Today is the second day of a 2-day workshop I’m attending at Case Western Reserve University on Virtual Organizations as Sociotechnical Systems(VOSS). The workshop is sponsored by NSF with both practitioners and scholars participating. Yesterday was packed with interesting talks and break-out sessions. Today Noshir Contractor gave an inspiring presentation of his work on Communication Networks and the C-IKNOW (Cyberinfrastructure for Inquiring Knowledge Networks On the Web) in particular. Looking forward to presentations by among others Steve Sawyer, Youngjin Yoo, James Gaskin later today.

I was in the grading committee in Uppsala today when Anders Larsson defended his dissertation. A good discussion on Giddens, Zappa and social media. I got some good ideas for our own research on social media

This morning at SISA, Jonny had the opportunity to share his thoughts and reflections on Quality in IS Research, outlining and expanding on the ways in which the IT Management group try to raise the quality of our education and research. Drawing on these insights, Jonny reflected on how SISA, the national interest group for Swedish Informatics/IS-research, could push things forward.

Henrik Wimelius! During the SISA conference, Henrik was awarded the Börje Langefors award for best Swedish information systems dissertation 2011! The motivation from the committee:

“Henrik Wimelius doktorsavhandling är välskriven och tydligt positionerad gentemot existerande litteratur. Den frågeställning som adresseras är både teoretiskt och praktiskt intressant. Metodmässigt baseras forskningsarbetet på en rigorös process som presenteras på ett reflexivt sätt. Dessutom är avhandlingens logik och struktur väl genomtänkta. Eftersom förekomsten av parallella, konkurrerande IT-system inom organisationer och verksamheter tenderar öka bidrar Henrik med värdefulla insikter och lärdomar. För hans egen del utgör avhandlingen en förnämlig kunskapsbas som med fördel kan vidare exploateras.”

SISA (Svenska Informationssystemakademin) is the Swedish branch of the Association for Information Systems.

Göran Goldkuhl gives his opening speech at the annual informatics/information systems conference in Linköping

Viktor is currently visiting Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland. During his stay he will work with Daniel Nylén and Kalle Lyytinen, pushing some exciting work closer to publication. Stay tuned!

 

Today, Fredrik Svahn presented his dissertation manuscript at a pre-seminar at the department of Informatics. The title of the dissertation is “Digital Product Innovation: Building Generative Capability through Architectural Frames“. In all, the discussions were interesting and inspiring and we are very much looking forward to Fredrik’s defense this autumn.

This week Katrin and Ulrika are visiting Lars Mathiassen at Georgia State University to push some interesting paper projects forward.

Good news today! Our youngest recruit, Viktor, just got accepted to the ECIS Doctoral Consortium. This will give him an excellent opportunity to push his dissertation forward together with some of the best and brightest in our field. The Doctoral Consortium is taking place in Barcelona on 8-10th of June, immediately prior to the 20th European Conference on Information Systems. Ens veiem a Barcelona!

Professor Kalle Lyytinen is visiting us this week, which as always is very inspiring. Today, he gave an interesting talk in which he discussed the historical development of IS research, the current state of affairs, and the potential future directions needed in order to arrive at IS research that is capable of producing innovative, usable and good knowledge.

For more detailed information about the seminar, please visit this page.

We have a new paper based on our collaboration with VK, entitled ‘Digital convergence from within and without: Investigating digitalization and its implications for a local newspaper’. The paper is authored by Daniel Skog, Daniel Nylen and Jonny Holmström and it will be presented at The International Symposium on Media Innovations at Oslo University in april.

Jonny, Katrin and Henrik had the pleasure of participating at the event Kunskapsnoden 2012, arranged by Umeå University at Grand hotel in Stockholm. The theme for the event was modern innovations, and Jonny, being one of the four speakers, addressed the innovation dilemma by presenting five keys to creative leadership. Overall, Umeå University once again succeeded in putting together an inspiring and professional event, and the dinner, consisting of over 50 delicate courses from Västerbotten, was simply fantastic. The full press release can be found here (in Swedish).

