Contact Details

NOTE: if copying this email you will need to re-insert the '@' symbol

Position

Doctoral Student

Affiliation

Alexander Borek

Research areas

• Strategic Information Management
• Information Risk Management
• Information Quality in Asset Management
• Business Value of IT
• Tools and Techniques for Data Quality Management
• Crowd Sourcing

Introduction

Alexander Borek is a PhD student at the Institute for Manufacturing and member of the Distributed Information and Automation Laboratory and the Cambridge Service Alliance. He is also part of the EPSRC funded project “Information Quality in Asset Management (IQAM)”. His PhD supervisor is Dr. Ajith Parlikad.

Research

In his PhD, Alexander Borek focuses on developing a process for Total Information Risk Management (TIRM), which helps to identify, assess and treat operational and strategic risks that arise from poor information quality. In particular, Alexander tries to find out effective ways to assess and optimize information quality in order to improve decision making in asset management (management of complex physical goods like production machinery, trains, electrical networks, etc.). He works closely with his industrial partners from the manufacturing, transport, utility and energy sectors to test and refine the TIRM process through application in these organisations.

For more information about his PhD project and the TIRM process, please visit www.informationrisks.com.

His further research interests are centered around how IT creates business value through information quality and how data quality tools and techniques and crowd sourcing can be used to assist information quality improvement in companies.

Background

Prior to joining Cambridge University, Alexander received a first class diploma (MSc equiv.) in Information Engineering and Management from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany in 2009. From September 2008 until April 2009, he was a visiting researcher at the school of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, USA. Alexander has gained work experience in two internships in strategic management consulting in Germany and Austria. In 2007, Alexander was a cofounder of sendia.de, which provided an internet platform on which members of different social networks could meet for trading DVDs. The startup won several prizes in 2007/2008 and attracted private investors. Alexander has been awarded with several scholarships, among others from the German National Academic Foundation (Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes).

Scholarships and Prizes

• November 2011 - One of the 12 Winners of the International PhD Competition organised by the School of Management, University of South Australia
• October 2009 Doctoral Scholarship of Cambridge University Department of Engineering
• March 2008 Baden-Württemberg Scholarship for an eight months research stay at Carnegie Mellon University
• 2005-2009 Scholarship of the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes (German National Academic Foundation)
• October 2007 Cyberchampion award: 1st Prize in the category "Newcomer" (company competition)

Publications

• Borek A, Helfert M, Ge M, Parlikad AK. An information oriented framework for relating IS/IT resources and business value. In: Proceedings of the International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems (ICEIS). Beijing, China; 2011.
• Borek A, Helfert M, Ge M, Parlikad AK. IS/IT Resources and Business Value: Operationalisation of an Information Oriented Framework. In: Enterprise Information Systems - Revised Selected Papers. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing. Springer; 2011.
• Borek A, Helfert M, Woodall P, Parlikad AK. Design and Evaluation of Management Processes in IS: Application of a Process-Based Research Approach. In: Proceedings of the European Design Science Symposium 2011. Communications in Computer and Information Science. Springer; 2011.
• Borek A, Parlikad AK, Woodall P. Towards A Process For Total Information Risk Management (TIRM). In: Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Information Quality (ICIQ 2011). Adelaide, Australia; 2011.
• Borek A, Woodall P, Oberhofer M, Parlikad AK. A Classification of Data Quality Assessment Methods. In: Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Information Quality (ICIQ 2011). Adelaide, Australia; 2011.
• Borek A, Woodall P, Parlikad AK. A Risk Management Approach to Improving Information Quality for Operational and Strategic Management. In: Proceedings of the 18th EUROMA Conference: Exploring Interfaces. Cambridge, UK; 2011.
• Borek A, Woodall P, Parlikad AK. Managing Information Risks in Asset Management - Experiences from an In-depth Case Study in the Utility Industry. In: Proceedings of the IET and IAM Asset Management conference 2011. London, UK; 2011.
• Wichmann P, Borek A, Kern R, et al. Exploring the “Crowd” as Enabler of Better Information Quality. In: Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Information Quality (ICIQ 2011). Adelaide, Australia; 2011.
• Borek A, McLaren BM, Karabinos M, Yaron D. How Much Assistance Is Helpful to Students in Discovery Learning? In: Cress U, Dimitrova V, Specht M, eds. Learning in the Synergy of Multiple Disciplines. Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS). Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer Berlin Heidelberg; 2009:391-404.