Summary

New service centres will start operations at all UH campuses this spring with the aim of reforming the organisation of administration as well as cut back on administrative work. The goal is for the administrative staff to collaborate more while ensuring that university staff can focus on their own duties, and to free up resources for duties that need to be carried out at department level. The service centres will provide administration for faculties, departments, research projects, and staff and students. The reform is expected to reduce the number of administrative staff in time, not to add another level of administration. This is why we need a clear division of duties between departments and service centres.

The Rector has appointed a task force for establishing the campus service centre at Kumpula. The task force will finish its work by the end of March, and the service centres are expected to start operations by 1 April 2007. According to our Office Manager, Päivi Karimäki-Suvanto, who is a member of the task force, no decisions have been made as yet. She thinks the service centres will mostly benefit small units. For large departments like ours, the service centres will impact the administration of staff and economy the most. Duties like the planning and preparation of administration, decision-making and follow-ups will still be carried out at the department. Päivi also points out that our department has some fields of special expertise, like research funding and IT, which are developed much further than those of the university at large.

This week's diarist is Sampsa Lappalainen, a student and a research assistant in HIIT/BRU. His week was filled with lectures, exercises, and other university work. He wrote and polished his summary for the Scientific Writing course, and he carried out some work for the department. Furthermore, he participated in different TKO-äly events, and took part in an Assassin game, where his team eventually managed to wipe out all the members of the opposing team. For the weekend, he was supposed to go to Tampere with TKO-äly, but overslept and missed the bus. He took the train instead, and spent a nice evening in Tampere before heading back to Helsinki and another TKO-äly party.

Who are you and what do you here?

-My name is Alex Norta, and I am a post doc working on Lea Kutvonen's SOAMeS project.

What is your background, where do you come from?

-The last place I lived in was Eindhoven , the Netherlands , where I worked on my PhD project. I was born in South Africa , and have dual citizenship from South Africa and Austria . My wife is Finnish, so we wanted to move here because it is important to have family around and because Finland is a very nice and prospering country.

- I have an MSc. in business informatics, which could be described as computer science with the objective of automating business and administrative activities. Consequently, business informatics is very applicable in today's networked economies and public administrations. In my PhD project I investigated dynamic inter-organizational business process collaboration for the EU-research project CrossWork.

Everybody should know that I...

- ... am approachable.

In my leisure time, my hobbies are…

- My family, fitness workout, cooking, and reading. I like to keep up with current events and I am always very curious about what drives people in my immediate environment and also what drives the larger society I live in.