- Main Research interests: ================== Utility, Cloud and Grid Computing Distributed Work Practice Knowledge Man... moreMain Research interests:
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Utility, Cloud and Grid Computing
Distributed Work Practice
Knowledge Management and Communities of Practice
Distributed Information Systems
Software Engineering
Information Systems Development Practice
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Current Research Projects
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Principle Investigator for Pegasus: Studying Particle Physicists Engagement with the Grid. (EPSRC Funded)
Co-Investigator in Connecting for Health Evaluation of Electronic Prescribing Service.
Researching various Cloud Computing issues.
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Other Activities
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Member of the board of trustees of YouthNet (an exclusively online charity).
Warden of Sidney Webb House LSE Student Residence.
Faculty Editor of iSChannel(Main Research interests:<br />==================<br />Utility, Cloud and Grid Computing<br />Distributed Work Practice<br />Knowledge Management and Communities of Practice<br />Distributed Information Systems<br />Software Engineering<br />Information Systems Development Practice<br />==================<br />Current Research Projects<br />==================<br />Principle Investigator for Pegasus: Studying Particle Physicists Engagement with the Grid. (EPSRC Funded)<br />Co-Investigator in Connecting for Health Evaluation of Electronic Prescribing Service.<br />Researching various Cloud Computing issues.<br /> ==================<br />Other Activities<br />==================<br />Member of the board of trustees of YouthNet (an exclusively online charity).<br />Warden of Sidney Webb House LSE Student Residence.<br />Faculty Editor of iSChannel)edit
requirements that set them apart from other types of enterprise applications. Determining where and how the cloud can support these systems depends on a set of five primary requirements: bandwidth, storage, cost, security and... more
requirements that set them apart from other types of enterprise applications. Determining where and how the cloud can support these systems depends on a set of five primary requirements: bandwidth, storage, cost, security and accessibility. This paper outlines some of the key considerations midand large-sized enterprises need to examine before deciding to move their video surveillance systems into the cloud — and looks at how they can leverage cloud capabilities for video in the meantime.
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We show that proximity is significant during cloud computing’s adoption. This is counter to the prevailing assumptions of cloud adoption as being more impersonal and distant, with less interaction between provider and purchaser than... more
We show that proximity is significant during cloud computing’s adoption. This is counter to the prevailing assumptions of cloud adoption as being more impersonal and distant, with less interaction between provider and purchaser than on-premise technologies. We do this through an interpretive study of cloud computing adopters across Europe. We develop a conceptual framework of cloud proximity which draws attention to its locational, relational and temporal proximal dimensions. Our proximal analysis leads us to identify three aspects of cloud adoption where proximity plays a key role: mercantile aspect (e.g., cloud sales support), counsel aspect (e.g., access to internal and external expertise) and organi-technical aspect (e.g., the understanding of cloud technology and services alongside their organizational adoption context). By challenging assumptions of distant and remote adoption, we contribute to the cloud computing adoption research and raise questions for IT adoption in general.
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With cloud computing becoming an increasingly important element of the IT function of most organisations, this five-part report presents a state-of-the art review of the key features of cloud computing and its likely near–term and... more
With cloud computing becoming an increasingly important element of the IT function of most organisations, this five-part report presents a state-of-the art review of the key features of cloud computing and its likely near–term and longer–term development trends. It draws on research undertaken from late 2010 into 2011, including a survey of over 1035 business and IT executives and more than thirty-five interviews with key international players in the cloud computing ecosystem including cloud providers, system integrators and users of cloud ...
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With cloud computing becoming an increasingly important element of the IT function of most organisations, this five-part report presents a state-of-the art review of the key features of cloud computing and its likely near–term and... more
With cloud computing becoming an increasingly important element of the IT function of most organisations, this five-part report presents a state-of-the art review of the key features of cloud computing and its likely near–term and longer–term development trends. It draws on research undertaken from late 2010 into 2011, including a survey of over 1035 business and IT executives and more than thirty-five interviews with key international players in the cloud computing ecosystem including cloud providers, system integrators and users of cloud ...
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This final chapter builds upon chapter 8 to look to the future and considers the impact cloud computing is likely to have on society and the economy. In 2007, nobody imagined using a data center on the other side of the world to send a... more
This final chapter builds upon chapter 8 to look to the future and considers the impact cloud computing is likely to have on society and the economy. In 2007, nobody imagined using a data center on the other side of the world to send a text message or book a calendar appointment. Yet, well before 2013, Apple Siri and Google Now were exploiting cloud computing to provide these services. Here we discuss the social and technological implications of cloud, looking at its potential impact on smart cities, communication, and business. Within this we also note the emergence of other technology trends such as super-low-cost computing (for example, the $10 computer-on-a-chip) and additive manufacturing and explore their potential in shaping the commercial landscape when linked with cloud computing. Essentially, the chapter addresses the question: If computing is in the cloud — what next?
