I just worked on an interesting academic project to assess Dell's Analytics Maturity completed by 5 highly professional exec-MBA students from my alma-mater, the London Business School. I am happy that I initiated this project a few weeks ago after seeing a mail from a LBS Faculty seeking support from LBS Alumni for what really is an elective course. This is an course that involves students with a professor come in to a company in a developing country such as India and work on a strategic project for a week learning about the challenges of working in India as well as providing an outside-in perspective to the company on a key problem they identify. A month later, they present a more detailed report and recommendations on the problem or question posed.
While there was nothing path-breaking that came out (at least not yet) in terms of findings/recommendations, the glimpses of what we saw in the preliminary report impressed me with how well they had understood our business (Not one of them had a background in Analytics or working in India) and what they put together in terms of preliminary recommendations in 4 days of talking to people across the floor and reading Tom Davenport's "Competing on Analytics". In addition, this was a good outlet for the floor and some good recommendations came out. The leadership team of DGA now look forward to the final presentation and also agreed to work together with the school and the faculty on certain areas of their expertise (e.g. Research on Innovation).
A photo we took at the end of the presentation with the students, Pankaj Rai - Head of Dell Global Analytics and Alok Agarwal, Director of Marketing Analytics, a couple of my colleagues (Santosh and Praveen) who helped drive this project and a few Managers who attended the preliminary presentation.
L-R Standing (Praveen, Puneet, Sanjay, Pradeep Menon, Niraj, Pankaj, Viktor, Wael, Santosh, I and Alok)
L-R Sitting (Angeli and Kamila)
While there was nothing path-breaking that came out (at least not yet) in terms of findings/recommendations, the glimpses of what we saw in the preliminary report impressed me with how well they had understood our business (Not one of them had a background in Analytics or working in India) and what they put together in terms of preliminary recommendations in 4 days of talking to people across the floor and reading Tom Davenport's "Competing on Analytics". In addition, this was a good outlet for the floor and some good recommendations came out. The leadership team of DGA now look forward to the final presentation and also agreed to work together with the school and the faculty on certain areas of their expertise (e.g. Research on Innovation).
A photo we took at the end of the presentation with the students, Pankaj Rai - Head of Dell Global Analytics and Alok Agarwal, Director of Marketing Analytics, a couple of my colleagues (Santosh and Praveen) who helped drive this project and a few Managers who attended the preliminary presentation.
L-R Standing (Praveen, Puneet, Sanjay, Pradeep Menon, Niraj, Pankaj, Viktor, Wael, Santosh, I and Alok)
L-R Sitting (Angeli and Kamila)
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