At a time when many adults are struggling with their own personal finances, they may be faced with expenses from the generation before them as well as the one after.
Traditionally, parents have been financially responsible for themselves as well as their young children. With increases in life expectancy they are now finding [...]

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Continue reading → Burning Money at Both Ends

Today is turning into a pretty nice day. First, I checked the current copy of the SmartMoney, the magazine of the Wall Street Journal, and saw that it referred to my research on peer to peer financial marketplaces in one of the articles. Second, I heard back from the Academy of Management Conference and one of my papers have been accepted for presentation there.

The current issues of SmartMoney has an article on Prosper.com titled “The Banker Next Door” by Ann Kadet. She quotes my research in the article. I am quoting the article below:

As a whole, Prosper’s lender community is still more subject to irrational whims and emotional behavior than professional credit analysts. Sanjeev Kumar, a doctoral student at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, analyzed six months of Prosper activity and found that quantitative data such as credit scores and borrower income explain just a third of bidding behavior. “Everything else is subjective, like whether there is a photo of the kids”, he says.

Here is the link to the original article: Banker Next Door.

Now the other good news. Academy of Management is the largest association of management researchers and professionals. The Annual Meeting of Academy is one of the largest gathering of management researchers. It would be a great experience to present in the Academy 2007 conference. The paper accepted is titled: Embedded Trust in Open Source Software Development Communities. Following is the abstract of the paper:

Structure of naturally evolving collaborative relationships in open source software (OSS) development communities has been identified as a critical factor in success of OSS projects. This study attempts to extend the literature by examining impacts of collaborative relationship structures on trust, an important yet under researched construct in the OSS context. Based on social network and organizational theories, this study proposes that collaboration network structures have significant effects on individual OSS developer’s trust in a project team. Subsequently, we expect that trust has positive effects on effectiveness of an OSS development community. Empirical analysis of project and survey data using partial least square (PLS) verifies that collaboration network structures significantly affect trust, which subsequently enhances OSS team effectiveness in terms of perceived software quality, team cohesiveness and satisfaction with the teamwork. Results of this study shed light on the antecedents and relevance of embedded trust in OSS communities with significant implications for both researchers and practitioners.

This year has started well - I attended the first conference of the year and my paper got accepted at the first paper submission of the year. I hope the luck is continue for the rest of the year as this is my job market year. Talking of jobs - I finally finished writing my academic Vita.

I also got the full student feedback for the course I taught in Spring 2006. Here is the feedback image from the evaluation website:

Quite Nice, Huh?

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Continue reading → Research Mentioned in SmartMoney; Paper Accepted at Academy

Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) has been on a center of a lot of debate and controversy. However, the fact remains that it is here to stay, it will continue to grow and it benefits both sides. Important thing to note through is that the nature of BPO and hence the potential benefits of BPO as well as the capabilities needed to successfully compete in the BPO marketplace have evolved significantly in past few years. This evolving nature of BPO and associated issues have been part of my recent research focus. Here is one picture that explains my view of the evolution of BPO:

The figure above says many things - so needs a little explanation. The left axis represents the main driver of BPO in a particular BPO evolution stage. The right axis represents the ideal role that a vendor should play (or a client should establish) for a BPO evolution stage. The x axis represents the three stages of evolution of BPO. The main body of the graph depicts the core activity or work that is outsourced for a BPO evolution stage. This framework was presented by Prof M S Krishnan (my doctoral advisor and dissertation chair) at the Global BPO Forum organized by the CGRL:India in New York. Prof Krishnan and I both attended the forum.

This framework is helpful in understanding the future direction of BPO. We will increasingly be moving towards the third generation BPO - BPO 3.0 - high value added, knowledge intensive BPO work. This will require vendors to change their focus from cost (predominant focus right now) and quality (emerging focus among top players) to innovation. Clients, on their side, would need to make sure that they do not use the old and outdated mechanisms (efficiency oriented SLAs, restricted collaboration…) to engage with their vendors. They will have to enter into strategic partnership with their BPO vendors to co-create value for both sides of the transaction. This is of course easier said than done - but there are many leading indicators to suggest that this is happening and growing. We (as in researchers at Ross, Michigan) have documented instances of BPO 3.0 in our case studies, analyzed them in our ongoing research and I plan to investigate this phenomenon further in my dissertation.

From a research point of view, the most interesting question to be asked is: on a broad level, what are the antecedents of a successful BPO 3.0 engagement? What kind of contracting, engagement structuring, engagement monitoring, HR policies, process selection etc needs to be done to leverage the “innovation” aspect of BPO 3.0. BPO vendors and clients have more of less perfected the art of an “efficient” BPO engagement with main focus on cost reduction. Many have acquired sufficient mastery over running an “effective” BPO operation with main focus on quality improvement. However, based on my interactions, most companies are still looking for directions on how to successfully leverage an “innovation” oriented BPO engagement where an efficiency or effective oriented policies might not only be ineffective, they may even be critically detrimental to the success of the engagement. I hope to throw more light on the subject through my ongoing dissertation research.

To end, an image I have found quite effective in breaking the ice when teaching any BPO related topic:

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Continue reading → Evolution of Business Process Outsourcing