Who am I
I am Ahmad Shaharudin Abdul Latiff, a senior lecturer with a university called Putra Business School. Despite its name, Putra Business School is a full-fledged private university in Malaysia. However, it is wholly owned by another university, namely Universiti Putra Malaysia, which is a public university.
My field is Information Technology. As my university is a post-graduate business university, I teach courses that applies to business fields like Management Information Systems, Digital Business & Entrepreneurship, Business Intelligence & Analytics Systems, Financial Technology, and Knowledge Management.
I joined the academia quite late in my life. I have been in the corporate sector for about 10 years since 1988. Most of my involvements in the corporate sector was as internal auditor and financial person. I conducted audits of several companies in several industries. And I also had prepare business proposals to set up commercial banks in several countries.
Later, I ran my own business for about 14 years. As an entrepreneur, I dealt with information and communication technologies. I supplied ADSL systems for home internet, I sell satellite phones to local authorities, I supply video-conferencing products back in the 1990s, and I develop web-based applications for the public and private sector. I can proudly say that although I was not an academician back then, I had been involved in research activities. I was the principal researcher for a project “Semantic-based Multilingual Search & Retrieval System” funded by the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation Malaysia in 2007. It is an ontology-based enterprise search engine.
I joined Universiti Malaysia Kelantan in 2014 and headed the UMK Entrepreneurship Institute. We groomed the students and also the train the surrounding people to be entrepreneurs.
I completed my Doctor of Philosophy in Information Technology and Quantitative Sciences at the Universiti Teknologi MARA Malaysia in 2017. The title of my thesis was “Ontology-Based Islamic Banking Product Information for Informed Decision Making and Product Innovation”. In my research, I developed an ontology for Islamic banking products and tested it so that it could be used to differentiate Islamic banking products and also facilitate the design of new Islamic banking products.
