A Contest for MBA first year students.

Just ask one question to yourself, "Who will be driving the next generation insurance solutions?” You should find yourself as an answer to this. With this mindset, take part in the present contest.

There is a prize too, which is revealed at the end.

Contest Detail:

Maintaining balance between changing business requirements and IT implementation has remained a major challenge for most of the businesses. There are many such functional requirements, which remain undetected for long and surface at some critical moments exposing the IT unpreparedness of the organization. Identify or determine such requirements related to insurance industry, which is likely to remain undetected. To get an example of such requirement refer to the post http://niamba1.blogspot.com/2007/08/life-insurance-high-level-decision.html. Prepare a write-up as per the submission rules given below and send it to me by e-mail at girijeshp@niapune.com.

Following tips will be helpful:

1: Read 10% and think 90%.
2: Use all possible resources like newspapers, journals, books, Internet, friends, professionals, faculty etc. within given time.

Evaluation: 40 marks on innovativeness, 30 marks on appropriateness and 30 marks on clarity.

Last date of Submission: 31st October 2007.

Submission Rules:

-- Submission can be done by a group of students of size 1 to 3.
-- A group can submit as many entries as it wants.
-- Each entry will contain list of group members also and should not be of more than 400 words including the names of group members.
-- Keep evaluation criterion in mind. Writing multiple requirements in single entry may not help.
-- In the subject line, copy-paste the text given here inside quotes 'Submission for contest 1'. Since, the process may be automated at our end keep the subject same and don't exceed the word limit.

Prize: Students submitting best two entries will get an opportunity to work with me on research projects leading to at least 2 papers submission.

Object Oriented Analysis

Additional resource for study

http://www.umsl.edu/~sauterv/analysis/ooa.html

Life Insurance- A high level decision making

A Life Insurance company has over 20 million policy holders on record. They want to launch an aggressive marketing campaign to increase the customer base. For this purpose, they want to do following analysis:


Identify 20000 good customers, understand their characterics and find such geographic/ business segment where probability of getting such customers is high.

Work to do:

How will you describe ‘good customer’?

What data are required to identify good customers?

What data are required for associating characteristics with good customers?

What kind of data analysis will be needed for this activity?

Recommended topics for study (SDLC concepts)

Following topics should be studied in addition to what has been covered in the class:

1. Fact gathering techniques
2. Techniques to document facts: Data flow diagram, decision table, structured english
3. Implementation techniques

Some URLs are given below to refresh the coverage in the class.

http://www.notetech.com/images/software_lifecycle.jpg

http://www.computerworld.com/developmenttopics/development/story/0,10801,71151,00.html

http://www.computerworld.com.au/index.php/id;96792340;fp;2;fpid;568176992