Allow Us to Digitize Your Company

The names of the companies are not the real ones, but everything else is. The challenge, the data, and the context are real and constitute a stimulating test bench for the students of the IT Consulting course, headed by Ferdinando Pennarola. The participants challenged each other, working as real teams, in a competition in collaboration with Altea Federation, a company that offers management and IT consulting services to enable the digital potential of companies. "The company launched five different projects and the students, divided into teams formed freely by themselves, chose their preference," explains Pennarola. "Then, followed by Bocconi tutors and company tutors, after a long process that began in February, they presented their projects to the jury in May. This kind of work represents an important added value for a company, both because it tackles problems from a different point of view, also generational, and because of the great analytical skills shown by the students."

Those skills were put to the test, as explained by Federica Scabbio, who with Edoardo Bianchi Crema, Martina Cavallini, Pietro Maria Riccardo Cimenti and Gloria Eleonora Diletta Scalabrina (all enrolled in the course in Economics and Management of Innovation and Technology - EMIT) was a member of La Madonnina Consulting, one of the two winning teams. "The financial analysis part was really complex," says Federica. "We chose to work on the digitization project of a company, fictitiously named Web Do, which operates in the software field, and wants to expand its activities in the web agency sector. It was a very complex work, we had to indicate some possible paths to follow and then opt for one of them and explore it thoroughly. But it was a really positive experience because it allowed us to apply what we learned in the classroom in the field. In the end our work was rewarded because it was considered complete."

The interest of the other winning team, The Italians (Alessandro Corona, Claudia Fenicchia, Luca Formica, Giorgia Rancati, Luca Santillozzi, Silvia Terenghi) was instead directed at the pharmaceutical sector, also driven by current events enrolled in Emit: "After an initial interest in the wood industry," explains Alessandro Corona, "we focused on the process of digitizing controls in the pharmaceutical industry, following the example of what is happening with the covid issue. We created a kind of consulting model that uses artificial intelligence to control all processes ". As for the experience, Corona identifies two fundamental aspects: "This competition gets you used to being professional, because we were called to constant discussions and meetings, and also represents an opportunity, perhaps the first, to really get your hands dirty".

This initiative, as Ferdinando Pennarola had anticipated and as confirmed by Andrea Ruscica, President & Strategy Lead of Altea Federation, benefits all the actors involved. "I received excellent feedback from our tutors who participated in the project, both on the students and on the work they produced. We presented them with real challenges that we deal with directly on a daily basis, such as Cloud Applications, Web & Digital Economy, Advanced Customer Engagement, Hyperautomation, Cyber Security, to bring them closer to the world of work that they will soon face. And the results were truly brilliant. An excellent example of how universities and the business world can collaborate profitably to nurture talent and develop excellent opportunities for the future, on both sides."