Ing. Lukáš Zoubek

The paper explores how to set up cooperation between university and commercial organization on start-up principles and describes its application to the establishment of an IBM Centre of Competence at Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Czech Technical University. It examines the start-up approach from three perspectives - people, places, and practices - and explores the portability of this approach to the university environment. In the beginning, this paper introduces the faculty and IBM. The second part of the paper describes different types of cooperation and partnership levels derived from the size and number of realized activities. The idea of a “Partnership Continuum” is introduced. The third part briefly discusses the term “start-up” and start-up principles. The last part contains a case study of the start-up principle application in partnership establishment. It describes the way to get from small and unclear cooperation to a long-term cooperation “Alliance.” In the end, the paper summarizes the most important facts and recommendations. It emphasizes the time and people aspects.

In this paper, I describe our approach to simplified process visualization based on user’s role in the process. During our work on reference process model for universities in the Czech Republic, we have identified two different user groups of business processes diagrams. While the management of a university and process analysts need to see the whole process, tasks of every participant and communication and cooperation within the process, the needs of the other group – participants of the process-are very different. For them the process describes a service offered by the institution and the only information they seek is how to use this service, or, in case their role is the role of the service provider, how are they supposed to solve the request. Finding a solution how to satisfy both these groups and keep the process models simple and manageable even in large quantities is subject of our research.

The possibility of increasing the efficiency and effectiveness in a company is based on increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of its business processes. Process management is based on this idea and it consists of multiple consecutive phases. The first and essential phase of process management is to create a process model of the organization, which is used to perfectly understand all agendas and the connection between them. This gives the opportunity to acquire the information needed to analyze and increase the efficiency and effectiveness of each process. All of this can also be used in academic environment. The purpose of this article is to describe not only the motivation for creating the reference process model of universities, which is based on the principals of successful reference process model of the telecommunication environment (eTOM), but to also briefly describe the content of such reference model.

Background: Economic, cultural and political changes in recent have had a significant impact on society, companies, public institutions and even on the academic environment. Institutions from private and public environment have been forced to implement austerity measures and more to ponder the effectiveness of their functioning, not only because of lack of funds for their own operations due to the financial crisis, but also because of a noticeable increase in the competitive environment. Objective: Find the answer to the question whether it is possible to mitigate negative issues and eliminate their impacts on universities in the Czech Republic. Method: A systematic literature review was conducted in order to find and analyze available methods in order to efficiency. Results: We found a few projects (especially EFIN, KRÉDO, KVALITA) that dealt with improving the performance of the academic environment in the Czech Republic. Conclusions: Found projects provide only basic guidance on how to measure and increase the efficiency and performance of universities in the Czech Republic. For this reason, we decided to describe the way of a possible solutions (creation a reference process framework for universities in the Czech Republic).

The growing need for management of processes efficiency in the university environment often leads to the introduction of process management. The first step is process identifying and mapping. To support this, a university reference process model was proposed, based on that their functioning is determined by legislation, particularly the Law on the Higher Education. The reference process model thus identifies and categorizes the processes common to all universities in the Czech Republic. Pilot tests to verify the benefits of this model for process mapping were carried out, showing time savings of 25.6% and 30.9% and encouraging further work on developing the university reference process model.