David Allen

University of Leeds · Adaptation Information Management and Technology Group (AIMTech)

Modern engineering projects are increasingly collaborative,often developed over a network of organisations and involving multiple actors and stakeholders. Actors in such projects are dependent on multiple contextual factors which include technologies, processes and procedures. The outcomes of such projects are dependent on how actors interact with...

The purpose of this paper is to explore how the motivations for sharing information exhibiting aspects of cross-cultural differences and how decisions undertaken by diverse organizations participating in incident management at major events interact. This context is natural and challenging, one that embraces routine and contingent incidents involvin...

This paper reflects upon the development of a digital platform using a theoretically informed, bottom‐up approach to the co‐production where the researchers were immersed in the design and development process. It draws upon three concepts from activity theory illustrating how each illuminates the development of the platform.

Social media has transitioned from leisure-based communication into a platform for professional work across many organisations. The police force is one such organisation that is integrating social media into its practice, especially as a means for community engagement. This effort creates new opportunities to engage with the public, whilst also gen...

This report presents the first results from the Information, Technology and Policing Research Project which is being undertaken between February 2016 and July 2017 by Professor David Allen, Dr Alistair Norman, Mr Simon Williams, Mrs Emma Gritt, Ms Emma Forsgren and Dr Nicky Shaw of the AIMTech Research Centre at Leeds University Business School. Th...

This paper intends to propose a platform dedicated to a community for inclusive fashion. This platform can innovate in the awareness creation pro-cess by involving a wide range of stakeholders through a novel combination of visually-centered networking/collaboration together with a powerful recom-mendation system based on data analytics. This solut...

Customer satisfaction measurement is argued to be the ultimate arbiter of the success of public organisations (Hill et al 2007). Despite being a regulatory requirement for English social housing providers to measure customer satisfaction throughout the 2000’s and remaining relevant after sector de-regulation in 2010 (Williams 2013), it is surprisin...

Activity Theory, based on the work of Vygotsky and colleagues, has developed into a contemporary social theory for studying work and social activity. In the last 20 years it has become internationalised and accepted in the Organisation, Management, Human Computer Interaction, Social-Psychology and Education fields; yet traditionally its use in IS h...

The resilience of systems derives from many inputs, relating both to design and to operational planning. In the latter context the role and effective functioning of the ‘blue light’ emergency services is often critical. The judgements and decisions that have to be made are complex and time-constrained, often undertaken before all the critical infor...

Introduction. This interdisciplinary research in progress paper describes research exploring information sharing and decision making in a policing context. As the use of information from social media, particularly within a public safety environment, is still new and emerging, there is a distinct lack of theory to explain the transformation in infor...

Mobile technology and the information and communication services supported by it have become increasingly embedded in, and in some cases transformed, work and social activity and created new challenges for studying information systems. This paper focuses on the experience with mobile technology in an inherently mobile and information-intensive work...

In this paper we explored three areas: decision making and information seeking, the relationship between information seeking and uncertainty, and the role of expertise in influencing information use. This was undertaken in the context of a qualitative study into decision making in the initial stages of emergency response to major incidents. The res...

This paper presents results of a recent research project that focuses on the influence of mobile technologies on social exclusion. It investigates the impact of two distinct approaches by local government to providing access to local support and services. Aug City advocated a bottom-up infrastructure-based model with non-state involvement after the...

Social web content such as blogs, videos, and other user-generated content present a vast source of rich “digital-traces” of individuals' experiences. The use of digital traces to provide insight into human behavior remains underdeveloped. Recently, ontological approaches have been exploited for tagging and linking digital traces, with progress mad...

Public Safety (PS) organizations bring value to society by creating a stable and secure environment. The services they provide include protection of people, environment and assets and they address a large number of threats both natural and man-made, acts of terrorism, technological, radiological or environmental accidents. The capability to exchang...

In this paper, critical realism and activity theory are compared within the context of theorizing technologymediated organizational change. An activity theoretic analysis of the implementation of large-scale disruptive information systems in a public sector setting (in particular concerning paramedic treatment of heart attack patients and ambulance...

