When: 2.00 pm Wednesday 26th November
Where: Room 1.33, Business Building, La Trobe University, Bendigo

Topic: User Involvement and Participatory Design in Agile Software Development
Presenter: Professor Karlheinz Kautz

We provide a detailed description of and theorize about how user involvement and participatory design took place in practice in a large agile project, which utilized the agile method eXtreme Programming. The presented research is qualitative. It is based on an empirical case study of a commercial agile development project in a German public sector organization. The empirical data for the case study was collected in 12 semi-structured, open-ended interviews supplemented with company and project documents such as method, requirements and release descriptions, as well as project plans. Planning games, user stories and story cards, working software and acceptance tests structured the user participation. In our case we found genuine customer and user participation in the form of both direct and indirect participation in the agile development project. The users played both, informative, consultative and participative roles in the project and functional empowerment was achieved. We have however no evidence for any democratic empowerment. Studies of user involvement and participation in agile development and design activities in practice are very scarce. The work presented here contributes to this body of knowledge.

Brief Bio: Karlheinz Kautz is professor in Systems Development & Software Engineering at Department of Informatics at the Copenhagen Business School, Denmark and the former Director of Studies of Europe's oldest course programme on Computer Science and Business Administration. Previously he has been employed as a senior researcher at the Norwegian Computing Center and as a lecturer at universities in Germany, Norway, England and Denmark. Since 2005 he is also a Visiting professor at the School of Information Systems, Technology & Management at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. He is a founding member and a former chairman of the IFIP TC8 WG 8.6 on Diffusion, Transfer, and Implementation of Information Technology. He is a member of AIS. His research interests are in systems development and system development methodologies in practice, the diffusion and adoption of information technology innovations, the organizational impact of IT, knowledge management and software quality and process improvement. He has published in these areas in journals like the European Journal of IS, the Information Systems Journal, Information, Technology & People, the Scandinavian Journal of Information Systems, Software Process: Improvement and Practice, IEEE Software, Journal of Knowledge Management, the Journal of Information Systems, the Journal of Informing Science, the Journal of Information Technology Cases and Applications, Information and Software Technology.

When: 12 noon Friday 7th November
Where: Business Board Room 1.29, Business Building, La Trobe University, Bendigo

Topic: An Investigation into the Application of Artificial Intelligence techniques to improve the player selection process at the AFL National Draft
Presenter: John McCullagh, Department of Computer Science and Computer Engineering

The aim of this study is to investigate the potential of Artificial Intelligence techniques to use the AFL Draft Camp data in order to assist recruiting managers in the AFL National Draft selection process. Currently potential future players are selected largely based on the subjective judgement of coaches and scouts. The process of recruiting staff watching games will always be the major source of information for making decisions in the AFL National Draft. However there is a vast amount of untapped information available which has the potential to improve the decision making process. This study will investigate the application of backpropagation neural networks to this problem. Preliminary results from this study suggest that the extra data available to recruiting staff may have the potential to assist in improving the success of selecting players in the AFL National Draft.

When: 12 noon Friday 26 September
Where: Business Board Room 1.29, Business Building, La Trobe University, Bendigo

Topic: Assessing Business Benefits from ERP Systems
Presenter: Lorraine Staehr, Department of Computer Science and Computer Engineering

For more than ten years there has been an increasing industry trend to buy of-the-shelf software rather than custom build software to provide an integrated solution for the business transaction processing requirements of organizations. These Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems are large, complex software packages that provide an integrated real-time environment based on an enterprise wide data model with a set of software applications which allow processing of all the data of the organization. This presentation will report on the business benefits achieved from ERP systems in four Australian manufacturing organizations. The business benefits resulting from ERP use in each organization were assessed using the Shang and Seddon (2000) ERP business benefits framework. In addition to confirming the existing benefit dimensions and categories of the ERP benefits framework, the study identified new benefit categories and resulted in an amended and improved ERP benefits framework. The findings also provide some guidance on using the framework.

When: 5pm Monday 15 September
Where: Business Board Room 1.29, Business Building, La Trobe University, Bendigo

Topic: Sustainability: the HP story
Presenter: Philip Kong, Business Manager, HP Services, Australia & New Zealand

As far back at 1950, HP embraced responsibility for our role in caring for the environment. The cumulative result is that technology design and operational experiences have increasingly come together to create a portfolio of sustainable solutions our customers can benefit from. This presentation will take you through HP's journey, sharing with you the best practices we’ve developed to meet your green needs today, and in the future.

When: 12 noon Friday 15 August
Where: Room 1.30, Business Building, La Trobe University, Bendigo

Topic: Perspectives on requirements elicitation conversations, Varna and Paris
Presenter: Dr Chris Cope, Senior Lecturer, Department of Computer Science and Computer Engineering

Results emerging from an investigation of IS consultants' perspectives on requirements elicitation conversations indicate that much more emphasis should be placed on these conversations in IS education. Six distinctly different ways of experiencing the conversations have been described on the basis of semi-structured interviews with IS consultants. The conversations can be experienced as domination, manipulation, difficulty resolution, negotiation and partnership building. A number of these experiences are likely to be detrimental to the quality of the conversation outcomes. IS students should be made aware of the detrimental impact of experiencing the conversations in an inappropriate way.

When: 12 noon Friday 6th June
Where: Room 1.30, Business Building

Presenter: Werner Hulsmann, Program Manager, IBM IT Delivery - Australia and New Zealand

Werner has worked in the IT industry since 1972. After joining IBM in 1994, he worked as the AMS Ballarat Centre Manager, establishing the RSSC site (IBM site at the University). Under his guidance, Ballarat IBM has grown from 150 people in 2001 to over 600 now, with support and incentives from the Victorian Government.
In another role with IBM, Werner worked for the global emerging market team as Asia Pacific South program manager in countries including Vietnam, Malaysia, and Thailand, with the aim of bringing project costs down by using IBM world-wide approved suppliers in AP.
Werner is married, with 3 children and 2 grand-children, and hobbies of wine-making, cooking, swimming and ballroom dancing. His earlier hobby of car rallies (past German amateur champion 1981 – AvD ) ended after a bad experience in NSW in 1982, when he rolled the car at 150 km/h and got lucky..... only two broken ribs.