Kishore Sengupta

Professor of Operations Management

MBA, PhD (Case Western University)

My research interests include project management, knowledge management, and business value of technology. I’ve served as advisor on several projects with the US Government Department of Defense and NASA and have consulted with organisations in Silicon Valley and Hong Kong.

I’m a member of the Operations and Technology Management subject group at Cambridge Judge Business School, which focuses on practice-based research through partner organisations to address a wide spectrum of management challenges.

Professional experience

Professor Sengupta has served as advisor on several projects with the US Government Department of Defense and NASA, and has consulted with organisations in Silicon Valley and Hong Kong. He has also worked at the AT&T Network Software Center (now LucentTechnologies) and Ernst & Young.

Professor Sengupta’s published research appears in journals in information technology and management, such as Management Science, MIS Quarterly, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, and IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management. He is currently working on a book on online electronic environments.

Previous appointments

Prior to joining the School, Professor Kishore Sengupta was an Associate Professor of Information Systems at INSEAD. Before this he was on the faculty at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, USA. In 1996-1997 he was a Visiting Scholar at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong.

Selected publications

  • van Oorschot, K.E., Sengupta, K. and Van Wassenhove, L.N. (2018) “Under pressure: the effects of iteration lengths on agile software development performance.” Project Management Journal, 49(6): 78-102 (DOI: 10.1177/8756972818802714)
  • Sengupta, K., Abdel-Hamid and Van Wassenhove, L. (2008) “The experience trap.” Harvard Business Review, 86(2): 94-101
  • Lajos, J., Chattopadhyay, A. and Sengupta, K. (2008) “When electronic recommendation agents backfire: negative effects on choice satisfaction, attitudes, and purchase intentions.” INSEAD Working Papers, No.2008/33/MKT. Fontainebleau: INSEAD.
  • Nissen, M.E. and Sengupta, K. (2006) “Incorporating software agents into supply chains: experimental investigation with a procurement task.” MIS Quarterly, 30(1): 145-166
  • Evgeniou, T. and Sengupta, K. (2003) “Kent County Council: implementing IT for e-government.” INSEAD Case Study.
  • Evgeniou, T. and Sengupta, K. (2002) “Cluster specific software effort estimation for multi-company datasets.” INSEAD Working Papers, No.2002/77/TN/RISE. Fontainebleau: INSEAD.

Awards and honours

  • Outstanding Award, Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, 1999

News and insights

Five members of the Cambridge Judge faculty are awarded teaching prizes for excellence across the Business School’s various programmes.

Top UK law firms, slow to automate, shift decision-making away from partners toward experienced professionals as the line blurs between client-facing and back-office roles, finds report by Professor Kishore Sengupta of Cambridge Judge Business School for LexisNexis.

Leisurely pace of change not quick enough for many businesses in COVID-19 era. "Discontinuous" transformation rather than a leisurely pace of change will be needed at many businesses in the COVID-19 (coronavirus) era, Dr Kishore Sengupta of Cambridge Judge Business School says in a Financial Times article published today (Monday 15 June). Such transformation goes beyond speed of change "but also the direction of travel, and not through mere incremental moves," says the article, which accompanies the FT’s global ranking of Master of Finance (MFin) programmes. Finance plays a very important role in this type of transformation, because traditional linear return-on-investment benchmarks may need re-evaluation, says Kishore, Reader in Operations Management at Cambridge Judge. His research on discontinuous transformation has yielded four key insights: transformation can occur without large capital expenditures; timing on financial returns needs to be flexible; savings are crucial at a time of major change; and liquidity can be boosted by not prematurely ending existing revenue streams.…

Media coverage

Legal Futures | 3 December 2021

Top 50 law firms heading for “two-track” future

Top UK law firms, slow to automate, shift decision-making away from partners toward experienced professionals as the line blurs between client-facing and back-office roles, finds report by Kishore Sengupta, Professor of Operations Management at Cambridge Judge Business School for LexisNexis. Professor Sengupta said “progress between 2015 and 2020 had been uneven, with some firms “poised to leave behind others with muddled strategies and uneven execution.”

Financial Times | 14 June 2020

Why businesses need to embrace discontinuity

“Discontinuous” transformation rather than a leisurely pace of change will be needed at many businesses in the COVID-19 era, Dr Kishore Sengupta, Reader in Operations Management at Cambridge Judge Business School says in a Financial Times article. “Such radical reassessment of capabilities, operations and even the business model itself could become a routine necessity”, Dr Sengupta writes.

HR News | 10 June 2020

Be prepared for employee resistance post-lockdown, experts warn managers

Dr Kishore Sengupta, Reader in Operations Management at Cambridge Judge Business School, comments on remote working: “Give remote employees a budget and the freedom to spend it. Make it obvious that budgets can be used for equipment, for example, but not other classes of product; and that purchases must be tracked.”

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