As a part of the EnRiMa FP7 project Naghmeh Aghaee and I, together with project partners from Great Britain and Austria, visited test-sites in Bilbao and Oviedo. The buildings at the test sites will be used for collecting data about energy consumption and energy transfers. In turn, this data will later be the foundation for creating a service-oriented decision support system. Currently the energy consumption and overall state of the software system can be remotely monitored and controlled. Besides the software being used, it was interesting to see how different, from a Swedish perspective, the heating of the buildings where done. In Spain it is quite common to use gas for heating, and the use of geothermal ground heat pumps is not common. During the spring we will start making a draft of the software architecture for the upcoming decision support system. For more information on the EnRiMa project, go to www.enrima-project.eu
Open IS-seminar on IT Governance – February 2, 2011
For those interested in the presentation named “The effect of Critical Success Factors on IT governance performance in public sector organizations in a developing country” that took place on February 2, 2011 in the Open IS-seminar please access the following file: CSFs effect on IT Governance Performance – 2011-02-02
Johnny Flores’s Licentiate Seminar
On January 31, 2011 our colleague Johnny Flores has defended successfully his Licentiate Thesis named: “IT Service Delivery in Nicaraguan Internet Service Providers: Analysis and Assessment”. On behalf of research group in IT Management I would like to congratulate Johnny for his achievement. Some pictures from the seminar and after the seminar are included below.
Open IS-seminar: Lazar Rusu and Edephonce Nfuka
First seminar in the Open IS-seminar series. Every first Wednesday in each month.
February 2, 2011 from 12-13.00 in sal 6405A, BYO (bring your own) sandwich or lunch.
Welcome!
Title: The effect of Critical Success Factors on IT governance performance
in public sector organizations in a developing country
Key word: IT Governance
By: Lazar Rusu and Edephonce Nfuka
Abstract
Today in many public sector organizations, the use of IT has become ubiquitous in every facet of the organizations’ endeavours in supporting and evolving public services delivery. This ubiquitous use of technology have caused a critical dependency on IT, which in this environment involves a complex mix of political, organizational, technical and cultural concerns that call a specific focus on effective IT governance. Accordingly, the success factors for governance over these organizations IT resources must be entrenched and adhered to if they have to increase contribution of IT in achieving their objectives. Several researches have been done on such IT governance and necessary success factors in these organizations. Yet with no focus to such organizations in a developing country like Tanzania, which on one hand is characterized by IT resources, knowledge, and culture constraints and on other hand by the increase of IT investments and applications.
However, recently, based on IT governance focus areas and five organizations from this environment, an exploratory study to address such a gap has been pursued specifically on identifying Critical Success factors (CSFs) for effective IT governance. Although based on such a study it is reasonable to believe that these CSFs have effect to IT governance performance, this has not been confirmed. In this paper we have specifically addressed such a gap by hypothesizing that such correlated effect exists and we deductively examined it.
This was achieved based on a developed research model, survey research method, sample data from Tanzanian public sector organizations and a second generation structural equation modelling technique namely partial least squares (PLS). The result indicated significant moderate to high positive effects to IT governance. The CSF with most significant effect was “Involve and get support of senior management” and the least “Consolidate, standardize and manage IT infrastructure and application to optimize costs and information flow across the organization”. Finally a CSFs model for effective IT governance in this environment was also suggested. The findings provide more focus on CSFs that have a higher impact on IT governance performance in public sector organizations in a developing country and can improve available approaches.
Paper published in International Journal of Information Technology and Management
A paper named “Assessing the Risk Exposure in IT Outsourcing for Large Companies“ and written together with Georg Hodosi has been published in International Journal of Information Technology and Management, Vol. 10, No. 1, pp. 24-44, 2011. The paper is presenting the design of an information technology outsourcing (ITO) tool that includes a procedure based on transaction cost theory for assessing the risk exposure in ITO. The ITO tool presented in this paper is a useful and effective instrument for the IT decision-makers in support of decisions to outsource IT or not. In the development of the ITO tool, we have approached two large companies in Sweden with more than 20 years experiences in ITO that have helped us in the improvement and evaluation of the usability and effectiveness of this tool. For more information about this paper please access the following link: http://www.inderscience.com/search/index.php?action=record&rec_id=37760&prevQuery=&ps=10&m=or
Research visit in Australia, November 29- December 10, 2010
Sumithra Velupillai and I were invited to NICTA, National ICT Australia, in Canberra, December 7th – 10th, 2010, to work on an EU-application within Natural Language Technology and E-health encompassing 13 partners, as well as to plan forfuture collaborative efforts. Our hosts at NICTA were Hanna Suominen and Leif Hanlen. We also gave an invited talk at a seminar describing our research within clinical text mining.
Preceding this visit, I was also invited to the Macquire University, the University of Sydney, and to CSIRO, Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation in Sydney. At CSIRO, I visited Cecile Paris’ group and gave a talk about out IMAIL project answering e-mails automatically in an E-government setting. At the University of Sydney, Sumithra, Hanna and Leif joined me for visiting Prof. Jon Patrick’s group where I gave a talk on our clinical text mining research and Jon Patrick and his group described and demonstrated a very nice set of applications and technologies on clinical text mining using SNOMED.
I found Sydney and Canberra very beautiful and impressive and I would really like to travel there again though it is a very long journey over 25 hours airflight.
DSV is Co-organising BUSITAL 2011
The 6th International Workshop on Business/IT-Alignment and Interoperability is arranged in London the 20th of June, 2011.
Members of DSV staff are involved in various ways in the arrangements. Please consider contributing to the workshop by submitting your research reports.
The Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering (CAiSE’11, an important conference) is co-located with the workshop.
Additional info can be found at the workshop site. Info about CAiSE’11 can be found at http://www.caise2011.com/index.php
PACIS Track on IT Global Sourcing and Cloud Computing
DSV Center for Service Science and Innovation (SSI) is pleased to invite your research paper submissions for the track “IT Global Sourcing and Cloud Computing” at the Pacific Asia Conference on Information Systems (PACIS) 2011.
Please find out more about the conference track here: IT Global Sourcing and Cloud Computing.
For further inquiries, please contact gjs@dsv.su.se.