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Research interests

I hold a position as an Associate Professor at the Department of Applied IT at the IT University in Göteborg, Sweden (see my page at academia.edu). I received my doctoral degree in Informatics in March 2002 with my thesis Designing the new intranet, which addresses organisational intranets from a Knowledge Management perspective. My research as a PhD student was a joint venture between Volvo IT, the Viktoria Institute, and the Department of Informatics at Göteborg University. My research interest has shifted slightly over time but it has until recently always had the intranet as the technology platform around which my work has circled. Since 2008 my research focus has shifted towards the transport industry and IT-enabled innovation.

Service innovation in transport industry

Information technology (IT) has increasingly been used as a boundary spanning device for organisations to reach beyond their organisational borders to pick up early signals from the market. These signals, coming from customers, partners and/or government agencies, enable organisations to become more proactive and innovative. A parallel trend is the opening up of the innovation process, from being a strict in-house activity to involve and include actors from outside the organisation. Boundary spanning and open innovation both require technical abilities and willingness from the various actors to share information between systems and across organisations. Focusing on the transport industry, I study the convergence of the above trends, and examine the IT-based service innovations that come from combining information elements from different - previously unlinked - actors. My research thus includes both technological and organisational aspects.

However, changes to technical artefacts affect not only the technology per se, but also the context in which it is situated. This is due to the mutual influence that technology and organisation has upon one another; new technology adapts to the operations in place but also alters the routines and configurations of the hosting organisation. While IT innovation in its simplest form may involve only a technological component, it is almost always accompanied with and amplified by various organisational innovations such as new forms of processes, routines, business models, and/or organisational structure. In my work I thus try to approach the topic of organisational innovation from a broad perspective; including the technology, the organisation and the business.

In recent years I have studied the railroad sector and how various types of sensor technology - e.g., RFID - have been utilised to automate, informate and transformate transport-related business processes amongst large Swedish industry organisations to which the railroad is an integral part of their business. I have studied the challenges involved when these actors jointly try to establish new IT-services that combine real-time data from their different information systems. Concepts such as demand and supply become blurred as services increasingly tend to be co-produced. By studying what is required to set up technical and organisational interfaces between these actors, my work helps us understand the interplay between demand and supply.

Previous research interests

I did most of my dissertation work within the VINNOVA-sponsored Knowledge Management programme. This was in the late 90s/early 2000. During 2004 and 2005 I taught Knowledge Management to Master students in the Business Technology programme at the IT University. I was also the coordinator for these students' Master Thesis course and supervised many of them. I have continued to publish papers on various aspects of IT-supported KM and I am still a member of the Editorial Review Board for the International Journal of Knowledge Management, although I do not actively do any KM research these days.

More recently, I worked in a project sponsored by the Swedish Council for Working Life and Social Research (FAS) entitled "Individualisation and cotextualisation of unstructured information: strategies and techniques for decreasing information overload". In this work, I set up a sub-project called BiSON - Business-related information-seeking in organisations. This project, which closed in December 2007, focused on how ordinary employees found the information they needed to carry out their work and how this could be better supported by IT. Most notably, we analysed intranet search engine log files to understand usage.

On the administrative side I acted Programme Manager for the Business Technology Master programme between 2004 and 2007. Until 2010 I was also responsible for setting up the higher seminars at the department.
I currently teach two courses:
Information infrastructure, which is a 15hp advanced course at Master's level, and
Science and Research Methodology, which also is a 15hp advanced course at Master's level. The former typically only has Swedish students whereas the latter has international students and is taught in English.

Other time-thieves

As most scholars I also serve on various committees. Below is a list of some of my recent engagements

  • I am a member of the Editorial Review Board for the International Journal of Knowledge Management (present)
  • I am a member of the Editorial Review Board for the International Journal of Social and Organizational Dynamics in Information Technology (present)
  • I served as the primary international examiner for Krishna Venkitachalam PhD Thesis presented at the University of Melbourne (2006)
  • I was on the half-way seminar committee for Lars Lindsköld at Karolinska Universitetssjukhuset 2009.
  • I reviewed for HICSS 38 & 39 (2004 & 2005)
  • I reviewed for ECIS (2005, 2006, 2008, 2009 and 2010) and served as an Associate Editor (2008, 2009, 2010)
  • I reviewed for ICIS (2006, 2008, 2009, 2010)
  • I was an Associate Editor for the KM track at ICIS 2007 (2007)
  • I reviewed for MISQ (2008)
  • I reviewed for Journal of MIS (2005, 2007)
  • I reviewed for Journal of American Society for Information Science and Technology (2008)
  • I reviewed for European Journal of IS (2005)
  • I reviewed for Journal of Organizational and End User Computing (2006)
  • I reviewed for Organizational Studies (2006)
  • I reviewed for Group & Organization Management (2007)
  • I reviewed for Information Systems Journal (2007)
  • I reviewed for Information Processing & Management (2006, 2007, 2010)
  • I reviewed for Journal of Applied Social Psychology (2010)
  • I was the local Organising Chair for the ECIS 2006 Doctoral Consortium in Gothenburg (2006)
  • I was on the programme committee for IADIS Applied Computing conference (2006 & 2007)
  • I was on the programme committee for the IIT '06 in Dubai (2006)
  • I was on the programme committee for the IFIP 8.6 Working Conference On The Transfer and Diffusion of IT for Organizational Resilience, Galway, Ireland (2006)

I also try to maintain a list of conferences that are of interest to me and my research. It contains all the call-for-paper deadlines, word limits and stuff.

   
 

© Dick Stenmark. Page updated October 11, 2010. This product has not been tested on animals or students.