In this year I have submitted an application for Ph.D. funding to Swedish Research School of Management and Information Technology (MIT). The application has been successfully and in the next five years I will receive 1500000 SEK from MIT for financing together with our department a Ph.D. position in IT Management. For more information about Swedish Research School of Management and Information Technology (MIT) please access the following link: http://www.forskarskolan-mit.nu/
Papers accepted for publication in the proceedings of Americas Conference on Information Systems (AMCIS 2011), Detroit, USA, 4-7 August, 2011
The Americas Conference on Information Systems (AMCIS 2011) that in this year will be held in Detroit, USA from 4-7 August, 2011 (http://amcis2011.aisnet.org/) is a top ranked conference in Information Systems area according to The Australian Government’s Excellence in Research project (ERA): http://lamp.infosys.deakin.edu.au/era/?page=cfordet10&selfor=0806
In this year three papers written by the members of IT Management group were accepted for publication (two as papers and one as poster) in the proceedings of AMCIS 2011. The authors of the papers, the title and the abstract are included below.
The first paper is written by Edephonce Nfuka and Lazar Rusu, and is entitled: “Critical Success Factors Framework for Implementing Effective IT Governance in Public Sector Organizations in a Developing Country”.
Abstract
Several frameworks for IT governance exist with various approaches like for example COBIT or ITIL. However neither of these frameworks has looked on implementing an effective IT governance from the point of view of Critical Success Factors (CSFs). Therefore in this paper, we have specifically addressed this gap by developing a framework of CSFs for implementing effective IT governance (CEITG) in public sector organizations in a developing country like Tanzania. This was achieved using four previous studies in this environment as a basis, together with interviews with 43 IT and business people from 25 public sector organizations, 6 industry/academic experts and finally through a case study in an organization in this environment during CEITG development and evaluation. The results of this research is a high level and holistic view framework based on CSFs and the activities in each IT governance focus area that should be considered by IT and business management personnel in the process of implementing effective IT governance in public sector organizations in Tanzania.
The second paper is written by Anayanci Lopez, Lazar Rusu and Paul Johannesson, and is entitled ”Construction of a Maturity Model for Analyzing Strategic IT Service Management”.
Abstract
The paper presents the construction of a maturity model for analyzing the strategic IT service management (ITSM) process of internal IT service provider’s in early growth stages. This model is presented as an alternative tool for improving the understanding, from an IT service management perspective, of: (i) the strategic IT processes/practices in an IT organization, and (ii) facilitates the improvement task of such IT organization. The model construction is done by using a combination of best practices of IT service management and IT governance together with characteristics specific to the object under analysis, e.g. internal IT service providers, municipal governments standards. The model uses a wider scope for strategic ITSM which facilitates its applicability in IT organizations in early growth stages, giving a practical value to the model. Furthermore this model is designed to be used independently or as a complementary component of a method for analyzing IT service strategy presented in a previous study.
The third paper is written by Georg Hodosi and Lazar Rusu, and is entitled “A Risk Based View of Influential Factors in IT Outsourcing Relationship for Large Swedish Companies”.
Abstract
Today IT Outsourcing (ITO) is well spread among the large Swedish companies and this trend will continue in the near years. Our focus in this research is a service buyer company who needs a well working relation with its ITO supplier for fixing: emergent issues, daily operation and changes that have not been foreseen. In the last years, an increasing attention has been paid to improving ITO relationship. In the review of the research literature we have not found any studies about Influential Factors (IFs) that could improve ITO relationship in large Swedish companies, nor about how risks factors are interrelated to the ITO relationship. Therefore this research has addressed this problem by providing the IFs that could improve ITO relationship in large Swedish companies and could help the service buyers companies’ to focus on these IFs. Additionally, we have developed a framework that could support the ITO decision makers in both mitigating the risks and the improvement of the ITO relationship.
2 papers accepted within 15 minutes!
A new personal record, received 2 paper accepts within 15 minutes yesterday.
Paper 1 – accepted for presentation at The social side of gaming in Stuttgart in July.
Social believable NPCs: a conceptual model and analysis of current NPC models – Harko Verhagen, Mirjam Eladhari, Magnus Johansson
Paper 2: accepted for presentation at 5th European Conference on Games Based Learning in Athens in October.
Model of Social Believable NPCs for Teacher Training – Harko Verhagen, Mirjam Eladhari, Magnus Johansson
Paper accepted in EMMSAD 2011 Conference
A paper titled “Analyzing the Integration between Requirements and Models in Model Driven Development” has been accepted for the EMMSAD 2011 Conference (http://www.emmsad.org/), which is held in conjunction with CAiSE 2011 in London, UK.
Authors: Iyad Zikra, Janis Stirna, Jelena Zdravkovic
Abstract: In Model Driven Development (MDD), models replace software code as the development artifact. At the same time, requirements represent the information that is elaborated in models. However, despite the tight relationship between models and requirements, only a few MDD approaches provide the necessary methodological guidelines and tool support to explicitly facilitate this relationship. In this paper, we analyze existing approaches for integrating requirements with models within MDD. Based on the analysis, we elicit a set of general properties that need to be fulfilled when considering the integration of requirements and models, and we assess the contribution of the considered approaches accordingly.
Open Seminar with Professor Jerry Luftman on March 21, 2011
At the invitation of IT Management group within SYSLAB Professor Jerry Luftman has given on March 21, 2011 in Forum – Aulan an open seminar. A short description of the seminar topic and information about our distinguish guest speaker including his presentation you could find below.
