Peter Baloh :>> Research & consulting

We are entering a new era of flight-travel… Check this out…

San Francisco – May 20, 2009 – Virgin America, the California-based carrier, announced that as of today it is the first and only airline to offer Gogo® In-flight Internet service on every flight. As of today, guests on any of Virgin America’s 100 daily flights have the option to surf the Web, check e-mail, or log on to their corporate VPN – all from the comfort of their seats at 37,000 feet. Virgin America marks this in-flight WiFi milestone with another first for an airline: an air-to-ground Skype video call with Oprah Winfrey which will air this Thursday, May 21 on The Oprah Winfrey Show (check local listings).

“As a new airline, Virgin America is reinventing the typical domestic air travel experience with award-winning service and brand new, beautifully designed planes equipped with the latest technology and entertainment. With power outlets at every Virgin America seat, Gogo® has now turned our planes into WiFi hotspots and home offices in the air,” said Porter Gale, Vice President of Marketing for Virgin America. “Hosting a chat from a plane at 37,000 feet to Oprah Winfrey in her studio is a fun example of how Virgin America is embracing technology and meeting the needs of consumers who want to stay connected.”

Virgin America in-flight teammate Mandalay Roberts chats with Oprah Winfrey on this Thursday’s episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show, entitled “Where the Skype Are You?” via video chat from the First Class cabin of Virgin America Flight VX780 en route from Seattle to Los Angeles. Oprah Winfrey also surprised and met some of the 120 guests on board the regularly scheduled commercial flight and hosted the first ever Skype-enabled in-flight wine tasting, where Virgin America guests swirled, sniffed and sipped right along with her from the skies. For more on the segment, visit: www.oprah.com

Although Virgin America does not typically allow Voice-Over-IP (VoIP) products like Skype video call in-flight due to concerns about maintaining a quiet, restful cabin environment, guests can currently use Gogo® to Skype via the instant message feature, in addition to e-mailing, tweeting, updating their Facebook pages and any of the myriad other ways the web is keeping people connected. The early roll out of the Gogo® service across the airline’s network makes Virgin America the first and only airline to offer consumers in-flight WiFi on every flight – regardless of route, aircraft type, or flight time.

“We were thrilled to virtually host Oprah Winfrey and her audience on-board one of our flights. The excitement people have about in-flight WiFi has been reflected in the rave reviews we’ve received from our guests since we launched the service on our first plane back in November. Our tech-savvy fliers have already embraced the option, as we’re regularly seeing up to one-quarter of guests on any given flight logged on,” added Gale.

The Gogo® service is available for $12.95 for daytime flights of over three hours, $9.95 for daytime flights of less than three hours, $5.95 on red-eye flights and $7.95 for handheld devices. In November 2008, Virgin America launched Gogo® In-flight Internet on its first flight with a first ever “air-to-ground” video stream to YouTube Live – YouTube’s first official real-world user event. In February 2009, the airline became the first to host a live national television broadcast via WiFi stream while in-flight over the coast of Massachusetts with CBS News’ THE EARLY SHOW. This spring, Virgin America also became the first and only carrier to show guests which flights were WiFi enabled at the time of booking, as the airline continued to roll out its service fleetwide.

Virgin America flies to San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Washington D.C., Seattle, Las Vegas, San Diego, Boston and Orange County. The airline is one of the fastest growing of all time, with an all-new Airbus A320-family fleet and daily flights from: SFO to LAX, SFO to JFK, SFO to SAN, SFO to IAD, SFO to LAS, LAX to JFK, LAX to IAD, SFO to SEA, SEA to LAX, JFK to LAS, BOS to LAX, BOS to SFO and SFO to SNA.

I have successfully defended my doctoral dissertation at Faculty of Economics today in front of the committee:

- Prof Dr Talib Damij, Faculty of Economics at University of Ljubljana, defense chair, committe member
- Prof Dr Cene Bavec, Faculty of Management Koper at University of Primorska, committee member
- Prof Dr Kevin C Desouza, Information School at University of Washington, dissertation committee chair, advisor

The title of the dissertation was: Towards Knowledge Needs-Technology Fit Model for Knowledge Management Systems. The extended abstract is as follows:

