Hello! Today I'm going to tell you about the two things that have been occupying my mind lately - the Business Informatics Summer School (BISS) in India and Queen's Day (Koninginnedag). For all those who have no idea what I'm talking about, Queen's Day is probably the biggest public holiday in The Netherlands. BISS is a research project in which twenty top talented students are revealing the secrets of outsourcing through a research trip to India.

To start with, Queen's Day, 30 April is the Queen's birthday (which of course in reality is in January :)). And its amazing - you can see two million people pouring (literally) in the streets of Amsterdam for the biggest fest I've ever seen. But I've missed an important detail - everybody is dressed in orange! So it's 2 million orange people having an amazing party all day long. There is music coming from every corner and there is a big stage at every square. We are going in a group of 20 people from the Master of Business Informatics program and for me the last remaining task is to get an orange shirt! Can't wait for it!

Now onto the Summer School in India... I'm one of the people organizing the whole program and for me yesterday was a moment of joy. We managed to get our first big sponsor! The company Patni, one of the major pure players in the Indian IT world of outsourcing, backed up our project! Thank you, Patni!
In the meantime, our research is going quite well. We have managed to identify the most relevant outsourcing issues at the moment, the students have formulated precise research questions and are building the framework for their research. I have the feeling that we are going to get some excellent results! I'll keep you updated.