Topic: IT-Business Strategic Alignment Maturity
The beginning of the 21st Century is marked by the continued penetration of Information Technology (IT) into all facets of the organization. Businesses, regardless of their size, cannot function without IT enabling/driving every activity, from traditional systems such as e-mail, accounting, payroll, and inventory management, to strategic applications that interact with customers and partners. In spite of recognizing the above, for over 30 years, aligning IT and business organizations have remained a pervasive and persistent problem. Professor Luftman has created an assessment of the maturity of this important relationship; in fact he has conducted assessments from over one-third of the global 1,000 companies. The purpose of this seminar will be to introduce attendees to the model and present some of the important benchmarking insights that have resulted from Professor Luftman’s research.
Speaker:
Professor Jerry Luftman is a Distinguished Professor at Stevens Institute of Technology New-York, USA, Wesley J. Howe School of Management. He is the founder and Executive Director of the Howe School’s Graduate Information Systems Programs. Professor Jerry Luftman’s career includes strategic positions in management (Information Technology and consulting), management consulting, Information Systems, and education. Dr. Luftman’s experience combines the strengths of practitioner, consultant, and academic. His proficiency in business-IT alignment, books, published research, consulting and teaching/speaking engagements further exemplify Dr. Luftman’s expertise and leadership in his field. After a notable twenty-two year career with IBM, he is currently a Distinguished Professor at Stevens Institute of Technology School of Management.
The pdf file of Professor Jerry Luftman’s presentation you could find here Luftman SAM MATURITY Stockholm
Professor Michaël Petit in SYSLAB this week!
During this week Prof. Michaël Petit from University of Namur (Belgium) is going to continue his collaboration with our research lab. This time the effort is set on an integration of well-established Business Strategy approaches such as Strategy Maps, Value Chain, Blue Ocean and others for a better understanding of their use in the requirements engineering scope. From our side, Paul, Constantinos, Birger and Jelena are engaged in the work.
2 Contributions accepted for IEEE RCIS 2011
The research papers of our PhD students, Khurram Shahzad and Constantinos Giannoulis have been accepted for the 5th IEEE International Conference on Research Challenges in Information Science (RCIS 2011). Short summaries of their works, the first on a process analysis approach using warehouses, and the other on business strategy modelling, are provided below:
Towards Goal-driven Access to Process Warehouse: Integrating Goals with Process Warehouse for Business Process Analysis (Shahzad, Zdravkovic)
Analysis and improvement of business processes, one of the core phases in the BPM life cycle, is becoming on top of the agenda for many enterprises and organisations. An emerging approach to analyze business processes is to use the business intelligence approaches that attempt to facilitate the analytical capabilities of business process management systems by employing process-oriented data warehouse and decision making techniques. However, very little work has been done on employing a business orientation in the design and utilization of process warehouse. The approach presented in this paper, addresses that limitation by attempting to integrate business goals with warehouse. The proposed approach to integration spans across two levels, conceptual and implementation; the first defines the concepts that are used to relate goals and process warehouse; the latter is used to implement the concepts and the relations to link warehouse data and goal records for relational databases. The latter is used identify the records that are related with goals. The proposed approach enhances the way users access warehouse data and interpret the data. To facilitate the use of the proposed approach we have developed a prototype. The evaluation results, though preliminary, provides evidence of the usefulness of our approach.
Modeling Business Strategy: A meta-model of Strategy Maps and Balance Scorecards (Giannoulis, Petit, Zdravkovic)
Business strategy is aimed to support the vision of an enterprise, by paving the way to achieve it through goals that direct the strategy’s execution. However, there is a lack of means to establish and assess the alignment of business strategy and goal oriented requirements engineering. The objective of our ongoing research is to model business strategy in order to establish well-defined and traceable links with system requirements. In this paper, we propose a business strategy meta-model for Strategy maps and Balance Scorecards. The validity and applicability of the meta-model is demonstrated through a case scenario using OWL and Telos.
Papers accepted for publication in the proceedings of Conf-IRM2011 and WSKS 2011 conferences
Three papers written by the members of IT Management group were accepted for publication in the proceedings of 2011 International Conference on Information Resources Management (Conf-IRM2011), Seoul, South Korea (http://conf-irm2011.org) and in the proceedings of the 4th World Summit on Knowledge Society (WSKS 2011), Mykonos, Greece (http://www.wsks.org/).
The first paper accepted for publication in the proceedings of the Conf-IRM2011(published in AIS e-library) is having as authors: Johnny Flores Delgadillo, Lazar Rusu and Paul Johannesson and is named “A Maturity Model of IT Service Delivery”. The paper is proposing a maturity model that is oriented to formalize and assess the maturity levels of IT service delivery. The maturity model is supported by IT service delivery elements that are considered significant for managing IT service delivery in the Nicaraguan Internet Service Providers sector, by IT service concepts and maturity model properties complemented by the IT Service Capability Maturity Model.
The second paper accepted for publication in the proceedings of the Conf-IRM2011 (published in AIS e-library) is having as authors Anayanci Lopez Poveda, Lazar Rusu and Paul Johannesson and is named “Improving a Method for Analysing Information Technology Service Strategy in Governmental Organisations in Nicaragua: Ex-post Analysis”. The paper is presented the improvement of a method for analyzing IT service strategy from the perspective of the implementer and designer after the use of the method in the context of Governmental Organisations in Nicaragua.
The third paper accepted for publication in the proceedings of WSKS 2011 (published in Springer series in Communications in Computer and Information Science) is having as authors Hari Nugroho, Gamaludin Al Afghani, Georg Hodosi and Lazar Rusu and is named “Key Factors in Managing IT Outsourcing Relationships”. The paper is presented an analysis of the key factors in managing IT outsourcing relationships that were elicited from the IT outsourcing relationships research and which were applied in the case of three organizations in Sweden.