In this paper, critical realism and activity theory are compared within the context of theorizing technologymediated organizational change. An activity theoretic analysis of the implementation of large-scale disruptive information systems in a public sector setting (in particular concerning paramedic treatment of heart attack patients and ambulance...

This paper provides an analysis of a broadband implementation in the town of Slavutych, Ukraine. Slavutych was purposefully built 50 km from Chernobyl shortly after the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant (ChNPP) disaster in 1986 to house personnel of ChNPP and their families evacuated from the city of Prip'yat. Drawing on activity theory, and in particu...

Public sector inter-organisational information sharing and interoperability is an area of increasing concern and intense investment for practice and an area of increasing scholarship. This paper focuses on one particular set of public sector organisations (emergency services) and illuminates the key technological and organisational issues they face...

The research reported in this paper explored decision making and information use by public safety personal leading teams responding to major incidents. The research methodology was qualitative using critical incident technique and observation grounded in Activity Theory as meta-theoretical framework. The data gathered uncovered intuitive as well as...

Under parallel initiatives across Europe, emergency services are being conjoined or proactively seeking enhanced collaboration for efficiency and improved capacity, while emergency management systems (EMS) are being deployed, in the main, at Regional (Government administrative) level. Interoperability of EMS will contribute greatly to the integrati...

Communication and information sharing during the response to a major incident on oil rigs have been identified as significantly influencing capability to control, manage, and limit the effect of the incident. This article reports on one of the few studies of information sharing during such incidents. Interviews drawing on the critical incident tech...

The concepts of place and the social have been put forward as significant intertwined explanatory contexts for information behavior. Much of the research that approaches information behavior from this perspective, however, has focused on static contexts or virtual contexts and has not addressed the influence of technology in physical spaces. In thi...

In this paper, we seek to draw attention to the piloting stage of information systems (IS) in organizations. We argue that this stage has been neglected by IS scholars. To illustrate this argument, we draw on previous research and examine and review the pilot process across a number of studies undertaken with police forces in the United Kingdom. Th...

This article reviews results from a research project designed to understand the mediating influence of information technology on information behavior. During the analysis of the data, five modes of information behavior were uncovered. These provide us with a reconceptualization of core information-seeking and search activities, as well as a fruitfu...

Over the last 7 years, the AIMTech Research Group in the University of Leeds has used cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) to inform a range of research activities in the fields of information behavior and information systems. In this article, we identify certain openings and theoretical challenges in the field of information behavior, which...

Policing is a complex setting for innovation, influenced by a range of social, economic, and political factors. Nonetheless, police forces are faced with the unavoidable choice of innovating in order to address criminal activity, improve organizational efficiency, and appease public concerns. In this article, we report on an investigation of innova...

Information sharing is vital for the successful completion of a group task. It’s significance is emphasized in situations where group members are drawn from different organizations, where members do not know each other and when they are making complex, time dependent decisions within an uncertain environmental context. In this paper we address info...

Emergency situations are chaotic in nature. It is however, necessary to understand the context in which Emergency Responders work such that information practice issues can be highlighted and addressed by the system designers. In this paper, Activity Theory is proposed as a methodological and analytical framework to study information practices in th...

This paper discusses WiMAX (Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access), an emergent broadband wireless technology, and examines its suitability to developing countries. Previous technologies have not fulfilled the promise of increasing connectivity in developing countries, largely due to the high-cost of the technologies and the unsuitability...

Although higher education (HE) libraries have given increasing attention to information literacy, the information literacy requirements of researchers have been relatively neglected. This paper reports on the findings of a national survey on the training of postgraduate and postdoctoral researchers in the UK, focusing on the information literacy tr...

The 14th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIED2009) is being held July 6--10 2009 in Brighton, UK. AIED2009 is part of an ongoing series of biennial international conferences for top quality research in intelligent systems ...

Introduction. Gives an account of research carried out in UK police forces relating to the introduction of information technologies and their consequent effect on information transfer within the forces. Method. The work is derived from a number of investigations, all of which involved observation and interviewing of management level and operational...

The broad goal our research is to explore how Activity The-ory can be utilised to develop adaptive mobile learning environments to support reflective on-the-job training at Fire and Rescue services. Specif-ically, we examine how to facilitate crew commanders to develop risk assessment skills. This paper presents the architecture of a personalised m...

