BUSINESS INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
Student
Mario Escalante is 25 years old, Venezuelan and currently finishing his Master's thesis in Business Information Technology at Royal Philips Electronics. This Master's programme involves planning, design, development, implementation, operation, support and project management of business information systems from a scientific and managerial perspective. It focuses on placing the most suitable IT solutions to enable an organisation to do business. Many courses also include the opportunity for hands-on experience of effectively managing business-IT interfaces; a valuable perspective for facing real-life situations. "The UT is not just about academic study. Playing soccer has become a tradition, and I have enhanced my network with the international contacts I have made through the Latin American Student Association (L.A. Voz); we organised some of the best parties and barbecues on campus. Enschede is a quiet town for some, but for most of us, it's never boring. Feel free to contact me if you'd like to know more about the UT."
Ruben Heerdink Vice President - Operations at Distimo
Juliette Fhij Communication staff member Business Information Technology.
Using Gaming to Recruit Students
Claudia Steghuis graduated almost 5 years ago with a MSc degree in Business Information Technology. "The combination of business and IT was for me the most interesting part of the study. Since then, I have been working as an IT architect at Capgemini. As a consultant, I've worked at different companies in the areas of system design, business process improvement/development and enterprise architecture. Last year, I worked for a big chemical company in a project to centralise procurement processes. My role concerned managing the migration and operation of the master data for these processes. To do this we extended the current data entry team with a team in India and supported the business groups in the migration of the data. One of the important aspects of this project was communication with all stakeholders, which is one of the attention points in the BIT study, and in business process improvement: How can we improve the process so that it better aligns with the IT applications, and so that service to the business can be improved? At the moment I'm working on the management reporting of these operation processes, to be able to monitor and improve these processes on a continuing basis."
Advisory Board of Practitioners
Louwke van der Steen is married and the father to an active 9 year-old boy. "I've been a member of the BIT Advisory Board of Practitioners a little over a year. For the past twenty years, I have worked for the larger computerization concerns, such as Logica and Atos Origin, in the Dutch and international world of IT. After graduating from my Informatics course in Leiden I followed the well-trodden path from development, to consulting and via project management to senior management, in which capacity I have been active in the 'emerging markets' of India and South-East Asia, on behalf of Logica, for the last six years. At the moment, I am Outsourcing Director responsible for complex 'sourcing' processes. Typically this involves international outsourcing of IT infrastructure and associated organisations. I undertake my role in the Advisory Board of Practitioners with a lot of pleasure and it always gives me an extra 'energy boost'.
My daily work takes place where management and IT technology intersect, and I enjoy sharing this experience with the Board members and with students. Above all, I am searching for ways to continually improve the connection between the textbook and the practices in use in trade and industry. I mean this not only in the qualitative sense, but also in terms of the number of graduates...motivated candidates are more than welcome at the School of Management and Governance, and of course, they are also welcome afterwards in the fascinating world of trade and industry!"