The Stanford Business Reporter

Issue date: 10/1/01 Section: Summer Experiences

Joseph Wawi, Deputy Director of BaliCamp, with his daughter Anya

Tata Consultancy Services – eat your heart out. We’re on a GMIX at BaliCamp! While this is plenty of information to set the stage for second years, the first years will undoubtedly benefit from some additional background. GMIX, which stands for Global Management Immersion eXperience, is a four-week internship that SBS students can elect to take during the summer between their first and second years (see http://www-gsb.stanford.edu/gmp/opportunities/gmix.htm for more information). For additional info on Tata, you’ll have to wait and see…

Our team was lucky enough to land a project on the Island of the Gods, none other than Bali, Indonesia. Rather than chronicle our failed attempts at catching the perfect tube, mastering Bahasa Indonesia, or chasing down the latest styles in Balinese teak home furnishings, we thought we’d share a bit about our intellectual journey and the challenge and reward that comes along with applying some of our new found book smarts in a foreign land.

BaliCamp (http://www.balicamp.com), a wholly owned subsidiary of the Sigma Group based in Jakarta, Indonesia, was our home for the full weeks of this experience. BaliCamp, with 80% of its 120 employees trained in software development, was chartered to become a programmers’ paradise where engineers, in unison with the beauty surrounding them, would be inspired to develop the best code on earth. While the programmers seem to have bought in to the idea, the North American and European companies have yet to, enter yours truly.

We can start out by saying, God Bless the Cases! We’ll never again complain about there being too many pages to read! Our first reference was to the Tata Consultancy case from our Strategy class (yes, Galeno actually brought it…good looking out!). We were able to take an industry behemoth in the major competing country (India) and use it to map out the key success factors for companies in the software outsourcing business. It also gave us a baseline understanding of consumer preferences when choosing outsourcing partners. After only two days of talking to software engineers and project managers, we were reliving every lesson from MIA. (Shawn, what does SQL stand for again?) It was very helpful to be able to have basic discussions with the “techies” while working on our project. MIA was to thank for opening communications lines to an unfamiliar field.

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