Research Statement

The following pages explain my past activities and future plans as an information systems researcher interested in the organizational implications of information and communications technologies (ICT). The main focus of my research is the study of coordination in organizational processes, in order to understand what new organizational forms are enabled by the use of ICT. More recently, this work has extended to consideration of the implications of these organizational changes for industry structures. This work takes its methodology and theoretical base primarily from organization theory, using data primarily from field observation. Because this is such a broad research area, my work has spanned a number of topics, but all with a connection to this central issue of coordination in organizational processes. Motivation for research The range of possible organizational designs clearly depends in large measure on the availability and cost of communications and coordination. Before the invention of the telegraph, for example, real-time control of an organization was effectively restricted to the range of a manager’s voice or line of sight (essentially to one building or even one room). The distributed organizations that did exist (e.g., O'Leary et al., 2002) were managed by giving the manager o