HoD News - 9 September 2019

Dear colleagues,

At the departmental meeting on Wednesday last week, I informed you about some future organizational changes within the department.

I have now been the head of department for two years and it is my experience that given the size of the department, a larger degree of delegation of tasks to sections and section heads is necessary. In the current organization, and because of the size of the department, too many daily operation tasks end up on my desk. I have also learned that communication at a large and heterogeneous department can be difficult, and I believe that communication via sections will ease the communication process in the future and establish a shorter distance between employees and management. Given the portfolio of tasks to be delegated, the demarcation of sections should be reconsidered from both an administrative and a professional angle.

New sections
In the future, the department should have three instead of five sections, plus of course the administrative section and the NCRR. The Accounting and Finance Section remains as it is. The Logistics Section and the Section for Econometrics and Business Statistics will be merged into one section: Econometrics, Logistics, and Business Analytics. Also, the Section for Industrial Organization and Trade and the Section for Labour and Public Policy will merge into one section: Economics.

The Accounting and Finance Section is expected to have a faculty of approximately 35 people (post docs, assistant, associate and full professors). The Econometrics, Logistics, and Business Analytics Section will have around 42 faculty members. And the Economics Section will have around 55 faculty members. PhD students and admin staff should be added to these numbers. These new sections may seem “big”, but compared to other departments with a similar professional demarcation, the range of section sizes is actually quite common. It is also important to stress that section members have full freedom to organize themselves in research groups and (externally funded) research centres, and to have a multitude of seminar series and so on.

I believe that the new Econometrics, Logistics, and Business Analytics Section makes a lot of sense professionally. Today, a number of courses are taught across the sections, where there is a common interface (such as forecasting, machine learning etc.). “Business Analytics” is a common denominator for much of the research and teaching interests covered today. Co-supervision of PhD students takes place across the existing sections. Also, the two current sections have a common ownership of the new Data Science education together with the Computer Science, Mathematics, and the Engineering departments at the Science and Technology Faculty. In the new merged section, I see a great potential for increased success to attract external research funding, to create research synergy, and to be prepared for advancing our educations towards the field of business analytics, which is increasingly demanded by the industry.

I also believe that merging the two present economics sections into one, Economics, is a natural development. The names of the existing sections create a lot of confusion, and separating the two is artificial. The Economics Section is defined broadly and covers most subfields of economics, even though econometrics is shared with another section. The teaching interests of the present sections are to a very high degree the same, and we draw very broadly on the teaching resources across the sections. The fact that the new course coordination scheme is organized jointly across the two existing sections shows that we are already moving towards having just one section.

All our cand.merc. programmes will be anchored in one section. Other programmes such as HA, BScB, BA-oecon, and cand.oecon will be anchored across sections, even though some educations will have a stronger anchor in one section than in other sections. In any circumstance, it is important that faculty members take responsibility for and ownership of our educations within and across sections. The study programme panels play an important role in this respect.

Section councils
To facilitate the administrative work in the sections, section councils will be established to support and function as sparring partners to the section heads. The section councils will have a portfolio of different tasks. It will be natural that the teaching coordinators are part of the section councils to deal with education matters. But the section councils will also play an important role regarding the professional development of the sections, the research activities, creation of documentation of resource needs, mentoring and feedback to junior non-tenured faculty about promotion possibilities, creating a culture to attract external research funding and publishing in high quality outlets, and so on. The sections and the section councils will also be much stronger involved in the recruitment process at the junior level in particular.

When?
The process of establishing the new sections and the section councils is expected to be completed before the summer 2020. A number of unresolved issues remain, such as the constitution and the exact terms of reference for the section councils. The head of the Economics Section should also be appointed. Hans Jørn Juhl has agreed to head the Econometrics, Logistics, and Business Analytics Section by 1 October 2019, so the merger of that section is effective soon even though the section council is not yet in place.

This reorganization of the department will of course imply certain changes of tasks for the admin staff as well. It is expected that a new head of the department secretariat will be in place 1 December 2019 at the latest. The new head will be responsible for organizing the administrative work within and across the new sections.

I know that changes are not always well received. I do believe, however, that in the future you will see a shorter distance between individual and management and that communication will become easier. After all, I believe that your daily work life will only be little affected. I thank you for your understanding and your support.

Niels Haldrup