VC Video Shooting.

In view of the forthcoming MOU signing ceremony between UiTM and the Accountants General Office to be held in Kelantan later this month, a group of officers from the AG Dept came to UiTM today to conduct an interview and a photo shoot of our Vice Chancellor. ARI and the Faculty of Accountancy was each represented by AP Dr Nafsiah and Prof Dr Ibrahim respectively. After the RU meeting, I had the opportunity to discuss with the video shooting team on the video contents. The AG Department will be engaging UiTM team through the Public Sector Accounting Research Centre to conduct several research topics. They will also be involved with some staff training programs...

Suggested Applied Research Topics.....

I wish to suggest some applied research topics in accounting that the masters students and other interested ARI members can undertake this semester. Please find enclosed a newly purchased journal by Emerald Publishing Group and samples of topics in the journal's "call for paper": Impact of new financial reporting standards or legislation on a company; Critical discussions of cases of corporate failure or financial systems; New solutions to or new ways of thinking about established accounting problems or newly identified accounting-related problems.

More on Applied Research...

The basic question one often ask is what is applied research?. The basic definition for applied research is "any fact gathering project that is conducted with an eye to acquiring and applying knowledge that will address a specific problem or meet a specific need within the scope of the entity". Applied research is designed to solve practical problems of the modern world, rather than to aqcquire knowledge for knowledge's sake. The key thing to remember about applied research is the fact that "applied research tries to solve a particular problem".

New Approach to Applied Research

Effective this semester (July 2009), our part-time master students will have an option of taking an applied research course. The applied research course will be a guided one. A lecturer is assigned to guide the students throughout the 10-week duration. There will be at least four related presentations before the students are allowed to submit their report. The four presentations focus on (i) Identification of research issue (ii) Variable(s) identification and methodology (iii) Data analysis of research findings and (iv) Report writing. We hope to reduce the number of non-completion amongst the master students.

Sustainability Reporting Seminar-Workshop

The National Sustainability Seminar/Workshop was held today. The event which was jointly organised by the ACCA-Asia Pacific Centre for Sustainability Reporting (APCeS). It was a good mix of academia and practioners. The keynote speaker was the renowned Prof Roger Burritt from the University of South Australia. There were also several forums and plenary sessions to discuss relevant issues on sustainability reporting in Malaysia and globally. I also moderated a plenary session where Prof Dr Mustafa deliberated a paper titled "Sustainability Reporting and Its Competitive Advantage" and Tengku Marina from Nestle Berhad shared her corporate experience in bringing Nestle to winning the ACCA Mesra award in 2007.

Welcome Prof Roger Burrit

ARI welcomes our guest all the way from Australia, Prof Roger Burrit. He is an expert and author of numerous journal papers related to sustainability and corporate social reporting. Basically he is here to participate in the forthcoming workshop on sustainability where he will be the keynote speaker. Perhaps there's a lot of potential for ARI to collaborate with his CAGS research group in UNISA.

UiTM Knowledge Portal?

In our effort to streamline our data management for RU, I visited the PTAR library IT department yesterday. I wanted to explore the library's data collection and data management system. To say the least, I was actually very impressed. The "mom meta-data" and "Imprint" facilities are indeed very good. Both system can facilitate and enhance citation of our publication as it is already registed with the global open access system. As a result, the RU committee data management working committee that met today decided to utilise the system and to integrate it with Prisma...