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
In late July, I participated in the IADIS conference on e-Health (a part of the IADIS Multi Conference on Computer Science and Information Systems). The conference was held in Freiburg, Germany, located close to the borders to Switzerland and France. At the conference, I presented a paper written together with Hélène Sandmark. The title of our paper is “Multiple Help Online: An Integrated E-health System for Stress Management”. As a committee member of the conference, I also chaired one of the conference sessions.
A PhD student at DSV, Wah-Sui Almberg, participated and presented a paper at the parallel conference on ICT, Society and Human Beings.
E-tjänster hittar man allt oftare på kommuners och förvaltningars hemsidor. Men hur effektivt hanteras inkomna ärenden? Tyvärr är dagens verksamhetssystem inte byggda för effektiva processer. I följande artikel diskuterar jag och Petia Wohed hur kommunala processer kan effektiviseras med verktyg för just processhantering, samt öppen källkod. Artikeln baseras på ett tillämpat forskningsprojekt inom Järfälla kommun och kommer presenteras på konferensen Sundsvall 42.
Mot en processorienterad förvaltning.pdf
A paper named “Organizational Culture Impact on Business-IT Alignment” written by Mohamed El Mekawy and me has been accepted for publication in the proceedings of Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-44) publisher IEEE Computer Society (http://www.hicss.hawaii.edu/hicss_44/apahome44.htm). The Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS) is a top ranked conference and is ranked “A” according to The Australian Government’s Excellence in Research project (ERA) (http://lamp.infosys.deakin.edu.au/era/?page=cfordet&selfor=0806). Therefore we are very happy that our paper (that has received excellent reviews) has been accepted for publication in HICSS-44 conference proceedings. An abstract of our paper is following below.
Abstract.
Importance of Business-IT Alignment (BITA) has increased over the past few years. However, achieving and maturing BITA still has apparent difficulties. Therefore, research efforts resulted in a number of theoretical models that can be applied as supportive tools for assessing different components of BITA. Most of these efforts have been produced either in Anglo-Saxon Countries or based on their experiences. The purpose of this paper is to explore the impact of organizational culture on maturity of BITA. The paper relies on the nine dimensions of Project GLOBE to understand societal as well as organizational culture. It also relies on the bottom-up comprehensive approach of Luftman’s Strategic Alignment Maturity Model to understand organization’s alignment components. To fulfill the purpose of this study, a comparative analysis has been carried out between two subsidiaries of a multinational organization with a federal organizational structure that operates in Egypt and Sweden. The results shows that: a) is a difference in how different components of BITA are interpreted and implemented in different organizational culture, and b) that the impact of organizational culture on BITA maturity is more complex than what is expected especially on variables that require social interactions.
In mid June this year, I participated in the European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS-2010). This time the conference was held in Pretoria, South Africa. It looks like was strategic as the 2010 FIFA World Cup started a day or so after we have finished the conference. Also we were able to enjoy Vuvuzela (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vuvuzela) as they started using them even before the games! At the conference, I presented a paper written together with Lazar Rusu. The title of our paper is “Critical Success Factors for effective IT governance in the public sector organisations in a developing country: The case of Tanzania”. Shared are some photos while presenting but also with Prof. Joey George, President of Association of Information Systems (AIS) after his key note speech and some talks with him… and few more pics.
Mid of this month, I participated in the Americas Conference on Information Systems (AMCIS-2010). Like the case of ECIS-2010, this year conference was also held outside traditional host i.e. USA and Canada. It took place in Lima, Peru. It was interesting to note that one of the seven wonders in the world today is in Peru i.e. Machu Picchu, a city in clouds (www.peru-machu-picchu.com). And there were organized trips after the conference if wanted to take the opportunity. The good news is that you can also take a virtual tour (http://www.peru-machu-picchu.com/map.php) and more interesting while there can also take tour to the rest of 7 wonders in the world. Also during the conference we were able to enjoy the typical culture of Peru in organized dinners as can see some photos far below! At the conference, I presented a paper written together with Lazar Rusu. The title of our paper is “IT Governance Maturity in the Public Sector Organizations in a Developing Country: The Case of Tanzania”. I also participated in one day CIO Symposium that was held along AMCIS-2010. In this symposium one of the three important themes addressed this year was IT governance. Shared below are some photos one of them being with the famous IT/Business alignment Prof. Luftman and another while contributing in some topics of the symposium.
