Apps In Business: My First 50 Min Presentation in Dutch/Nederlands

…but only for the first 50 seconds!  “Goedemorgen Mafrao en Mineau. Ik spreek en beicha Nederlands” (it meant "Good Morning Ladies and Gentlemen, I speak little Dutch!")were  the first words that I started my presentation with, today on March 10, 2011 in the “Smart Business is App Business” event. It was a seminar organized by Sogeti Netherlands BV and attended by people from many different companies representing diverse industries across Netherlands. Much to our surprise we came to know that the event was a full Dutch language event except only for the presentation we were presenting. It was an interesting and for a moment frightening fact to know, only a day before the presentation, we did not know whether it is an advantage or a disadvantage, but anyways at the end of the day it didn’t really matter! I was joined by my fellow classmate Amit Munshi who presented the latter half of the presentation with me starting off.

The day started off with me and Amit joined by our dear friends Tina Liu and Javen Chen, catching the bus to Utretch from Nyenrode and from there again to Vianen. We reached the venue at around 9:00 AM and the seminar was scheduled to start at 9:30 AM. The Agenda of the day was, Wim Hofland, one of our main project sponsors presenting “Smart Business is Mobile Business”, later followed by our presentation “Apps in Business - De stand van zaken” which meant “Apps in Business -The Current Situation” from 10:10 to 11:00 (for 50 minutes) followed by presentations from Arnd Brugman, our one other project manager from Sogeti, on “Strategisch gebruik van Mobile” (Strategic use of Mobile) and lastly from Jeroen Jonker Roelants, a Sogeti customer representing IDG Nederland sharing his views on their App journey.

We stepped in to the magnificent hotel hall soon after our registration and as soon as we stepped in, it made us realize the farther gravity of the seminar. It was filled with around 150 (as we were informed at the end of the event) executives from a plethora of companies! It did make us feel good (but at the same time posed us with a challenge because of the mere size and diversity of the audience). We started settling in with the atmosphere after making sure that our presentation is available in the laptop and I getting the microphone fitted, and very soon I came across one other thing, I saw this sheet of paper placed on all the chairs. I gazed in to it trying to decipher what was in it, because all it had was in Dutch and found out that it was a feedback form for the seminar with options for people to provide rating for each of the individual presentations! Whoa, isn’t it interesting, when you get to know that 150 people will be placing tick marks about you at the end of your presentation (or if you are so bad and boring even before the presentation ends).

So, it was 10:10 AM, the presentation from Wim ended and the noble call for the Nyenrodean’s came along! I was called upon the stage to present “Apps in Business”, a project that we, the class of Nyenrode International MBA 2011 comprising of 37 students from 19 different nationalities, had worked on for the last 5 months. It had culminated with seven reports from the seven different companies that we worked on and a generic report that summated all these efforts. It also came along with a much exciting and interesting model called Appetizer, which was a humble effort to develop a jumpstart kit for businesses struggling to formulate their Apps strategy. The project involved an extensive data collection with desk research across Google scholar search and industry comparison of mobile apps, hands-on testing of apps, in company interviews, public surveys, class room sessions and discussions, multiple company visits, opinion gathering from social media platforms and many more channels. It was later followed by a broad analysis phase accompanied by a user persona based approach of targeting the right segment. It was an effort to build concise recommendations on the mobile app strategy for the different companies we worked with. On a whole, speaking about the Apps in Business project, it was an industry and academic joint venture project to explore and assess the landscape of mobile apps in different industries and to create a strategic report for organizations to benefit from the App movement. All in All, it was exciting, grueling, time consuming but at the end satisfying!

Oh, by the way did I mention that we received a free iPad at the very beginning for working on this project!

Coming back to the presentation, it was truly a great and interesting opportunity for me to be there, to be representing the Nyenrode Business University being the ambassador of Nyenrode and to be interacting with these people from different companies across different industries. Soon after I ended my few Dutch words at the beginning of the presentation, I conveyed that it is for the benefit of the audience that I switch my presentation to English, which caused a good round of laughter, encouraging though! I then continued and went on to explain the app explosion and the factors influencing it, the key strategic questions businesses are confronted with while building their mobile app strategy and the current app trend. It was later followed by the 7 stories or experiences we came across when working with the companies, such as,

·         Achmea (the largest financial services providers in the Benelux region and one among the largest insurers in Europe)

·         KLM (a leading international European airline based in the Netherlands)

·         ING (a leading global financial services institution offering banking, insurance and asset management services)

·         Cordares (one of the subsidiaries of ABP/National Civil Pension fund for government and education employees, specializing in collective pensions and supplementary products)

·         Academic Medical Center (one of the eight university medical centers in Netherlands in the field of Academic Medicine)

·         Sogeti (a wholly owned subsidiary of Cap Gemini S.A and a leading provider of professional technology services specializing in Applications Management, Infrastructure Management and High-Tech Engineering)

·         Nyenrode Business Universiteit (a leading university in Netherlands offering graduate and post graduate level programs in the fields of general management, accountancy and controlling)

I believe I was able to carry the audience to quite an extent, an opinion that I support myself from the small rounds of expressions and exclamations during the course of the presentation. The one that caused a little more exclamation was when I gave the example of the Fridge Police, a food expiration tracker App (if you aren’t already aware, know more about it here)

I was done by the end of 10:40 AM (Yes, I did take a little more time) and Munshi took over the floor for the later part of the presentation which was the Appetizer model. I should say that it did raise a lot of eye brows, which we could make out by the many people we interacted with at the end of the seminar. However, we did ensure to mention that it is a work in progress and the excitement to feel and use the model has to be delayed for a few more months, and I am sure we will have something great at the end!

All in All, the event was a nice experience! It was further more exciting for me when Wim came back at the end of seminar and mentioned that “Uday, you were a true performer on stage, Goed!” What can I say!

Later soon, at the end of the seminar, we were presented with a Sogeti wine bottle (a customary I see mostly in Europe) and the event ending with a networking lunch.

It was a day well spent, In being a Nyenrode Ambassador and In being a Mobile App evangelist! …..NOW, I am looking forward for more! Thanks Sogeti, and Great Nyenrode!


Thanks to @ArndBrugman for taking some pictures of the event! More of them at http://yfrog.com/hsceqcj, http://yfrog.com/h07welnj, http://yfrog.com/h418pxpj and http://yfrog.com/h0dc8evj