Improving how knowledge is leveraged in organizations for improved business performance is today considered as a major organizational challenge. Knowledge management (KM) projects are stigmatized as demanding, fuzzy and complex, with questionable outcomes. While information technology (IT) is seen as important factor in KM-related organizational activities, more than 70% of technologically enabled KM initiatives fail, according to some statistics. Existing research and practice shows that knowledge management systems (KMS) are many times used indiscriminately, without regard to the type of knowledge being managed or the nature of work being conducted by the knowledge worker. To the best of researcher knowledge, the current literature has not yet provided an answer on how to go about designing KMS. The basic proposition of this research is that KMS has to fit knowledge needs and that the latter will differ across different organizational contexts. In order for KMS to provide value, KMS-design process needs to account for these differences and suggest what kind of technology meets these needs. The tentative design model suggested in this research tells how to analyze knowledge needs of employees, and how the nature of knowledge needs influences the design of a KMS that enables and supports knowledge creation and utilization in everyday working practices. Based on thorough scrutiny, synthesis and combination of existing literature from fields of Information Systems (IS), KM, and management/organizational science, and based on findings of rigorously executed multiple qualitative case study, a KMS design model is suggested in this design-science-type research. Besides a practically relevant question, the choice of research approach is also timely; recently, there has been an increasing demand for this type of research in prominent IS journals (Benbasat & Zmud, 2003; Hevner et al., 2004; March & Storey, 2008; Markus & Saunders, 2007; Straub & Ang, 2008; Venkatesh & Ramesh, 2006). Taking steps in appropriately grounding the model in existing theories (i.e. Process value of IT theory (Barua et al., 1995; Barua & Mukhopadhyay, 2000; Sambamurthy, 2001; Tallon et al., 2000), Evolutionary information processing theory (Li & Kettinger, 2006)), and Task-Technology Fit concept (Goodhue, 1995; Zigurs & Buckland, 1998)) ensured indispensable rigor in the build phase of research. Similarly, in empirical part, appropriate steps were taken in the data analysis and data collection to ensure plausibility of findings. Undertaking an exploratory study in Parsons Brinckerhoff, knowledge intensive multinational engineering company, helped in establishing face validity of the initially (theoretically) proposed model. To evaluate the model an in-depth exploratory qualitative case study was performed in Samsung Electronics, which has just undergone a similar organizational change project. Data-collection sites and key informants chosen for participation were of ‗revelatory‘ type, and findings from both ‗build‘ and ‗evaluation‘ phases were analytically generalized. The design model presented in this dissertation will enable the KM community to critically evaluate efforts underway to leverage organizational knowledge with KMS. The model suggested has made several advancements over the existing KMS work. Contrary to mainstream research, it confirmed that developing one company-wide KM solution could not be fruitful. This calls for a portfolio of KM solutions which are tailored to satisfy the knowledge needs of an individual. Next, it has introduced a Knowledge needs / KMS fit concept, which is not a monolithic or ‘black box‘ structure, but rather a well defined union of its rightful constituent parts. Additionally, practitioner guidelines on how to use the model to build KMSs as a part of knowledge-related organizational change projects were proposed. Hence, besides the model, first steps toward another design science artifact, a method on how to use the proposed model, were made. Findings represent the first step towards construction of a solid design theory and provides contributions to the growing literature on knowledge management, organizational learning, information systems, and strategic management.

I have learned immensely during the process. Now, it is time to harvest and breathe.

The recent book on Access 2007 and business informatization, which me and Peter Vrečar coauthored, is now out on the shelves. Probably the fastest way to it is through Pasadena e-shop – http://pasadena.si/knjigarna/?id=45256, but other e-sellers and some of the bookshops will carry it too. We wish everyone happy “Accessing” ;)

DESRIST 2009 conference in Malvern, Pennsylvania, was a successfull affair. I presented in front of highly distinguished researchers, all coming from the same very focused domain of IS design science.

Just being here would be great, but to have the submission accepted as full research paper and to be selected for presentation, was a big recognition. The conference is a distinguished research venue with highly visible programme committee members, top scholars of IS. Great feedback, awesome contacts and networking.

The paper which I presented was coauthored with Prof Kevin C Desouza of University of Washington, chair of my dissertation committee. It was a best-paper (student as first author) nominee.

Am in Las Vegas, attending ISOneWorld 2009 conference. Besides networking, I am involved in two appearances…

- panelist at KM Panel (organized by Russ Meir) — Wednesday afternoon

and

presenting the paper Baloh, Damij, Desouza: Theoretical Perspectives on Managing Knowledge (Friday morning).

About the conference: ISOneWorld conference started as an academia – industry partnership facilitated by SAP. Over the past several years the conference has emerged as a premier event exploring the interconnections of information, communication, technology, organizations and society. ISOneWorld is an event of the Information Institute, which is a non profit, non partisan organization focusing on the study of information in organizations and society.

Me and my coauthor Peter Vrečar have finished another book and it is off to the printer’s and to the market. See below for the covers in Slovenian language – zoom in for close up.

