Research seminars - 2013 presentations
Contact details
Seminar coordinator: Dr Yee Ling Boo.
Cloud Computing Adoption by SMEs in Australia
Date: 10 May
Speaker: Ruwan (Ishan) Senarathna
Recently, SMEs has increased their adoption of Cloud Computing technology due to its eminent benefits such as reduced IT overhead costs, greater flexibility of services, reduced TCO (Total Cost of Ownership), on-demand services, and improved productivity. The most economical deployment model in Cloud Computing, is called Public Cloud and is especially suitable for SMEs because it provides almost immediate access to hardware resources and reduces their need to purchase an array of advanced hardware and software applications. Large number of prior researchers have considered Cloud Computing adoption as just technology adoption, but this research will look at Cloud Computing adoption as an IT service adoption. The changes experienced in Cloud Computing adoption over the past decade are unprecedented with the issues arising such as privacy, security, trust and reliability. Some factors which are taken into consideration in general technology adoption are not as important in Cloud Computing adoption, and some new and unique key factors have to be considered. This research aims to develop a model for Cloud Computing adoption by SMEs and to that end the study will be looking at SMEs in Australia.
School of IS research publication framework
Date: 3 May
Speaker: Dr Craig Parker
This seminar will present the first draft of a framework which is intended to guide School of IS staff in meeting Faculty research publication expectations with respect to job protection, the publication points (PPR) and promotion. It will also include details of School-based events which are planned to assist staff in this area. Feedback from School staff will be sought on the framework draft.
Understanding Organisation by Business Intelligence: A Sensemaking Approach
Date: 26 April
Speaker: Morteza (Mory) Namvar
As the volume of potentially useful information available to organisations grows at a rapid pace, the ensuing complexity, fluidity and ambiguity of business situations become a problem for understanding business by managers and a serious obstacle to the effectiveness and accuracy of their decision-making processes. Making sense of an organisation overwhelmed with the abundance of data becomes a challenge for decision-makers at all levels of business planning and operation. Although several technological solutions - such as the use of business intelligence (BI) - have been previously suggested as able to aid executives in decision making, the processes of assisting business stakeholders in making sense of their organizations is still largely unexplored. Against this backdrop, this proposal leverages theories of organizational sensemaking to investigate how BI technology could support managers and other business stakeholders in understanding business and its environment before decision-making and action-planning processes would actually commence.
Social Media, Big Data, New Challenges: Business, Society and the Law
Joint seminar of School of IS and School of Law.
Date: 19 April
Panellists: Dr Darryl Coulthard (Social Informatics), Prof. Matt Warren (Business Informatics) and Assoc. Prof. Damminda Alahakoon (Text Analytics)
The rise of social media and the production of 'big data' provides a wide array of social and business challenges and opportunities. Social media and big data are changing the way we interact with and organise ourselves, how we market our products and do business. They also raise a raft of important ethical and legal issues such as privacy, dataveillance, the relevance of 'offline' practices to inform online practices as well as new opportunities for civil participation and the mitigation of corruption. The purpose of the seminar is for each panelist from their resepective research domains to outline emerging trends in social media and its analysis with the view to develop collaborative research between the School of Law and the School of Information Systems.
Engagement, Insights and Story Telling through Data Visualisation
Date: 12 April
Speaker: Ben Hosken (Flink Labs)
Exploring topics such as biological and adaptive systems, casual games, information theory, interaction design and storytelling; this workshop will show how you can use Data Visualisation to explore data, develop insights you can act on, and better engage and communicate with your team around your data.
Ben Hosken is the Founder of Flink Labs (http://www.flinklabs.com/), Australia's leading data visualisation studio. Prior to starting Flink Labs, Ben founded AgentArts, a recommendation and personalisation company that he ultimately sold to Microsoft. Ben holds two patents in data mining and predictive analytics. When he is not at work, you'll likely find him training for Ironman triathlons in the pool, on the bike or out running.
