Great Lakes Institute of Management, Chennai, hosted its first Business Analytics, Supply Chain and Consulting conference — BASCCON, at its campus. The theme was ‘Transformational challenges in the VUCA world’, with 12 speakers from corporates across the country.
The chief guests were Santosh K Misra, IAS, CEO of Tamil Nadu eGovernance Agency, and Commissioner – eGovernance; and Anantha Sayana, Chief Digital Officer, Larsen & Toubro.
Misra and Dr Suresh Ramanathan, Dean and Principal, Great Lakes Institute of Management, signed an MoU to collaborate on research pertaining to analytics and emerging technologies such as blockchain, IoT, and artificial intelligence.
Dr Bala V Balachandran, Founder, Chairman and Dean Emeritus, Great Lakes Institute of Management, said: “Great Lakes is the very first B-school to introduce business analytics as a major. New inventions in analytics would address a massive issue of unemployment and underemployment in India.”
‘Become an early adopter’
Dr Ramanathan said, “Today’s businesses are so agile that all you need is an early adopter and then everyone else adopts. It is necessary to be agile, fast, nimble and spontaneous in the way we are. To quote a famous article — Unbundling the Corporation — which talks about the idea that a business can succeed if it focuses one of the three — scale or R&D and innovation or customer services. The notion is that not all can be performed at the same time. However, it turns out that today’s business models are completely transforming that notion.”
Misra emphasised the significance of innovating and thinking out of the box. He was a part of the first panel discussion on ‘Architecting analytics to be game-changers — leaders view’, along with speakers such as Rajan Sethuraman, CEO, Latent View Analytics; and Narayanan Ramaswamy, Partner and Head, Education KPMG.
This was followed by discussions on ‘Staying in tune with the changing time — Analytics’ and ‘Design thinking — Paradigm approach to unlock opportunities’.
Anantha Sayana talked about how an organisation can become successful by focusing on four things — customer, operational effectiveness, innovation and technology.