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Cloud computing is the consequence of the evolution of two distinct strands: technological innovation — based around virtualization and shared computing provision — and a distinctive service-based perspective on computing. Following from... more
Cloud computing is the consequence of the evolution of two distinct strands: technological innovation — based around virtualization and shared computing provision — and a distinctive service-based perspective on computing. Following from this dual-strand perspective on cloud computing, we argue in this chapter that the drivers of the near-term development of cloud computing will have their origins in both strands. We have already seen in the previous chapter, with the Desires Framework, how important it is to see and focus on the business service dimension inherent in cloud developments. In this chapter we develop the notion of the service trajectory with cloud. On a larger canvas, based on our interviews and analyses of the IT industry, we identify three big impacts that relate to the service trajectory in cloud computing. These are: a radical shift toward service performance, a move from products to business services and a radical reconfiguration of the supply industry. In practice, as will emerge, these three shifts present major challenges to the IT supply industry and also to its user organizations.
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With cloud computing becoming an increasingly important element of the IT function of most organisations, this five-part report presents a state-of-the art review of the key features of cloud computing and its likely near–term and... more
With cloud computing becoming an increasingly important element of the IT function of most organisations, this five-part report presents a state-of-the art review of the key features of cloud computing and its likely near–term and longer–term development trends. It draws on research undertaken from late 2010 into 2011, including a survey of over 1035 business and IT executives and more than thirty-five interviews with key international players in the cloud computing ecosystem including cloud providers, system integrators and users of cloud ...
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This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Elsevier via the DOI in this recordThere is a markedly broad range of definitions and illustrative examples of the role played by governments themselves within... more
This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Elsevier via the DOI in this recordThere is a markedly broad range of definitions and illustrative examples of the role played by governments themselves within the literature on government platforms. In response we conduct an inductive and deductive qualitative review of the literature to clarify this landscape and so to develop a typology of six definitions of government platforms, organised within three genres along a spectrum from fully centralised, through to fully decentralised. For each platform definition we offer illustrative ‘minicases’ drawn from the UK government experience as well as further insights and implications for each genre drawn from the broader information systems literature on platforms. A range of benefits, risks, governance challenges, policy recommendations, and suggestions for further research are then identified and discussed.Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC
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The mirroring hypothesis asserts a symmetry between how a firm organizes its activities and tasks internally (division of labour) and how technologies are logically partitioned into subcomponents and modules. Yet digital artifacts can... more
The mirroring hypothesis asserts a symmetry between how a firm organizes its activities and tasks internally (division of labour) and how technologies are logically partitioned into subcomponents and modules. Yet digital artifacts can violate fundamental properties of physical modular systems, such as the impossibility to univocally allocate functionalities to the various modules, due to their agnostic and generative nature. Although an increasing amount of works is starting to question the usefulness of classic modularity theory to understand how firms take decisions and organize their activities internally, there is still a scant literature on the topic. In this work we draw upon the mirror hypothesis, and complement it with the insight provided by the IT governance literature. By doing so, we suggest that a company’s epistemic interpretation of the modular nature of a digital system depends on the dynamics of its internal decision-making process, reflecting formal and informal pa...
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development: Exploring the collaborative
Research article A critical review of cloud computing:
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Many elements of the needed information infrastructure don't exist yet. Will Venters and Ayesha Khanna studied Berlin's prototype.
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Existing research on organizational agility aims to explain how agility is achieved, but is often restrained by traditional conceptualizations of IT and agility. We address this by conceptualizing agility as a performance and relating it... more
Existing research on organizational agility aims to explain how agility is achieved, but is often restrained by traditional conceptualizations of IT and agility. We address this by conceptualizing agility as a performance and relating it to the emerging stream of research on digital infrastructures (DI). To find out how this theoretical lens can help explain agility in organizations, we conduct a case study with a telecommunications company, aimed at identifying generative mechanisms enabling performances of agility. We find that using DI as a theoretical lens shifts the focus of research to performances within DI, enabling a more dynamic view of both IT and agility. We outline a theory of agility that marks a significant shift in the way agility is conceptualized and addresses calls for research in the areas of organizational agility and DI.
