In this year I have submitted together with Georg Hodosi, Mats Danielson and Love Ekenberg a project proposal to Swedish Research Council having the title: “A methodology for assessing the risk exposure to support IT outsourcing decisions”. As we know the decision process for companies to outsource information technology (IT) or not is a substantial business change and in many cases the competence to take such decisions is limited and has major consequences for the company’s future performance. Therefore in this project we have proposed the development of a method that can be used for assessing the risk exposure in support of IT outsourcing (ITO) decisions based on using Transaction Cost Theory (TCT) in order to give us a quantitative measure of the IT outsourcing risks.
The project proposal which Paul, Martin, Birger and myself submitted to the Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet) this year can be found here (VR10-main.pdf). It is an improvement from our proposal from last year. The objective is to research on the integration of Business Process Management Systems (BPMSs) with social software (SoS).
On May 27, 2010 our colleague Georg Hodosi has defended successfully his Licentiate Thesis named: “A Method for Decision Support in Information Technology Outsourcing: The Case for Large Swedish Companies”.
On behalf on our research group in IT Management I would like to congratulate Georg and to wish him “Good luck and success towards PhD”. Last but not the least I would like to thanks to all the participants in this seminar.
An abstract of Georg’s licentiate thesis and a picture from the seminar is following below.
Abstract
Information technology outsourcing (ITO) is a growing area. However, not all ITO experiences have been positive, as they have not delivered the cost savings or the expected IT service quality. From this perspective, a method for assessing the risk exposure (RE) in ITO would be a valuable support for IT decision makers from any large company in Sweden that plans to outsource IT. This thesis proposes a novel method for ITO.
The development of the method is based on transaction cost theory (TCT) and risk exposure (RE) and supports IT decision makers in deciding whether to outsource IT or not. The method developed in this research has been implemented in an ITO tool and has been evaluated during the last three years in two large Swedish companies with more than twenty years’ experience of ITO. Moreover, the method developed has been extended with different practices from areas like procurement, contracting and project management based on the professional experience of the author in these areas from a large Swedish company (other than the two included in this research). The main contribution of the thesis consists of a method for assessing the risk exposure in ITO, which can support IT decision makers in determining whether to outsource IT or not. Furthermore, the thesis proposes recommendations for how to reduce the risk exposure in the IT processes intended to be outsourced.
Hercules Dalianis, Sumithra Velupillai and me (Elin Carlsson) participated in the the seventh international conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC) that was held
in Valletta, Malta 19-21 May 2010. The conference had approximately
1200 participants and about 600 out of 900 submissions were accepted.
We presented three different posters: Creating a Reusable
English-Chinese Parallel Corpus for Bilingual Dictionary
Construction; How Certain are Clinical Assessments? Annotating
Swedish Clinical Text for (Un)certainties, Speculations and
Negations; and Influence of Module Order on Rule-Based
De-identification of Personal Names in Electronic Patient Records
Written in Swedish. I attach our report from the conference (written in Swedish): LREC2010_notes_and_reflections.pdf
Sumithra and Hercules present their poster: How Certain are Clinical Assessments? Annotating Swedish Clinical Text for (Un)certainties, Speculations and Negations
Elin and Hercules present their poster: Influence of Module Order on Rule-Based De-identification of Personal Names in Electronic Patient Records
Written in Swedish.
Hercules and Elin after the poster session.
Today we held our presentation (Shanghai Innovation Day.pptx) at the enormous World Expo in Shanghai. About half a million people visit the expo every day. And it will be open for six months! We presented DSV and reserach in mobility, service systems and computer games. Mr. Lou Qun, vice mayor of Shanghai and deputy mayor Eva Samuelsson of Stockholm opened the so called Innovation Day in the Swedish pavilion. We established contacts with a university outside Beijing which is interested in putting up a branch in Kista for research and student exchange. On Saturday we will meet with six other universities with whom we already have established agreements of cooperation.
Harko talking to the Mayor in chinese.
Gustaf just talking.
Robert and Angela at the buffet.
