Well, by now you have probably at least skimmed through the materials on my professional life and thus, you know that I have been working for six years as an Associate Professor at Bentley College and am currently serving as the Chair of the CIS Department. I continue to be very enthusiastic the opportunities Bentley offers and truly impressed by the positive developments and dynamic growth Bentley has been experiencing during the past decade. Prior to Bentley, I was a Visiting Assistant Professor at the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University. Before coming to IU I was working as an academic administrator trying to figure out how to keep the HSEBA MBA Program as one of the best MBA Programs in Europe and create a unique learning environment for the great students we had. I came to Helsinki and Mikkeli from Bloomington after graduating from the doctoral program in MIS at Indiana University in July 1995 and spending a year at IU as a visiting assistant professor.
What you do not know based on what you have seen so far is that since August 15, 1998, I have been married to the most wonderful woman of the world, Anne-Louise Klaus, who earned her Master's in Vocal Performance at Indiana University School of Music in 2000. For the past six years, she has been working on her professional career as a classically trained singer.
In my life, I try to be honest, communicate openly, keep promises, respect diversity, and learn from others whenever I can. I believe in individual responsibility for one's actions but simultaneously, I think that we have a shared responsibility to make this world a better to place to live in by helping each other. I enjoy music in various forms, dinners with good friends, problem solving using computer tools, all kinds of ways to present words that have been organized to form a sensible message (e.g., books), learning by traveling, European movies, long, intelligent, and challenging discussions, and various other things I will add to this list later.
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I was born in Finland, in a beautiful European country with a unique combination of western democracy, modern technology, and clean forests and lakes (to correct some common misconceptions, I did not spend my adolescence in tango bars and yes, I have heard Finns to say "I love you" ("Rakastan Sinua") to their loved ones in several occasions. I have even said it myself to my wife a few thousand times...) I was lucky enough to grow up in a wonderful family with a healthy sense of humor and a strong respect for work, honesty, and justice.
Searching for the true meaning of God's will has always been an essential part of my life, to the extent that I spent enough time at the University of Helsinki to get a Master's degree in Theology (although I don't yet fully understand why.) Retail sales has been one of my areas of interest since the time I was thirteen and started to work for a local grocery store. For some unlucky customers in the retail business I designed and implemented my first information systems without virtually any knowledge of what I was doing. After working a couple of years in the IS field, I felt that I should finally learn something about computers. This brought me back to school (Helsinki School of Economics and Business Administration) to get my M.Sc. in information systems.
While studying and working, I also played various instruments and listened to music as much as possible; the high point of my career as an amateur musician were two and a half years I played in the only -- to my knowledge -- rock balalaika band in the world, The Siberian Mules.
In May 1991, I found myself in a situation in which I had two hours to decide whether I wanted to spend a couple of months as an exchange student at IU School of Business. I hardly knew where Indiana was and had never heard of Bloomington, IN, but I had the feeling that the offer was too good to resist. I liked Bloomington, the school, and the people at the D&IS department so much that in August 1992, I was back in Bloomington with a goal to get my Ph.D. in MIS. The three and a half years in Bloomington were full of hard work in an intellectually stimulating and culturally rich environment with great colleagues and many new friends.
I managed to graduate in July 1995 and worked at Indiana University - Bloomington as a visiting assistant professor for about a year. That was another year with an extremely busy schedule, and when I returned to Finland at the end of May 1996 I expected at least slight change in the pace. Well, that was not the first time I have been mistaken... Life as an administrator was full of interesting challenges and I was definitely learning something new all the time.
Since Fall 1997 millions of wonderful things have happened to me, and once I get a chance, I will report more on those. If you read some of the other documents, you know that the most wonderful of these events was, of course, that Anne-Louise and I got married in August 1998. Our life together continues to get better and better all the time! Professionally, I moved at least temporarily from administration towards a more traditional academic path, and I really enjoy my work as an Associate Professor at Bentley College at this moment. In the Summer of 2006 I took a step back towards administration by becoming department chair -- it is great to work with outstanding colleagues!