Peter Baloh :>> Research & consulting

This is the letter the Faculty of Economics employees have just received from our Dean. We continue to be among the top!

Regarding the standards and criteria of the leading and the most important European association of business schools – European Foundation for Management Development (EFMD), Faculty of Economics, University of Ljubljana meets quality standards of EQUIS accreditation and therefore it remains EQUIS accredited for another three years. This classifies faculty among the 118 EQUIS world’s best business schools with the highest academic quality.

In May 2009, the Faculty of Economics in Ljubljana was visited by the EQUIS 4-member peer-review team. During three days, peer-review team met with over 160 representatives of FELU’s staff, students, alumni graduates, representatives of Slovenian and international economy, university and the representatives of the Slovenian ministry. In addition to the positive recommendation of the peer-review team, the accreditation board (composed of deans of prominent international business schools) emphasizes excellence of the FELU’s high quality standards of the pedagogical process, cooperation with the corporate world and the progress in research and development. Although the faculty expanded the dimension of its internationalization (number of foreign students has risen up to almost 500 per year) FELU should, develop its long-term vision of a global positioning and make the next important step towards the internationalization until the next evaluation process.

Paying regard to the accreditation criteria is an extremely demanding process for the Faculty and all its partakers. However, EQUIS reaccreditation again proves we are on the right path; that our research results and knowledge disseminated to students and business world are equally compared to quality standards of the best business schools in global perspective. Employability of FELU students in the highest in the domestic environment is highest and EQUIS certificate of quality additionally increases it, above all on the international labour market.

Everyone who is in any way connected to the Faculty can take credit for every success of the school; beside employees and partners the merits deserve all students and graduates who distribute your knowledge with business world and employers who enable use and transfer of this knowledge.

Let me take advantage of this opportunity and express sincere thankfulness to all who help us create Faculty of Economics, University of Ljubljana.

There are still challenges for the future. EQUIS accreditation is award but at the same time obligation to continue with our work and complete it where necessary.

Sincere congratulations to Faculty of Economics, being a student, graduate, business partner or employee of EQUIS accredited faculty is an honour and a great opportunity!

I am looking forward to our further cooperation, your and our shared success as well as the development and growth of Faculty of Economics in Ljubljana,

Prof. Dušan Mramor, PhD
dean

Tommorrow I am presenting at “invitation only” event which Microsoft Slovenia organizes yearly for a group of CIOs of top slovenian companies. It is a discussion forum, a meeting point where experienced consultants, experts and innovative practitioners get together to discuss some of the burning technological/business issues that they face when dealing with management and deployment of contemporary technologies. There is 80+ confirmed guests attending.

I will be presenting one of my “business value of IT” cases of an organization-wide deployment of Microsoft Office System 2007; the one which I lead and executed in an engineering company Trimo d.d. Trebnje. The goal is to justify the reasonableness of migration to (radically new) Office 2007 by pointing out the true (and measured) business value of it.

This is the agenda:

Today I have been attending “Citrix ROI/TCO” event in Ljubljana. The purpose of my attendace was to analyze established concepts of the business value behind virtualization projects (as per Citrix), and, more importantly, starting my work on a novel concept which will improve the existing thinking.

As I see now during the workshop, the existing business value assessment is very much 1) focused on the IT-function stakeholder, and 2) very detailed. These two characteristics I will use to build my critique on. Add 1), I think there are more stakeholders that should be included in the “benefit calculation”. Add 2), methodology of “benefit calculation/presentation” could be improved by adjusting the level of detail and the choice of metrices presented based on the audience (IT function, key individual users, business processes owners, board of directors, CEO).