MITPS

PGP 23 TERM 4 END TERM EXAM

Roll Number: PGP/23/287 Mark:

25*2=50

Name of the Student:- Rituraj Paul Duration: 2

Hrs 30 min

Instructions:-

A. Kindly write/type in the space provided, do not exceed, write in 2-3 original sentences only.
B. Choose 25 questions from the 35 given below.
C. While choosing for B. above, note that groups of 5 questions pertain to 1 article in the articles
file attached alongside, e.g. Qs 1-5 pertain to Article 1, Qs 6-10 are about Article 2 and so on.
D. Choose only questions related to 5 articles you are comfortable with, do not answer more
questions than 25 in number or answer questions related to more than 5 articles.
E. It is essential that you do not engage in any form of copy-paste of material from the Internet.
F. Please save your answer file as PGP_Batch_Roll No_Name(PGP_23_001_XXXX) before uploading
on moodle.

Questions:-

1. What could be some of the software-friendly operating models that non-software technology
companies can follow?

2. Information Technology for Enterprise Functions -> Analytics for Business Intelligence
-> .........................: fill in the blank and justify in 2-3 sentences

Page 1 of 13
3. Why is there no 'Chief Software Officer' in most brick-mortar organizations? What is the harm
this causes?

4. What good practices to a non-software technology sector organization would a senior software
leader bring about?

5. What are the 2 options suggested for non-software technology companies to attract software
talents?

Page 2 of 13
6. How does the Gartner model calculate the price of an equipment?

7. What was the Measure B Bond program implemented by Chabot-Las Positas Community College
District (CLPCCD)?

8. What are the 3 kinds of lifespan of IT systems discussed and which do you think is the defining
factor for TCO?

Page 3 of 13
 9. Can you name some Hidden Acquisition Costs for IT Project items in a firm?

10. What were the application outsourcing models available over cloud for CLPCCD?

11. List and differentiate any two variations of open source licenses?

A couple of variations I am thinking are GPL and BSD.

 Both allow code to be viewed and modified by an user.

 Differ in how modified code is to be distributed. BSD allows modified code to be commercialised
and sold in new licensing terms. GPL modified code is to be shared as GPL licensed code only so
everyone can see all historic changes in the code.
 BSD licensed code can thus have multiple different versions while GPL code is less fragmented
because of lower incentive. BSD is more open than GPL.

12. What is the difference between Patent and Trade Secret in the software industry?

Trade Secrets and patents both allow a company to keep control on innovative software they
developed. Patents are usually there for 20 years and dont allow people to reverse engineer the code.
They have to be filed formally with disclosure to the government. Trade Secrets are timeless. They
however allow code to be reverse engineered and used freely if found. Companies dont have to disclose

Page 4 of 13
any information and no legal costs are required. Protection is generally stronger in patents than in trade
secrets.

13. Explain copyright and Copy left?

By copyright your code is protected from unauthorised modifications or copying by others. In copyleft,
all code is available for all to see, modify use and distribute as they please. Copyright is more of an
individual effort which is protected from others while copyleft code is more of a collaborative effort.
Copyrighted code can have a modified license while copyleft code always has to be in the public domain,
free for all to use and modify and all changes have to be released publicly with no commercial
possibility.

14. What is Open Innovation?

Open innovation is the process by which external intelligence is allowed to accelerate the
internal innovation and generate applications of the innovation externally. Can be of the Outside-In
form where outside ideas are allowed to be brought in and improve the innovations. Can also be of the
Inside Out form where  internal innovations with low outlook can be shared with others for their use.

15. How is Complementary Pricing done by IP Creators?

In complementary pricing, the IP owners may restrict some certain use cases of the IP from the licensee.
There will be a base fee to license the IP and use according to the base restrictions but other use cases

Page 5 of 13
may be charged. For example people may be allowed to use a certain program but modification and
customisation may be charged for the user.

16. Consultants normally carry a negative connotation, why?

Consultants have negative connotations because: -

 They charge a huge amount of fees for their services for a short duration and are viewed as
someone who is an outsider
 It takes time for the consultant's solutions to reflect that can be seen as adding value to the
business. Till that time, the money spent behind their services is considered to be wasted.
 Employees don't get along well with the consultant's image, which reflects that they know
everything and have a solution for every problem.

17. What makes ecommerce a sweet spot to employ consultants?

 Special knowledge is required in the e-commerce sector with respect to different business unit
functions like logistics, inventory management, application development, payment, etc.
 E-commerce is usually a very competitive environment that generates a low return. Hence,
consultants are hired to make robust plans that leads to the growth of the firm.
 It's important to stay updated and adopt new technologies in the e-commerce sector as it's
evolving with time with new technologies. These new technologies help to drive value for the
end consumer or customer.

