Susan Gasson - Home Page

Research Interests
My research explores how groups of people from diverse communities of practice collaborate to design information systems in organizations, with the aim of improving approaches to the co-design of business processes and information systems. I am also interested in the design of technology to support collaboration, particularly to support organizational knowledge exchange and group memory. I identify design, problem-solving, and decision-making as fundamentally the same process. My research therefore focuses on design groups faced with wicked problems -- problems that cannot be defined in terms of a solution. I conduct ethnographic and action-research studies in the co-design of business and IT systems in boundary-spanning groups, to understand how these processes function -- and how we may intervene to make organizational IT innovation more effective. I am currently working on a 5-year NSF project to study Distributed Cooperation In Boundary-Spanning IS Design.

I was honored with an Emerald Literati Award for Excellence 2008, for the outstanding paper of 2007 published in the journal Information Technology & People. The paper, co-authored with Katherine Shelfer, is titled ‘IT-Based Knowledge Management To Support Organizational Learning: Visa Application Screening At The INS.’ The paper explores how to reconcile the contradiction between two paradigms employed in analyzing IT-related change requirements: knowledge-as-thing versus
knowledge-as-process. It analyzes high-risk decision-making from the perspective of an integrated hybrid human/ICT intelligence system. The study exposes detailed mechanisms by which knowledge of different forms is transferred, to identify four roles for ICT support for human intelligence in high-risk decision environments.

I believe passionately that the design of organizational IT systems should be easier than it is -- and that the reason that "user-centered design' is so rarely user-centered is that we lack a common language (methods, terminology, and shared deliverables) to involve users effectively in IT system design. I have written extensively on these topics (see the Publications page and also the Discussion Papers on this site). I am the coordinator for the Social Informatics research cluster in the iSchool at Drexel.

Teaching Specialisms
I teach courses that are concerned with critical thinking, IS analysis skills, and management of the systems development function. I also teach seminars in qualitative research and social theory.

About Me: Brief Biography