IIT Mumbai organizes ‘Continuum’ seminar to encourage interaction between students, industry stalwarts

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MBAUniverse.com News Desk |
July 26, 2016
Shailesh J. Mehta School of Management (SJMSOM), IIT Mumbai, organized System and Consulting Continuums in its campus on March 14-15, 2009.

Consulting Continuum, which was held on March 14, addressed the theme ‘Hard times come hand in hand with opportunities: A consultant’s perspective.’ This continuum was graced by top-notch consultants from esteemed organizations like KPMG, Mc Kinsey & Co., Stern Stewart & Co., AT Kearney, Protiviti, Avalon Consulting etc. The event saw participation from almost 300 students, including the management students and Alumni from the Shailesh J. Mehta School of Management, IIT Mumbai.

The event was kicked off with an address by the Head of SJMSOM, Prof Karuna Jain. She spoke on technology and analytics being the two key tools of a consultant.

The keynote address was delivered by Mr Neelesh Hundekari, Principal AT Kearney. He said, “The current scenario is not all doom and gloom because what some may perceive as frightening, others may perceive as challenging.”

The next in line was Mr KG Purushottam, Associate Director, Protiviti Consulting who stressed on the need to work within a risk management framework. He also emphasized the fact that there are more expectations from consulting to deliver more ‘solution’ from more service and at the same time demonstrate value and savings.

The vote of thanks was delivered by Prof Dinesh Sharma, the Faculty Coordinator for the Consulting Continuum, who expressed the delight of the students and faculty at having such a series of distinguished practitioners from the industry share their views with the students. All the talks were followed by interactive Q&A sessions and the students made the most of this opportunity to question the stalwarts from the consulting domain.
 
System Continuum, held on March 15, addressed the theme ‘IT: Driving the next generation business processes’ and ‘Consulting Continuum’ had the theme ‘Hard Times Come Hand in Hand with Opportunities:  A Consultant’s Perspective.’
 
According to SJMSOM, the objective behind the launch of the seminar is to continue efforts towards fostering interaction between the industry and B-school students.
 
The event started with an inaugural speech by Prof DB Phatak, Chair professor KReSIT, IIT Mumbai. This was followed by a key-note address by Mr S Gopalakrishnan, CEO & MD, Infosys Technologies Ltd, who spoke about ‘The Future of IT’. He also spoke about the impact of IT saying that only 25 % of the actual potential of IT has been explored till date. He also expressed his viewpoints on the impact of the Internet and how the Internet has extended into the real world. He shared his views on mobile computing, cloud computing, the Digital Home, & green computing. He stressed that India is at the center of IT and IT is as exciting as ever and people have many significant opportunities in this space which are as yet unexplored.
 
There was also a panel discussion moderated by Mr. Rajdeep Sahrawat, the VP of Nasscom. The topic of the panel discussion was ‘Managing IT in the downturn.’ The eminent panelists were Ms Sunanda Ambardar Chak, Director, Marketing, CA, Mr. Meetul Patel, VP, Capgemini Consulting, Mr. Bhalchandra Joshi, VP, Reliance Communications and Dr. Jawahar Malhotra, CTO of Yahoo! India.
 
The post-lunch session started with a talk by Mr Suvojit Mazumdar, Global Delivery Leader, Global AIS, IBM India on ‘Smart solutions’ wherein he stresses, “In order to build a smarter planet, we need to provide solutions in fields of digital data, distributed computing, and IT infrastructure. The next talk was by Mr P A Krishnan, President, ITO & Head, GDS - New Business Support, MphasiS. His talk was based on the concept of ‘Productivity and agility comes in Green.’
 
A very interesting session was conducted by Mr B Muralikrishnan, Director, Category & Product Management, eBay India. He gave an insightful view on e-commerce opportunities and his talk was peppered with many relevant examples of e-commerce businesses and strategies in the past decade.
 
Consulting and System Continuum 2009, with its eminent speakers and variety of inputs was a resounding success, appreciated by not just the students, but the speakers themselves. Each talk was followed by a short interactive Q&A session and the students had the wonderful opportunity of mingling with the visionaries in the industry domain.