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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, a Swedish Research Institute focusing on IT, and the Department of Informatics at Göteborg University. My research interest has shifted slightly over time but it has always had the intranet as the technology platform around which my work has circled.

Service innovation and Sense and Respond organising

Currently, I am working with Banverket (Swedish Rail Administration) in a three-year project called "Design of innovative customer-oriented IT-based services". The rapid development of sensor technology that has resulted in the technology becoming cheaper and more powerful, has generated a growing interest in and an increased use amongst many of the railway industry actors. Today's problem is that much of the data that sensor technology generates is piled up in isolated subsystems where it risks becoming a liability rather than an asset. To be able to exploit the large potential that sensor technology implies, two requirements need to be satisfied:
1. There must exist technical possibilities to combine data from different sources (systems and actors) in innovative ways and with maintained integrity, and;
2. There must exist a desire amongst the actors to share their information.

The above project intend to study the railway industry as a whole and from a decentralised information ownership examine how to create IT-based services, which, by combining information objects from several different actors, give each actor more in return than what they gave out. The project's aim is thus to design the railway industry's future customer-oriented IT-services, and to develop/complement the existing information infrastructure to be able to accommodate these services. This will be implemented through two partly parallel activities:
a. To design future innovative customer-oriented IT-based services for the railway industry that will strengthen the competitiveness vis-à-vis other forms of transportation and enable collaboration between competing actors
b. To suggest how the organising of these services should be designed and carried out and how future information infrastructures underpinning this organising shall emerge out of the existing environment.

Knowledge management (KM), Information seeking and intranets

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 yo publish papers om 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. I am now working part time with the PhD training in the Graduate School in Information Technology Studies, with a responsibility for the Higher Seminars and the Industrial PhD programme. I also supervise three PhD students:
Taline Jadaan, full-time PhD student, who is studying Intelligent Transport Systems and working in collaboration with Banverket,
Fredric Landqvist, consultant, who is studying IT use in intra-organisational networks, and
Kerstin Forsberg, who is working at AstraZeneca and studying components of information infrastructures.

Other time-thiefs

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 was on the half-way seminar committee for Lars Lindsköld at Karolinska Universitetssjukhuset 2009.
• I reviewed for ECIS (2005, 2006, 2008 and 2009) and served as an Associate Editor (2008, 2009)
• I reviewed for ICIS (2006, 2008, 2009)
• I reviewed for MISQ (2008)
• I reviewed for Journal of American Society for Information Science and Technology (2008)
• I was an Associate Editor for the KM track at ICIS 2007 (2007)
• I reviewed for Group & Organization Management (2007)
• I reviewed for Information Systems Journal (2007)
• I was on the programme committee for IADIS Applied Computing conference (2006 & 2007)
• I served as the primary international examiner for Krishna Venkitachalam PhD Thesis presented at the University of Melbourne (2006)
• I was the local Organising Chair for the ECIS 2006 Doctoral Consortium in Gothenburg (2006)
• I was on the programme committe 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 reviewed for Journal of MIS (2005, 2007)
• I reviewed for Information Processing & Management (2006, 2007)
• I reviewed for Organizational Studies (2006)
• I reviewed for Journal of Organizational and End User Computing (2006)
• I reviewed for European Journal of IS (2005)
• I reviewed for HICSS 38 & 39 (2004 & 2005)

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.