Richard J Self, University of Derby

R J Self
Richard Self is a Senior Lecturer in Analytics and Governance at the University of Derby in the UK.
He is leading the introduction of SAS and Big Data Analytics into the curriculum of the Department of Computing and Maths.
He has been at the University of Derby since 2002, after a 30 year career at Rolls-Royce plc. He has a BA from the University of Cambridge and an LLM in Conflict Studies and Dispute Resolution from the University of Derby.
Richard spent 30 years in the Aerospace industry, managing the development, and delivery of IT based solutions to many parts of the commercial and engineering organizations within Rolls-Royce Group plc. During this time, his focus was on using practical but “technology stretching” approaches to meet the customers’ operational needs. During the mid-1980s he led a small team of analyst programmers to develop one of the most powerful and capable Project Management systems in the world, using mainframe based SAS®, which was developed using a combination of prototyping and advanced agile techniques.
In addition, he developed his skills and interest in Analytics, Modelling and Governance during this period of his career. His final projects at Rolls – Royce involved responsibility for the delivery of the technical infrastructures for over 6000 staff in both the business and engineering organisations with a budget of over £12M for technical infrastructure provision.
He joined the School of Computing at the University in Derby in 2002 as a Senior Lecturer and, shortly thereafter, led the development of the unique on-line MSc programme in Strategic Information Technology Management. He developed and taught new BSc and MSc level modules that embedded the principles of Governance and IT Law. In 2012, he led a project to incorporate SAS and Analytics in the curriculum of the BSc IT to enhance the employability and analytic skills of the students.
In 2014, he was involved in the development of a new MSc in Big Data Analytics which will be launched in the autumn of 2014.

He has presented papers at a range of conferences on topics such as;-
1) Different approaches to teaching programming languages, such as SAS, in ways that lead students very rapidly to be able to identify the important questions and valuable insights that can be obtained from all sizes of data from small to Big Data.
2) Identifying the critical governance issues relating to Big Data Analytics, using 12 Vs of Big Data, six of which were developed and identified by his final year BSc students, as a framework to find the important governance questions.
3) The Governance issues resulting from the very high levels of TechnoStress that are now being observed as a result of the use of IT products.

His students publish edited e-book collections of the best of their work, which in 2014, are based on a wide range of topics to address the question of Big Data Analytics for SMEs.
His current research is focussed on the topic of Sustainable Information and Corporate Governance, with special focus on Big Data Analytics and the related questions of Ethics, Trust, Compliance and Governance. Many of his BSc and MSc students carry out projects in this field which feed into his own research and publications.
He is on the Programme Committees of the Knowledge Management in Organisations and the Learning Technology in the Cloud series of annual conferences. He was a co-chair of the IBM sponsored Big Data and Analytics Education Conference in 2014.
He is a member of the editorial board of the International Journal of Learning Technology.
Further information can be found here.

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