR (MIT)
that believes in altogether ignoring the Enterprise business strategy during EA!

Next, Business Architecture (BA) - a very structured set of artifacts where EA begins from - is studied, particularly in the context of the
contemporary advances. Practitioners identify BA to be weak link in the EA chain. Trade literature is reviewed.

But as several, including IBM's McDavid (1999), have pointed out - ICT skills alone are not sufficient for doing a BA. BA requires a
multi-disciplinary approach - combining the very structured and disciplined thinking of IS/IT on one hand with often subjective but
business-aware approaches from Management Sciences and Industrial Engineering. We thus follow up these IS-based approaches with developments in 3 directions that the IE/OR/MS fraternity is more acquainted with. a) Enterprise Integration and Engineering Standards; b) lessons learnt from the successes and failures of the most valuable integrated & strategic ICT systems - ERP & SCM; and c) popular ideas and practices like the Theory of Constraints, TRIZ etc. The survey findings of a pair of Supply Chain experts from MIT and SAP point out that is critically important to understand the Business models and processes and to possibly ensure their
maturity before calling in the support from ICT.

A research proposal is suggested to bridge the BA gap, based on a combination of the IS/IT work on BA and those in IE/OR/MS. The top-down approach begins with a replicable, partitioned, standard, business-aware but generic description of not just Enterprises but, importantly, their Supply Chains. In particular, a value-driven prioritization of the EI/EE/EA efforts and budgets allows value to be concurrently created. This addresses the core issue of "Making ICT pay". The proposed BA is limited not just to ontologies and artifacts, but extends the framework to cover the analysis and possible improvement of the BA.

A case study exposes how this approach is recently being used to ensure the creation of value for a specific Enterprise.

The talk ends with a partial list of future work.

Profile of the speaker:  Dr Siddhartha Sengupta is Principal Scientist & Head, TCS Innovation Labs, Complex Decision Support Systems Group in Tata Consultancy Services Limited, Mumbai

He has a Ph.D. in (Space) Physics, IIT Kharagpur and an M.Sc. in (Nuclear) Physics, IIT Kharagpur

Dr. S. SenGupta has over twenty-seven years of experience in applied research, design, development and management in the industry and six years in scientific computing and academics. At Tata Infotech Ltd (now Tata Consultancy Services) since 1982, he began his work in the Healthcare Industry.  Since 1985, his activities covered leading the company's research and business in the areas of

  • Automation & Optimization of Planning & Scheduling
  • Expert Systems & Knowledge Based Systems,
  • Data Mining & Pattern Recognition
  • Statistics & Forecasting
  • Transportation, Retail, Logistics & Supply Chain
  • Manpower Planning
  • Enterprise Architecture and Enterprise Engineering
  • He has published and spoken extensively on these areas in journals, conferences and workshops.
He has been a Student Member of the Senate, Indian Institute of Technology KGP, 1979-80, Member of the Board, Indian Inst of Information Technology, Kolkata, Member of the IT Academic Council, Govt of West Bengal, Member Knowledge Based Computing Sys, Int'l Conf, Program Committee (1992-2004) and an Examiner for PhD and Master's thesis at IITs and referee for research papers.

 

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