Business Development & Networking
As the Business Development point person in the area of Standardization at the world’s largest business software company, Oracle Corporation, Trond Undheim has built a strong global network in the IT industry, in public sector, and academia. These high level connections can be channelled to build and cement donor and partner relationship anywhere. As the National Expert on e-government at the European Commission, he created ePractice.eu, the world’s most successful best practice initiative in e-government, e-health, and e-inclusion. Having built it with €300K, with over 50,000 civil servants and practitioners engaged the programme, he secured another €3M funding for the follow-up before he left that position. He also ran the business incubator Innovision, where he took ownership in and sought seed capital for start-ups, two of which (Falanx and Plasus Technologies) were later acquired by other companies.
Partnerships & Multilingualism
Trond’s experience from working with highly accomplished individuals has taught him to be sensitive to individual needs as well as programmatic goals, that is, to improvise. At the Norwegian Board of Technology, he managed two high-level expert groups on Green Innovation Policy and Software Policy. The challenging group process led to important government policy change. Throughout his professional career, he has always built connections between people. Altogether, he has built ties across at least 50 countries. His LinkedIn network of around 1000 contacts (most of whom he has met face-to-face) spans 95 industries in 188 locations. He has lived abroad for most of his life and is fluent in English, French, Spanish, Norwegian, and Italian and can impress strangers in Russian, German, Korean and Portuguese.
Marketing & Branding
Trond co-led the launch preparations for a global non-profit foundation for best practice in the software arena, forging partnerships across the IT industry. Also, the ePractice brand, which he created, is now widely known throughout the e-government world. He is also a popular speaker at international events. He is a persuasive policy actor who has significantly influenced digital policy in Europe through personal relationships, professional industry associations, and writing. Early in his career, his start-up, Innovision, provided branding services to several major regional innovation initiatives. Analysing corporate branding efforts was part of his Ph.D work, as well. He is also an expert in social media and online community building.
Project Management & Administration
Throughout his career, he has been a leader. He believes leadership is an attitude, not a position. His preferred modus operandi is leadership from below, tapping into forces beyond the hierarchy to use specific skills and creating teams around you. That principle is further described in his eponymous book, Leadership From Below (2008). He drove Oracle’s Global Standards Strategy to shape the next decade of systems technologies. Collaborating with competitors or colleagues in adjacent fields in order to create alliances around common ground is a speciality of his. He solidified Oracle’s thinking around governance, technology and policy across business units, Public Sector, Public Affairs, and Applications Technology.
Moreover, Trond is a skilled Project Manager. At the EU, he coached 80+ management consultants and managed 14 projects on change management, new public service delivery chains, benchmarking and measurement (€10 m). As an example, he led the Economics of e-government project at the EU which has influenced the monitoring of all Digital Strategies across Europe, including the annual EU-27 benchmarking exercise. He previously monitored R&D projects for the EU, he is now an external Evaluator in the 7th Framework Programme for Research.
Academia & Analysis
As a former Visiting Fellow at UC Berkeley in California (1999-2000), a Research Fellow at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, a Fellow of the OFE Academy (2010-), as well as a Fellow of the Research Group for Marketing and Consumer Science (2010-2013), Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium, he is no stranger to the academic context. He founded the European Journal of ePractice, which contributes to analysis of e-government, e-health, e-inclusion, and public service, and he is still the Editor-in-Chief. He has written dozens of articles on topics such as social networking, e-Government, knowledge management, Internet strategy, and social change. He obtained his Ph.D. in Sociological Technology Studies from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (2002). He holds a Master’s degree in the Sociology of Publishing (1998).
See more of Trond’s CV (Experience, Education).