For non-slovenian audience: it is about Microsoft Access 2007 and business informatization. As always, Peter Vrečar and I have created a book that is pure practical-example oriented and this time we cover the area of informatization of smaller business processes by using Microsoft Access DB management system. Also covered is the area of supporting decisions based on the information that users can produce through queries and reports in MS Access. Furthermore, we cover the most prominent features of the 2007 version of this popular and widespread Database management system.

I have a paper accepted at the 4th International Conference on Design Science Research in Information Systems and Technology (DESRIST 09). The conference is a distinguished research venue with highly visible programme committee members, and has significant impact on IS-related research. The paper, Towards a Knowledge Needs-Technology Fit Model for Knowledge Management Systems, is co-authored with the chair of my dissertation committe, Prof Dr Kevin C Desouza (University of Washington, Seattle). This paper is based on my dissertation that is currently under evaluation of the other two members of the dissertation committee (Prof Dr Talib Damij of University of Ljubljana and Prof Dr Cene Bavec of University of Primorska).

Abstract
The goal of this paper is threefold. The first goal is to provide an illustrative example of design science research – from the crafting of a research question to the research’ execution and explanation of findings. As such it satisfies the academic reader and practitioner who will benefit from seeing how design science research guidelines as proposed by (Hevner et al., 2004) can be rigorously followed in a practically relevant study. The second goal is to provide an overview of the novel artifact constructed – knowledge management system design model. The third goal is to provide methodological contribution to the design science area by arguing for the need to add exploratory step in the build phase of a new design science artifact. By presenting the construction of the model in three stages (theory-based, exploratory-study-in-the-build-phase-amended, and during-evaluation-phase-amended), we provide evidence for that. This paper thus adds to the Hevner et al. guidelines by explicitly calling for a exploratory empirical study before actually going into the evaluation phase of design science study.  

We have a new paper accepted for SSCI-indexed publication. This paper represents the core artifact from the Ideas4Innovation (i4i) research project which was funded by the Institute for Innovation in Information Management (I3M) at the University of Washington…

Innovation is a crucial component of business strategy, but the process of innovation may seem difficult to manage. To plan organizational initiatives around innovation or to bolster innovation requires a firm grasp of the innovation process. Few organizations have transparently defined such a process. Based on the findings of an exploratory study of over 30 US and European companies that have robust innovation processes, this paper breaks down the innovation process into discrete stages: idea generation and mobilization, screening and advocacy, experimentation, commercialization, and diffusion and implementation. For each stage, context, outputs and critical ingredients are discussed. There are several common tensions and concerns at each stage, which are enumerated; industry examples are also given. Finally, strategies for and indicators of organizational success around innovation are discussed for each stage. Successful organizations will use an outlined innovation process to create a common framework for discussion and initiatives around the innovation process, and to establish metrics and goals for each stage of the innovation process.

I was privileged to be invited and hold a research seminar at School of Computing (IS) of National University of Singapore.

NUS is Asian and one of the worlds’ leading and foremost universities, with commited faculty, awesome campus, and great professional and academic placement records. Recently, their MBA programme was ranked 35th in the world by Financial Times.

I presented on the topic of rigor and relevance in information systems research to staff and graduate research students.

Thanks to Prof Shan Ling Pan, Prof Atreyi Kankanhalli, and Prof Swee Lin Tan, for invitation and for making my visit a great experience.

A research paper from the Leveraging Ideas for Innovation project which was led by Prof Kevin C Desouza and funded through the Institute for Innovation in Information Management (I3M) has been published:

• Awazu, Y., Baloh, P., Desouza, K. C., Wecht, C. H., Kim, J. Y., & Jha, S. (2009). Information-Communication Technologies Open Up Innovation. Research-Technology Management, 52(1), 51-58.

Short overview: Information-Communication Technologies (ICTs) are no longer just for internal use. Rather, in the era of open and distributed innovation, they must be leveraged by businesses and organizations to reach, record and review ideas from internal and external sources ranging from vendors, suppliers and customers to employees. ICTs enable the entire innovation process, from idea generation and development to experimenting and testing, and, finally, to commercialization of ideas.

The paper can be retrieved from the R-TM website at: http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/iri/rtm/2009/00000052/00000001.

Research-Technology Management is the award-winning, bi-monthly SCI/SSCI indexed journal of the Industrial Research Institute, published since 1958. It contains peer-reviewed articles covering the entire spectrum of technological innovation, from research and development through product development to marketing. RTM is a leading source of knowledge and best practices on innovation management for leaders of research, development, and engineering worldwide.