Social Informatics (SI) Seminar
Will innovative research suffer? The case of information systems and journal rankings, a research project
Date: 15 March
Speaker: Dr Darryl Coulthard
The seminar raises the issue of journal rankings and their possible effects on research. This seminar will outline a research project to examine the positive and negative consequences of the rise of the rankings of journals by governments, senior scholars, university management and professional associations. The research will cover such areas as pressures to publish, the political economy of academic publications, the construction of journal rankings, and changes to the quality, content and methodologies of journals. This will be undertaken by inviting journal authors from journals and delegates to conferences to undertake an online survey to canvass attitudes and publications strategies.
Business Informatics (BI) Workshop Theme: BI@2013 Activities
Date: 22 March
Speaker: Prof. Matt Warren
The workshop involves:
- Planning the activities for the Business Informatics (BI@) group in 2013.
- Identifying projects and related areas and development of planned activities.
Insights on Predictive Analytics
Date: 1 March
Speaker: Colin Shearer, IBM
About Colin Shearer
Colin Shearer is the Global Executive for Advanced Analytic Solutions at IBM and was one of the founders of IBM's Predictive Analytics practice. He is a frequent speaker at events around the world sharing his experience and knowledge of the use of advanced analytics and advising businesses on how best to leverage this technology.
Colin has a background in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence from the University of Aberdeen, and since 1984 has been involved in applying advanced software solutions to business problems. He co-founded Integral Solutions Ltd. (ISL), a pioneer of data mining in the early 1990s, he was the creator and architect of ISL's award-winning Clementine system (now IBM SPSS Modeller) and led a team which tackled numerous successful predictive analytics projects in areas including finance, broadcasting, market research and defence. In 1996 he jointly initiated and led an international cross-industry project to create CRISP-DM, now the de facto standard methodology for predictive analytics.
Colin is currently working on approaches that will allow a broader range of organisations and users to benefit from analytics. He is responsible for IBM Analytic Answers, a new portfolio of business-focused advanced analytic solutions hosted in the cloud.
Business on the Internet - What students should know
Date: 1 March
Speaker: Pratap Patnaikuni
Abstract:
The internet as a communications network and as a marketplace has changed dramatically over the last twenty years. What are the topics that graduates going into industry should have knowledge and awareness of? What are the things organisations looking to do business on the internet look for, and what should we be teaching them?
About Pratap Patnaikuni
Pratap Patnaikuni is an IT professional who has been working in the industry for over 20 years. Specialising in strategy, business/IT alignment, and helping organisations in improving the maturity of their technology capability, Pratap has worked for some of the largest firms in Australia in the retail, finance, banking, health, justice and treasury industries. He has also worked in some of the largest international consulting firms. From an academic perspective, Pratap has been sessional lecturing at the Graduate School of Business and Economics at the University of Melbourne since 2007, where he introduced the very well received Enterprise Architecture subject to the masters programme.
In addition, please find below the interviews conducted by Pratap:
Dr Adrian Gentle: Special Relativity General Relativity
Prof Brian Schmidt (Nobel Laureate, 2011): The accelerating universe
Prof Roger Short: Saving Asian Elephants part 1
Business Processes Affordances
Date: 22 February
Speaker: Edyta Rozycki
Abstract
The study looks at business process enactment with the aim to develop an understanding of action opportunities, also known as affordances, offered by such processes to their participants. Managers, employees and designer engaged in a business process and its planning develop first-hand experience of both, the benefits of well-designed processes and the difficulties that arise when processes are not a good fit for the particular context in which they are used. Experiences of business process participants manifests itself in their recollections, views and opinions, which in this study will be collected and explored to gain insight into the business processes, its qualities and the perceptions of utility by all involved individuals. To investigate such phenomena, the study adopts hermeneutic phenomenology, which is eminently suited to conducting research of personal lived experiences. Gaining an understanding of business process enactment, and specifically the perceptions of what facilitates or constraints human actions within the process can assist in improving the process design; its theoretical underpinning; process acceptance by the participants and customers; and ultimately creating the connection between process design and business performance.