Page 6 of 13
18. IT Consultants are the Apex Predators in the IT Consulting foodchain, justify

The roadmap for any organization's future is decided based on an overall strategy developed by the
consultants who are present at the top of the value chain in any firm. They are referred to as Apex
predators as they provide the architecture and practices for the firm's implementation and
management to a larger extent through their services.

19. What is the 'Best known method' in the kitty of consultants?

Consultants use the MECE Framework, which is the Mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive
framework for the billing of their projects. The solutions given by the consultants to their clients give
a unique approach that is not overlapping and its exhaustive in nature as it covers all the aspects
pertaining to the business case.

20. List down 2-3 differences between Consultancy job and company Job.
 Employees in an organization work within the same team whereas the consultants work with
different teams for their projects as it requires engagement from different business units.
 Consultants suggest different decisions that can be made by the management through their
work and finally, the decisions are implemented by the management, who are the employees in
the firm.
 It takes time for the employees in a firm to develop their reputation and get better
compensation for their work, whereas the consultants get better compensation for their work in
a shorter time as their work creates an impact and adds value to the firm in a smaller span of
time.

Page 7 of 13
 21. What is the no. 1 contradiction in Erica Zendell's career as a Tech Product Manager?

Erica Zendell was a graduate of Comparative literature graduate who didn’t have technical background
to apply for job of a technical product manager. While most of interviews for a product manager looks
for technical expertise, she was selected at Sephora since her manager thought Erica can figure the role
out. Her communicative skills were given importance here.

22. What was the author's focus before the internship at Sephora, and what shift happened after
the internship?

Before the internship, the author’s focus was to be a consumer goods brand manager, understanding
brand management and build a brand of scale in the foods and consumer industry. Unfortunately, not
many gave her the chance. Therefore, she decided against selling soda for Snapple Group and opted for
a PM role from Sephora at Store Digital.

Post her internship, she was seeking full time roles as an e-commerce PM job at a brand or a retailer.

23. What are the pieces of Product management that the author learned about during the work at
Wayfair?

Following are pieces of Product Management that the author learned during her work at Wayfair:

 The author observed that PM is not as fancy. Being the CEO of the product means one ends up
in a lot of calls and meetings.

Page 8 of 13
  Moreover, PM responsibilities vary from company to company and across projects. It can even
change within the first 2-3 months.
 A PM needs to make his or her product story strong and compelling. It is necessary to highlight
prior consumer behavior experiences, etc. while connecting with people on social networking
platforms like Linkedin for identification of the appropriate opportunity.
 Last, but not the least, nothing beats the experience of working as a PM. It cannot be replaced
by any school or MBA degree.

24. What are some of the Product skill sets that the author wanted improve during the work at
Wayfair?

Author wanted to improve following skills during her work at Wayfair:

 Improving her skills of analyzing data

 Improve her methods of conducting customer interviews which are efficient, crisp and to the
point and highly useful
 Improve her software knowledge pertaining to different architectures and get better at product
envisioning.

25. What is GSD that the author talks about? What does this mean about a Product Manager's role?

The GSD that the author talks about is an acronym for “Getting Stuff Done.” It is one of the common
terminologies witnessed in Product Management. This refers to managers who are focused on delivery
at any cost and do not take no for an answer. Such PM’s can be seen in high growth startups in general.
They cultivate an attitude in they may make their team work right up to the edge to get the things done.
It wouldn’t matter if they end up making enemies along the way.

Page 9 of 13
 26. List at least four factors contributing to the lower than expected adoption of IoT and thus the
revised market estimates?

Four factors contributing to lower adoption of IoT are as follows:

 IoT-as-a-service model if offered only as a retrofitted offering and not available for existing
devices. This incurs additional costs for enterprises.
 IoT involes multiple layers starting from hardware fitted with sensors, which is networked
through the cloud. Analytics lies on top of that. Moreover, applications are delivered from
multiple vendors. This requires varied skill sets for integration, maintenance and usage. This is
lacking within an enterprise and is one of the main reasons of low adoption.
 There are numerous protocols and standards across the different IoT layers. Interoperability
becomes a major complexity across the layers and has led to low adoption.
 IoT involves major capex investment and enterprises are still unsure and lack clarity how it adds
value for them. Additionally handling multiple vendors for a single IoT solution is a headache
that most enterprises wish to avoid.

27. What are the Tiers in an IoT?

There are 4 tiers in an IOT: the ‘Things Tier’ which represents the devices with embedded OS in them.
The next tier is the ‘Ingestion Tier’ which is a software and infrastructure present in the cloud or in a
data center and receives streams of data from the things. The next layer is the ‘Analytics Tier’ that is
responsible for organization and processing of data. At the end, we have the ‘End-user Tier’ in the form
of an application that the end user visualizes and interacts with.