Harko Verhagen, Angela Westin, me and Robert Ramberg is in Shanghai to present DSV at the Expo 2010. We arrived on Monday and have spent two days in getting to know Shanghai. Today we visited the exhibition area where most countries are represented. We will present DSV tomorrow in the Swedish pavilion right after “Mayors Opening”, i.e. Sten Nordins speech. The city of Stockholm is hosting a three-day event to promote the city and we are participating on the days for “Innovation” and “Education”. On Saturday we will meet with representatives from our Chinese partner universities.
Robert and Angela eating Chinese fondue.
Harko and Robert outside the Czech pavilion.
On May 31, 2010 our colleague Norman Vargas has defended successfully his Licentiate Thesis named: “A Unified Strategic Business and IT Alignment Model: A Study in the Public Universities of Nicaragua”.
On behalf on our research group in IT Management I would like to congratulate Norman and to wish him “Good luck and success in his professional career”. Last but not the least I would like to thanks to all the participants in this seminar.
The presentation of Norman’s licentiate thesis you could access here.LicPresentation_Norman_Vargas_Chevez.pdf A picture from this seminar is included below.
A research paper written together with Alexandru Smeu (a former student to which I have been the supervisor on his diploma thesis at Faculty of Business from Babes-Bolyai University Cluj-Napoca, Romania) has been published in the Information Systems Management journal, Volume 27, Issue 3, June 2010, pages 238-246. I am very happy about this result because Information Systems Management journal is a very good one among the journals in Computer Science/Information Systems area and is ranked by Thomson Reuters, having the impact factor 1.242.
The published paper is named “Managing the Reliable Design of an Enterprise IT Network Infrastructure “. The focus in this paper is on the practical modalities of designing a reliable IT network infrastructure in an enterprise. In this direction an algorithm has been developed that is a hybrid between classic greedy and simulated annealing that search for the most reliable IT network infrastructure meeting the imposed budget cost constraints and the enterprise managers’ decisions constraints. A key point of the proposed solution is the way in which the enterprise managers are involved in the estimation of the relative importance of their interconnections between their business’s data centers. Furthermore, the algorithm presented in this article has been evaluated in the case of a retail enterprise for addressing the business’s demands for a higher reliability of their IT network infrastructure.
For more information about this paper please access the following link:
http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~content=a924327097~db=all~jumptype=rss
Together with Karolinska Institutet we have got a paper accepted for Medinfo’2010! In the paper we outline a framework that can aid in identifying problems in health care processes. The framework can be used for improving current care processes, as well as for the design of supporting e-health solutions. The paper contains a case study from the Vippa project.
Authors: Maria Hägglund, Martin Henkel, Jelena Zdravkovic, Paul Johannesson, Inger Rising, Ingvar Krakau and Sabine Koch
Abstract:
The development of efficient e-services for patient-centered healthcare requires insight into concrete problems in administrative and clinical work processes as well as an understanding of the strategic goals that should guide these healthcare processes. However, considering both concrete process-related problems and high-level strategic goals during process analysis and solution design can be problematic. To address this, we propose a
structured approach for analyzing both high- and low-level goals in a healthcare process and relating these to identified problems. Thereby proposed solutions for each problem in form of, e.g. e-services can be connected to
strategic goals. The approach consists of five steps; process modeling; process-based problem identification and classification; process goal identification; mapping to strategic goals; and solution proposal. The approach
is illustrated by examples from a case study of Swedish stroke care. In conclusion, the approach enables analysis of high- and low-level goals in a healthcare process by relating these to identified problems. The results thereof form a basis for redefinition of current care processes, as well as for design of supporting e-health solutions.
This week we submitted a paper titled “Business Process Management for Open E-services in Local Government” to the BPM track in the Australian Conference on Information Systems. The paper describes the prototype which we developed for the Open Social Services (ÖST) project. More generally it discusses the use of business process technology for the development of e-services. A preprint of the paper can be found here.
The work was carried out in cooperation with Dr. David Truffet from Australia and Gustaf Juell-Skielse (DSV). I met David during my visit at QUT last summer, which coincided with his own visit there. Similarly to me, David believes in the YAWL open-source initiative carried out by the BPM group at QUT and invests (among other through the establishment of a consulting company for YAWL) on spreading out the research results and YAWL to industry and official sector.
