Andrei Akaikine, SDM ’09
Title: The Impact of Software
Design Structure on Product Maintenance Costs and Measurement of Economic
Benefits of Product Redesign
Fixing software bugs can be extremely
costly, both in terms of time and money. It has been estimated that for most
software products, the cost of maintenance activities exceeds the initial cost
of development and can reach up to 90 percent of total life cycle cost. Yet,
most research on software products economics focuses on cost management during
the development phase of the software life cycle. This study focuses on
software complexity as one of the main drivers of maintenance costs. To measure
the complexity of software systems under investigation, Akaikine designed a
complexity measure, based on the design structure matrix, suitable for use in
the maintenance phase of software lifecycle. He presents an empirical analysis
of the effects of software complexity on costs associated with maintenance
tasks within a large-scale commercial software product organization. The study
found that with reduction of propagation cost from 38 percent to 11 percent,
the productivity of engineers working on similar maintenance tasks improved by
more than 10 percent.
Akshat Mathur, SDM ’08
Title: The Evolution of
Business Ecosystems: Interspecies Competition in the Steel Industry
This thesis builds on the work
of Theodore F. Piepenbrock, whose 2009 MIT doctoral thesis, “Towards a Theory
of Evolution of Business Ecosystems,” proposed that firms in the same industry
vary systematically in performance over time as a result of differences in
architecture. Piepenbrock defines architecture in terms of the strength,
closeness, and the specific morphology of relationships that exist between the
core firm and the four markets that are its key stakeholders—product markets,
capital markets, supplier markets, and labor markets. Mathur extends
Piepenbrock’s model to examine its validity in commodity industries, specifically
the steel industry from the 1860s to the present. He finds the theory is
consistentlysupported by the steel industry data, and he concludes that the
evolution of business ecosystems is a reasonably robust theoretical framework.
Mario Montoya Jr., SDM ’09
Title: On Developing Business
Architectures: A Multi-Framework Evaluation of an Early-Stage Enterprise
Montoya examines the efficiency
and effectiveness of using multiple frameworks to analyze an early-stage
enterprise within the medical technology industry, Lentesco Luminarium. The
company faces a critical choice between two growth strategies: vertical
penetration within existing modalities or horizontal growth into new
modalities, and Montoya explores what tools might inform and guide the executive
team to make the right decision for Lentesco’s particular industry, maturity,
and size. In addition to the standard Lean Advancement Initiative suite of
tools, he uses Nightingale and Rhodes’ eight Enterprise Architecture views,
Kaplan’s Balanced Scorecard, McKinsey’s 7S framework, and Grave’s Spiral
Dynamics. He concludes that Lentesco needs to improve transparency and
communication, and he suggests the use of the McKinsey 7S framework to put
concepts into perspective as simply as possible. For a multiple perspective
evaluation, he suggests the EA 8 Views framework.
Shailendra Yadav, SDM ’08
Title: Analysis of Value
Creation and Value Capture in Microfluidics Market
In the last two decades,
microfluidics has been changing the shape of genomics, drug discovery,
proteomics, and point-of-care diagnostics. Advances in the technology have
resulted in faster analysis time, increased throughput, and reduced cost, among
other important benefits. Yet, in this thesis Yadav reports that the life
sciences end-users and the microfluidics players themselves are far from fully
capturing the value of these advances. As an immature technology, microfluidics
is to date still only in the hands of innovators and early adopters, who are
academic laboratories and research institutes. Yadav analyzes the current state
of the market and finds genomics and point-of-care diagnostics have captured
the most value from the technology, while drug discovery has seen the least. He
then proceeds to recommend short- and long-term strategies for increasing value
capture and accelerating the adoption of microfluidics.
To learn more about SDM thesis
research, contact Pat Hale, director of SDM
fellows program, at Pat_Hale@mit.edu.
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