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Visiting position at KNU, Korea

I am thrilled to tell that I have just accepted an invitation for a visiting position at Kyungpook National University (KNU). It has been regarded as one of the most prestigious national institution of higher education in the country, has almost 1.000 faculty and 400 admin staff, who provide 진리·긍지·봉사  (”truth, pride and service”) to their 23.000 students in Daegu.

I will be giving a 45-hour course at the College of Economics and Business Administration in the winter session (early 2008), engage in existing and spark off new research projects. More details coming up shortly…

2/3 of CIOs’ time is spent on nontechnical issues

IT professionals who have acumen in diverse business areas but whose IT skills are noncertified are bringing in bigger salaries on average than their certified counterparts, according to Foote Partners recent research which studied 74.000 IT professionals in US and Canada. “IT professionals today have to be routinely knowledgeable about a whole lot of things that have to do with their employers’ industry, customers and products, enough to take a strategic as well as tactical role in growing the business,” report concludes.

Similar conclusions came from Society for Information Management’s last week report, where CIOs and IT professionals surveyed ranked aligning IT with business goals, building business skills, developing business process management and deploying business intelligence as their top concerns in 2007. CIOs spend two-thirds of their time on nontechnical issues, and the shift towards business awareness is visible from executive offices down to administrators ‘working in the IT trenches’.

See related posting here: First rule of IT: business knowledge before technical!

MS Office 2007 in business practice

A new book by me and Peter Vre?ar has just been published by Microsoft Slovenia: Microsoft Office 2007 system in business practice. It is intended for distribution among Microsoft Slovenia’s esteemed business partners, as a guidebook on how to get the best and the most out of the latest Office system. On 120 pages it covers key innovation points in terms of improving productivity and facilitating collaboration of knowledge workers with Office 2007 applications.

Not in point-and-click but rather through real life practical cases it covers Word, Excel, Outlook, Access, PowerPoint, Onenote, Groove, Project, Publisher, and server-based solutions such as Information Rights Management, Enterprise project management, and Unified communications, among others. Take a quick peek (1,4Mb PDF) –>.

According to the first readers, it is an “invaluable resource”, as it provides “a roadmap of how and where we can apply and use novel functionalities of Office 2007 to improve business”, and a straightforward answer to the most legitimate question a business user can pose: “How and where exactly will the 2007 version improve my everyday work?”. The book has been officially released to public at recent key partner meeting and is available free of charge through various Microsoft partner programmes.

Managing knowledge and innovation for competitive advantage: executive development workshop

I will be holding a part of a 2-day executive development workshop Managing knowledge and innovation for competitive advantage at CISEF, Centre for Management Development and Training at Faculty of Economics, University of Ljubljana (FELU). Other team members include Prof Dr Vlado Dimovski (programme director, FELU), Dr Miha Škerlavaj (FELU), Robert Kaše (FELU), and Mr Križaj (Tipro company). I will be presenting 1) possibilities and limitations of information technology in support of knowledge management and innovations, and 2) organizational infrastructures for integrating external partners into highly agile innovation and management of technology processes…