I’m currently at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, OH. I’ll be spending the next 6 months here to work on a couple of different projects relating to my thesis. The first photo below shows the Peter B Lewis-building where the IS-department is located. It is a pretty cool building designed by Frank Gehry. Looking forward to an interesting exchange visit!

Lars Öbrand and Nils-Petter Augustsson attended the 45th HICSS conference and presented the paper “The Emergence of Information Infrastructure Risk Management in IT Services” co-authored with Jonny Holmström and Lars Mathiassen.

From left to right: Joakim Hultin, Diego Fernando Molina, Abebe Tadesse, Selome Kostetions Tesfatsion, Rahel Abraham Yitbarek, Erika Szabó, Johan Hellström (T3), Mattias Björkman (T3), and Emnetu Araya Zefeye.

As the frequent reader probably know, we launched the new master’s programme in IT Management during fall 2011. The first semester involved, amongst many other things, a major project work in the form of a live case together with the company T3. The project provided the students with an opportunity to apply theoretical knowledge in a live case, something that was much appreciated by both T3 and the students. On their part, T3 provided an impressive amount of commitment and real life context to the project, something that we consider essential for a high quality education. The results of the project were presented in December and as stated by Johan Hellström, chief executive of T3, the students brought many new insights and interesting potential business concepts to the table. More information about this particular collaboration may be found on the InfoTech website (in Swedish).

Check out this talk by Youngjin Yoo on re-imagining cities as computing platforms.

Northern Sweden has always been a fertile ground for innovation. As illustrated in this film clip our efforts in ProcessIT to take innovation to a higher level is an integrated part of a long innovation tradition:

ProcessIT Innovation – 100 år av regional utveckling from Sojafilm on Vimeo.

Checking out HUMlab X today during the board meeting. Looks very promising!

Daniel Skog, Daniel Nylén & Jonny Holmström got their paper ‘Digital convergence from within and without: Investigating digitalization and its implications for a local newspaper’ accepted for publication at  International Symposium on Media Innovations to be held at Oslo University in april 2012. More information can be found here: http://www.hf.uio.no/imk/english/research/groups/media%20innovations%20group/

Sara Öhrvall (Director at Bonnier R&D) and Professor Kalle Lyytinen (Case Western Reserve University) gave keynotes at the CiiR Autumn meeting in October. We had the keynotes filmed and you can watch the in their entirety on our Youtube channel.

Earlier today, Ulrika, gave a short presentation entitled “Transcending organizational boundaries through the use of remote monitoring systems” at the conference Critically Making the Internet of Things, at Humlab, Umeå University. The theme of this two-day interdisciplinary conference is to provide an arena where “…world-class researchers, entrepreneurs, and artists [come together ] for a critical and engaging examination of ideas for a world where everything is assumed to be connected, where objects such as cars and roads communicate and where the digital has moved outside of the computer”.

Big buildings, big ideas: Jonny & Henrik are visiting GSUs facilities in Buckhead where they have their for-profit executive doctorate program. We really should have such a thing in Sweden too! 

Last week Johan, Katrin, Per and Viktor participated in a workshop at ABB. The workshop was the formal start up of the project  ‘Platform strategy for Process Automation in Sweden’ where we focus on developing an industrial platform for the process industry. The next workshop will take place at Boliden just before christmas with a focus on the situation for the process industry.

Henrik and Jonny are currently visiting Lars Mathiassen at CEPRIN, Georgia State University. The purpose of the visit is to develop a joint paper on paradoxical consequences in IT appropriation. We’ve had a very good start so far and the paper coming along nicely, despite the jetlag!

This week Katrin is taking a two-day course on pulp- and paper production. The course is organized by Process IT for more than 30 participants from academia, IT companies and pulp and paper industry. The course gives an overview of the process from timber to paper, a process which ProcessIT aims to improve with the use of IT.