Introduction. We report on a small-scale research project which examined the impact of mobile technologies on the users' experience of information overload. The project focused on a group of worker who have had relatively little attention in both the mobile technology and information overload literatures: senior managers. Method. The case study ap...

The paper presents the results of the investigation of the implementation of mobile technologies in an under researched area: the police. Five key themes of investigation with relation to mobile information and communications technologies were identified in the research: changes in work procedures, changes in the organisational capability, changes...

This article aims to propose some elements for a theory of mobility. Mobility is the structural attribute of an age that heavily relies on information and mobile devices as identified by observed, cross-contextual research. It pervades most work and social organizations in various cultural and institutional expressions. Organizational structures re...

Mobile wireless computing has been identified as a critical new application of information technology; however, only a few case studies are available focusing on the organisational or social issues related to the deployment of these technologies. This paper provides a rich description of the situated activities of a particular set of mobile workers...

This paper present interim results on a research project on information management issues within the UK telecommunication and financial sectors. The specific focus of the paper is information overload. Our research, although at an early stage when this paper was written, suggests that organizational climate may play a significant role in influencin...

Based on findings of a longitudinal study this paper deals trust or mistrust between superiors and subordinates during the information strategy formation process. Working from within an interpretive framework, through which organisation ‘stories’ are explored, it provides a grounded model of factors which engender trust. The key factors that emerge...

UK public sector policy changes have driven Higher Education Institutions (HEI) towards a competitive and often turbulent market-focused environment. To respond to these dramatic institutional changes, many institutions began to strategically re-focus their management efforts on adapting and surviving in this environment. As part of their efforts,...

OSERP01New information technologies have brought public sector higher education institutions (HEIs) into increased competition, while their government funding in parallel has been continually eroded. In response to these growing pressures, there has been a call for HEIs to improve operational efficiency and to reduce duplication of resources by imp...

This paper provides an interpretation of information technology implementation in a relatively unexplored context, that of higher education. In recent years, there has been a call by governments across the world for universities to improve operational efficiency and to reduce duplication of resources by implementing advanced information systems tha...

This paper focuses on Cap Gemini’s electronic commerce system, TransLease. TransLease is an interorganizational information system (IOS), which facilitates electronic commerce between motor vehicle leasing and repair companies. During our investigation, the system was used by approximately 1000 repair agents working for seven of the UK’s leading ve...

Business Process Re-engineering (BPR) is being used in a number of UK Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) as a change management strategy. Whilst the focus of these HEIs is on re-engineering administrative services, there are also tentative attempts to redesign teaching and learning. This paper adopts a case study approach to determine the applica...

The relationship between information science and information systems (IS) research is examined through analysis of the subject literature of each field and by citation and co-citation analysis of highly cited researchers in each field. The subfields of user studies (US) and information retrieval (IR) research were selected to represent information...

Currently most UK universities and colleges of higher education (Higher Education Institutions) are re-evaluating the way they gather, process and disseminate information for teaching, research and administration, for many this will mean radical change. The Higher Education Funding Councils are encouraging all institutions to strategically plan thi...

This paper describes a research project in the Department of Information Studies at Sheffield University, focusing on Information Systems Strategy (ISS) Formation in UK Higher Education Institutions (HEI's) with specific reference to information strategies. Information strategies, for the purpose of this research are seen as a sub-set of an Informa...

Many Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) in the UK are developing Information Strategies. Paradoxically, there is no consensus over terminology and concepts surrounding the issue. Very little research has been conducted in this area and this is reflected in the dearth of literature available on the subject, both practitioner and theoretical. As pa...

Cet article traite des difficultes que pose l'application de strategies d'information dans les bibliotheques de l'enseignement superieur au Royaume-Uni au meme titre que dans les entreprises. Il tente de repondre a deux questions : est-ce que le concept de concurrence au niveau de l'entreprise est applicable dans le secteur de l'enseignement superi...

Trust among organizational members is a well-researched theme, but most work relates to trust between managers and those they manage, and little research has been carried out into the role of trust in the formation of information architectures. This paper reviews the evidence from a longitudinal, qualitative investigation into information strategy...