28. What role can Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) have in IoT?

With Platform-as-a-Service, one is able to get an Operating System not installed in one’s own desktop or
laptop. A similar proposition can be incorporated in IoT, wherein day-after-day, sensors data from the
things can be stored and made available in the cloud. This can be used for storing, engaging in analytics
and communicating between Software as a Service applications. This is further being made possible
through Dockers and Containerization and helps in having platforms that are massively scalable, always
available and easy to manage. This can help reduce one layer, i.e. the IaaS or the core sphere in the IoT
universe.

29. What is IoT as-a-Service model, what capabilities are expected from the service provider?

The desirable form of IoT adoption would lie in being able to offer what is known as IoT-as-a-service
Model. In IoT as-a-service model, the service provider offers entire range of IoT services as a bundle to
the client. The service provider should be able to give some kind of edge activity ((Liquid Computing/
Fog Computing) and to give some kind of a platform in an Opex billed model. IT Companies here are
expected to have skillsets across the entire stack of IoT layers of hardware, software, network and data.
They need to have strong domain expertise and need to deliver commercially viable verticalized

Page 10 of 13
solutions. The service providers should have multiple partners covering all the services offered across
the entire IoT stack. For example, they should even posess unheard of skillsets like Lora, Zigbee,
Arduino, etc.

30. How does IoTaaS help enterprises?

IoTaaS helps enterprises in the following manner:

 It provides a better cost-to-value proposition for enterprises.

 Enterprises don’t need to bear anymore any of the upfront costs.
 With IoTaaS, the service provider provides entire range of IoT services. Thus, enterprises do not
need to understand or manage any of the protocols relating to IoT. There is no need for any of
the in-house niche expertise that was required. Interoperability issues are also taken care of.

31. According to the study conducted by author, what is the approach that allows companies to
continually exploit data in new ways?

Rather than just focusing on technological deployment, the new approach stresses on giving enhanced
focus to explore newer ways and methods of leveraging data. Data driven decisions, backed by data
analytics are made understandable to the users. Five guidelines are there to keep the user and the
objectives as the central focus in the discovery of insights. This process is done in an iterative manner to
improve the accuracy of analysis. The 5 guidelines are as follows

 Keep people at the heart of the initiative

 Stress on the importance of using information to unlock value from IT
 Provide Cognitive and Behavioral scientists within IT Teams
 Enhanced focus on learning
 Place extra focus on finding solutions to business problems rather than deploying technology.

32. How is big data analytics project different from a conventional IT project?

Big Data Analytics differs from conventional IT project in the following manner

Page 11 of 13
  Scope of Work: Conventional IT projects include installation of systems like ERP and CRM.
Big data analytics involve understanding historical data to generate insights for facilitating
future decision making
 Project Structure: In IT Projects, there is clear specification of goals and technical
requirements upfront. In big data analytics projects, it involves development and validation
of hypothesis by analyzing data.
 Risk: Conventional IT Projects are risk averse. Big data analytics projects are risk neutral.
 Goals: Goal of a conventional IT Project is to improve efficiency and productivity. The goal of
Big data analytics project is to discover underlying latent patterns of data and use that to
improve decision making.

33. What shift in mind-set is expected while working with data?

While working with data, following shifts in mindset are expected

 The work needs to be problem oriented rather than being solution oriented.
 Focus should be given first on exploring data and consequently identify problems. Accordingly,
hypothesis that can be validated needs to be derived.
 The entire process while working with data needs to be free of bias. Only then can it generate
meaningful insights that can impact the organization’s functioning.

34. Compared to traditional IT project, how does success look like for analytic or big-data project?

For traditional IT Projects, success is based on timely delivery and the amount of costs that is incurred.
Subsequently, it can then be used for measuring tangible changes brought about by the optimization of
the process.

On the other hand, for projects pertaining to analytics or big data, success is determined by measuring
the extent to which employees are able to leverage and make use of the data to unearth hidden
patterns of information. Consequently, this is used for generating new and meaningful insights.
Eventually, it should result in transition of the process of making decisions entirely to the analytics
engine.

35. Who is a HiPPO and how is he threatened by data analytics users?

HiPPO refers to “Highest Paid person’s opinion.” It is a situation where all decisions involving high costs
and having high impact are deferred to employees who are paid higher. They then take decisions based
on their judgment. This decision may not be efficient or effective.

Page 12 of 13
With the extensive usage of data analytics, the process of making decisions becomes much more
streamlined, objective and rational backed by facts and figures. Thus, some of the traditionally followed
processes may change and be disrupted due to this and may not be left to the discretion of the HiPPO.
Thus, the HiPPO may feel threatened as they may lose their power to take decisions as per their own
discretion.

Page 13 of 13