In June I graduated from
The Swedish language consultancy programme (Språkkonsultprogrammet). My bachelor thesis is a part of the research in the Hexanord-project. The thesis is written in Swedish and the title is
Patientjournalen som genre (Patient records: a genre analysis).
The topic of the thesis is the language in patient records. The aim was to examine how well the law (Patientdatalagen/Patient data act) corresponds with the reality, and what the writers, medical doctors, think about the law. My special interest was paragraph 13 that says “the patient records should be as easy as possible for the patient to read”.
I also examined if parts of the records might be hard to understand if you are neither a doctor nor a nurse. A textual analysis, based on Hallidays sociocultural theories about language and grammar, was the main method in thesis. As a complement, a questionnaire was sent to doctors at Karolinska sjukhuset(/The Karolinska University Hospital). 40 doctors answered.
The results showed that the records can be difficult at several levels. They contain a lot of technical terms and abbreviations that even doctors might find difficult. The records are written from the doctors’ perspective. There are almost no people mentioned in the records. There are very few names and pronouns.
A majority of the doctors had a positive view on the law. A third of the doctors didn’t know of the law, and they were more negative than the others. Some of the doctors were highly set against the law, and emphasized that the medical record is first and foremost a tool, used by doctors and nurses in the care process.
The questionnaire showed that the doctors primarily write the record for their colleagues, and that they don’t write for the patients.
I presented our paper about the IMAIL-project at the EGOV 2010 conference in Lausanne, Switzerland:
Knutsson, O, T. Cerratto Pargman, H. Dalianis, M. Rosell and E. Sneiders. 2010. Increasing the efficiency and quality of e-mail communication in egovernment using language technology. In the Proceedings of IFIP e-Government Conference 2010 (EGOV 2010), Lausanne, Switzerland, Trauner Druck, pp. 45-52. pdf
The project has actually developed a lot since we wrote the paper in February-March, but I presented the work carried until the deadline of EGOV. I got a feeling that several people thought it to be a very important project, and that governmental agencies really must deal with all their e-mails in more efficient ways. Hopefully we will return to EGOV next year and present all the research results from the IMAIL-project.
I was also happy that another paper written by another research team at DSV achieved one of the conference’s paper awards: Design of an Open Social E?Service for Assisted Living by Gustaf Juell?Skielse and Petia Wohed. Congratulations!
Hi!
I have been working full-time at DSV for a month now and would like to take the opportunity to introduce myself on the Syslab blog. I’m currently working on adapting the Web Mining course to a more distance-friendly form. I will also be involved in the research work of the “IT for Health” team, performing natural language processing on patient health records.
I have a BSc in computer science from RMIT in Melbourne, Australia and I just recently completed my Master’s degree from KTH and the EMIS program. In my thesis I explored the possibility of applying the automatic classification methods (corpus annotation and machine learning) used in the biomedical and clinical domain to that of knowledge management. More specifically, I wanted to find out whether it is possible to assess automatically the level of certainty in knowledge-intensive documents. Together with my supervisor, Sumithra Velupillai, the thesis was turned into a paper that was published and presented at a workshop (Negation and Speculation in Natural Language Processing) in Uppsala in July.
I look forward to getting to know you all more in the coming months!
Aron
We are happy to announce that the paper “Design of an Open Social E-Service for Assisted Living” was awarded “most promising practical concept” at the EGOV2010 conference in Lausanne Switzerland. The paper was written by myself, Gustaf Juell-Skielse, and Petia Wohed. The EGOV conference focuses on issues related to design, implementation and evaluation of e-Government. This was the ninth conference in the series and attracted almost 150 researchers presenting about 100 papers. Our paper presented some of the results from the Open Social Services project at Järfälla municipality financed by Vinnova.
Preprint of the paper can be found here: Design of an Open Social E-Service for Assisted Living.pdf
