Assistant Director-General
OFFICE OF GOVERNMENT ICT

Peter Grant is the Chief Information Officer of the Queensland State Government within the Department of Public Works. He has held this position from 2005.
In this role, Peter fosters and develops relationships between the Queensland Government Chief Information Office and the private sector, forming partnership arrangements to aid delivery of whole-of-Government and multi-agency initiatives. Peter plays a fundamental role in driving and implementing the action items of the Smart Directions Statement; the key government planning tool to guide Queensland Government ICT investment in projects and services.
Previous to his current position, Peter was the founding Director of Consulting for Gartner Asia Pacific. Peter's high level of proficiency in strategic planning and customer development was utilised by more than 60 national and international clients. Peter is recognised as an expert in leadership development, business strategy, program management, and risk management.

• establishing Gartner - an ICT research and analysts company in Queensland and the ACT
• co-founding OZONE Systems - a technology start up company
• managing the IT operations of one of Australia's largest networks as the Director, Information Technology and Corporate Systems at Queensland Transport
• post graduate university lecturer and current Faculty Board Member at three universities
• current member of the Australian Institute of Company Directors
• an Inaugural Board Member of the CIO Executive Council - Asia Pacific

Professor Peppard holds the Chair in Information Systems at Cranfield School of Management where he is also Director of the Information Systems Research Centre, the IT Directors' Forum and leads the Cranfield IT Leadership Programme. The focus of his research and teaching is in the area of information systems and technology strategy and management. His most recent books include Strategic Planning for Information Systems and Customer Relationship Management: Perspectives from the Marketplace while his book The Essence of Business Process Re-engineering, has recently been translated into Chinese, having already appeared in Spanish and Polish editions. He is European Editor of the Journal of Information Technology, an Editorial Board Member of European Management Journal, and sits on IST/15/-/8, the BSI technical panel working on ISO/IEC 20000 IT Service Management. A former Irish international athlete, he is a Director of Fineos Corporation, a software solutions provider to the global financial services industry, and IT Alliance Group, an outsourcing vendor.

Please note that these two conferences, to be held in conjunction with ACIS 2006 in Adelaide in December, have had to be moved from their original date of 4th/5th December (just before ACIS) to Saturday 9th December (immediately following ACIS).

This change has been forced on us by the Ashes cricket test, which has effectively booked out Adelaide from 1-5 December – making it impossible to find hotel rooms or airline bookings for those days. We tried very hard indeed to work around these logistic problems, but finally gave in to the inevitable. As a consolation, we have decided that anyone registering for one of these two conferences will be able to attend sessions of the other conference without charge – delegates are welcome to move from session to session as it suits them

Our new dates mean that the joint conference dinner for these two conferences will be held on Friday 8th December and the conferences themselves will now be a one-day format, rather than their previous two-day format. If necessary, we will arrange for parallel sessions to ensure that all papers can be presented. Both conferences are being held at the Adelaide Riviera Hotel, which is immediately adjacent to the School of CIS at UniSA’s City West campus and the conference dinner will be at the Adelaide Wine Centre.

We are currently negotiating attractive weekend rates with a number of Adelaide hotels – and will be publishing these on the websites of the two conferences as soon as we have definite prices. Please do check out the CollECTeR 2006 Conference (http://www.collecter2006.unisa.edu.au/) and AWRE 2006 Conference (http://awre2006.cis.unisa.edu.au/) websites over the next few weeks to find out the details of the special offers we have managed to arrange. We hope you will find that a weekend in Adelaide straight after ACIS 2006 will be both enjoyable and very attractively priced!

If you have any queries about either of these conferences, please contact Nicole Howard at UniSA by email (nicole.howard@unisa.edu.au) or phone (+61-8-8302 9174); or email the individual conference organising committee members. We apologise most sincerely to anyone whose plans may be inconvenience by this change – but we really did have no choice in the matter.

We look forward to seeing you at CollECTeR 2006 and AWRE 2006 in December.