Peter Baloh :>> Research & consulting

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). 

Today I had my trial lecture for the academic title of assistant professor. I have presented “TAD methodology for business process modeling and improvement” in the class of students, and in front of the committee which consisted of Prof Dr Talib Damij, Prof Dr Janez Grad, and Prof Dr Ales Groznik.

Committee concluded I have delivered the lecture in very successfull manner, from the contemporarity, teoretical rigor and practical relevance of the content, to excellent use of audio-visuals and to very good interaction with students.

This was my final activity in the process of running for the title. Now my application for the title of assistant professor is complete and will be filing it to the University of Ljubljana boards and committees for the check-up. The waiting game begins…

I have attended the 1st ISIT 2009 conference, which was organized by the young Faculty of Information Studies (Novo Mesto). Plenty of opportunity for networking and meeting good old friends and colleagues. The keynote was held by Prof Kevin C Desouza of University of Washington, and I had the honor to chair the two morning sessions of the first day. I also presented the paper: Baloh, Stepančič, Kužnik: Improving Business Performance with Microsoft Office 2007.

This is the abstract of it: Microsoft Office is the most widely used productivity suite in the world. The 2007 version brought changes that are more radical from the user-perspective than the changes in this suite before. Applications in the 2007 version contain a number of new features and bring a significant change in the graphical user interface. As the changes reportedly add value to information workers using the (and thus improve business performance), and due to external compatibility issues with the previous version, the Trimo d.d. company decided on a full-scale organization-wide deployment, in spite of possible innovation adoption problems. This paper presents key success factors of this demanding technological innovation project, and its results. The latter are measured and reported at three perspectives: information users’ perspective, IT-department perspective, and the whole company perspective.

Today I was officially promoted to the PhD title at the University of Ljubljana gala event. While I successfully defended my thesis in May already, official events only happen once in a while. It was worth waiting for, I now have my “real” diploma, plus the wine was good at the reception :)))  A good celebration excuse :D

“Now it is time to move on. We are now following migration of knowledge management from the core group of pioneers that played in their sandboxes to where the action is – we are integrating pieces of the KM puzzle into business processes. There, KM is becoming embedded and will finally form the whole picture only when small pieces are all in the slots they need to be.” 

~ Excerpt from an interview with a KM executive
from Samsung Electronics ~

Academy of Management OCIS division runs a website for researchers and students in the area of information systems and business. I got featured at the site in the “Future stars section”, for which I talked about the dissertation writing and my research style. Please see the interview at http://ocis.wordpress.com/2009/06/11/future-stars-peter-baloh/ …

Today and tommorrow I am attending a Digital Cultures Workshop organized at University of Salford.

Very much looking forward to interesting discussions and the keynotes: Mobile Technology at Work: Stories of Interaction Asymmetry (Carsten Sørensen, Information Systems and Innovation Group, Department of Management, London School of Economics) and Mobile Technology at Play: Exploring post-rave electronic dance music (EDM) digital cultures (Dr. Karenza Moore, Department of Applied Social Science, Lancaster University).

/About the/ 2nd Digital Cultures Workshop: Social Media Publics #digcult09, June 4-5 2009

It is clear that the boundaries between the ‘public’ and the ‘private’ are becoming increasingly blurred within and amongst sites of home and work. Indeed, in the wake of reality television shows, national identity card schemes, increased social media usage and the like, publicity appears to be the order of the day. In this workshop we will discuss the issues raised for those living in environments where there is seemingly little room for privacy (privacy, of course, not necessarily being a good thing). As was the case last year, we intend for the workshop to be multi-disciplinary in nature, broad in the approaches participants take and issues they cover. If your work is about any aspect of digital culture, this is the workshop for you! The following are thus only indicative of potential topics that could be raised:

• How do people domesticate social media in their attempts to maintain a balance in publicity and privacy? Do they? Why do they, or don’t they?
• What matters are raised by increased access to data about individuals and organizations?
• What does the blurring of boundaries between public and private mean for our knowledge and experiences of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity and disability?
• How are ICT mediated spaces created and maintained at home, work and those spaces in between? For example, how are ‘geek gamers’ finding spaces to play now the only console in the house can be in the living room?
• How are ICT policies shaping public and private spaces throughout societies around the world?
• What privacy issues are presented by media convergence?
• What role are mobile and ubiquitous computing technologies playing in public and private spaces?
• How is the increased commodification of social media affecting our privacy?

Organizers

Ben Light and Marie Griffiths, University of Salford
Sian Lincoln, Liverpool John Moores University
Steve Sawyer, Syracuse University

PS See photos from the workshop at http://www.flickr.com/photos/salford-business-school/sets/72157619199895841 …

I will be spending first week of June at University of Salford, Greater Manchester, UK, where my primary purpose is giving a talk for postgraduate students and research staff. The talk will be delivered on Wednesday at 2pm (http://www.salford.ac.uk/events/details/912) – more than welcome to attend.

I am also attending a 2nd Digital Culture workshop (http://www.iris.salford.ac.uk/iris/p/?s=8&pid=51), plus, having couple of meetings about the future EU-based (Leonardo da Vinci) collaboration between my school and Salford University.

University of Salford has an excellent reputation, it is one of the two british universities with 6* research rating (RAE) in Information Systems. My host there is Prof dr Elaine Ferneley, head of the MBA programme at their Business school, who I met during my masters studies in year 2001 and during my MPhil studies (http://www.baloh.net/2008/so-its-official-i-am-mphil-awardee-now/) in 2006 and 07.

I am more than looking forward to meeting all the other friends there, Dr Beryl Burns, Prof Dr Ben Light, Simona Baressi, my student Tanja Zupancic (she has been there through Erasmus exchange this year), Dr Maria Burke, Carl Potts, and others.

This week I am attending biggest Slovenian gathering of IT professionals and CIOs — Microsoft’s NT Conference 2009. Yearly, over 2000 people attend and it’s awesome because you meet just about everyone from everywhere in this world.

This year I was invited to give a talk and together with CIO of TRIMO d.d., Denis Stepančič, we’re presenting a case of Office 2007 deployment in their company, which was co-led by me and Peter Vrečar. The title of the talk: Improving business efficiency through MS Office 2007 deployment.

Predstavljen bo projekt vpeljave sistema Office 2007 v podjetju Trimo in odgovorjeno bo na najbolj pereča vprašanja, ki tarejo CIO-ta: Zakaj se takoj lotiti vpeljave Office 2007 v podjetje? Katere pomembne prednosti prinaša poslovnim uporabnikom in kako utemeljiti dodano vrednost direktorju? Zakaj se ga tudi služba IT naj ne boji? Kako se lotiti projekta vpeljave (zakaj ne gre le za projekt “namestitve novega softwarea”)? Kakšno izobraževanje potrebujejo uporabniki in zakaj? Odgovori bodo podkrepljeni s konkretnimi podatki o rezultatih uvedbe v podjetju Trimo in na podlagi izkušenj pri podobnih projektih v več(j)ih slovenskih podjetjih.

We are giving the presentation on Tuesday at noon in ADRIA conference room. Kindly invited!