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The Internet of Things concerns extensive ecosystems of \u27things\u27 connected by interfaces. Researching such ecosystems is challenging given that devices extend into multiple administrative domains with different boundaries and... more
The Internet of Things concerns extensive ecosystems of \u27things\u27 connected by interfaces. Researching such ecosystems is challenging given that devices extend into multiple administrative domains with different boundaries and communications structures. In this paper, we explore how formalism, based on systems thinking and mathematical logic, might be used within a critical realist study of a sociotechnical IoT ecosystem. Specifically, we draw upon theories of distributed systems and their models to define IoT things in terms of locations, resources, and processes. Next, we explain how a formal logic can be used define and reason about IoT things and interfaces, explaining also the logically defined concepts of compositionality and local reasoning. Finally, we show how such models can be used to study a specific IoT ecosystem in order to derive generative mechanisms relevant to the socio-technical complexity of IoT ecosystems. In this way, we explore how we might introduce formal modelling within a critical realist epistemology
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How to locate the cloud phenomenon? Cloud’s profile has been very high in the media since 2008. On corporate radars, cloud has been rising from something to note through something we can use to something that may help us transform the... more
How to locate the cloud phenomenon? Cloud’s profile has been very high in the media since 2008. On corporate radars, cloud has been rising from something to note through something we can use to something that may help us transform the business. Those new to technology watching will recognize a bandwagon and want to jump on. The old technology watchers will have seen much of this before, through waves of technological advances. When moving to cloud, they will take a more pragmatic, better informed, more granular approach to the latest gee-whizzery. This chapter is designed to support such a perspective. We take a longer-term perspective on cloud, backwards, as well as forwards. For both history and the likely future have a lot to teach us about how to act now.
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This paper presents the British Council’s knowledge management strategy. It outlines how, as part of this strategy, the organization attempted to engender communities of practice among a strategically significant group spread across the... more
This paper presents the British Council’s knowledge management strategy. It outlines how, as part of this strategy, the organization attempted to engender communities of practice among a strategically significant group spread across the 110 countries in which the organization operates. Using a case study of this group, the paper explores 'degenerative structures' which impact on the ability to engender communities of practice and, through consideration of issues of individualization and risk, highlights a series of paradoxes which inhibited this organizations attempt to move from a 'hub-and-spoke' structure to become a networked organization in which communties of practice flourish.
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Information technology (IT) built into products and services have become the key drivers for service innovation. How information technology-enabled services (ITESs) affect consumer wellbeing has increasingly become a concern to service... more
Information technology (IT) built into products and services have become the key drivers for service innovation. How information technology-enabled services (ITESs) affect consumer wellbeing has increasingly become a concern to service scholars. In response to this, transformative service research (TSR) has emerged as a new stream in service research. This paper investigates consumer wellbeing derived from the consumption of ITESs in consumers’ daily lives. A mixed-method approach was employed in our study, including self-reflective reports, in-depth interviews and visual artistic methods. We demonstrated that a relational ontology, drawing on the ‘focal things’ concept (Borgmann, 1984) and sociomateriality (Orlikowski, 2009), could be used as a lens for us to understand consumer wellbeing in ITESs. We used four vignettes to demonstrate how relational ontology can enhance our understanding of consumer wellbeing in ITESs. Theoretically, this paper contributes to TSR by proposing and demonstrating the need to shift or at least extend the extant predominant technology ontology in marketing literature to make sense of consumer experiences and wellbeing in ITESs. In practice, this research encourages ITESs designers to emphasise the relational entanglement of technology with consumer routine practices in their service innovations for the purposes of consumer wellbeing.
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A PROLOGUE FOR KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT: THE CASE OF SUSTAINABLE CONSTRUCTION PRACTICE Will Venters*, Tony Cornford, Mike Cushman, Nathalie Mitev. Department of Information Systems London School of Economics Houghton Street, London WC2 ...
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No organisation, no matter how large, can remain totally reliant on the stocks of new knowledge it generates itself. In order to keep abreast of the latest scientific and technological developments, R&D organisations must continuously... more
No organisation, no matter how large, can remain totally reliant on the stocks of new knowledge it generates itself. In order to keep abreast of the latest scientific and technological developments, R&D organisations must continuously import knowledge from beyond the organisations boundaries. How does this external knowledge which is critical to success then become absorbed and integrated into the firm? Our paper addresses this question through the lens of the influential technological gatekeeper theory. Drawing on social network analysis (SNA) and ...
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On 13 June 2008, the opposition home secretary David Davis resigned from his position in the shadow cabinet and as an MP, triggering a by–election in his constituency of Haltemprice and Howden. The reason for this unprecedented event, he... more
On 13 June 2008, the opposition home secretary David Davis resigned from his position in the shadow cabinet and as an MP, triggering a by–election in his constituency of Haltemprice and Howden. The reason for this unprecedented event, he stated, was to fight “against the slow strangulation of fundamental British freedoms by this Government”(Davis, 2008). Davis resigned the day after the Government had pushed proposals through the House of Commons to extend detention without charge up to 42 days. However, he also ...
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Ultimately it is management that will make the difference. And for management, there is a (very large) sting in the tail. The next ten years are going to see a massive scaling of data needing to be managed. According to Chuck Hollis of... more
Ultimately it is management that will make the difference. And for management, there is a (very large) sting in the tail. The next ten years are going to see a massive scaling of data needing to be managed. According to Chuck Hollis of EMC,“the twin benefits of cloud are saving on IT and agility, but the result at the end of the journey is big data.” 4 In the face of the forthcoming data explosion, the problems organisations have always had with optimising their use of information are just about to get much, much more challenging. This brings to ...
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Abstract: In many ways, the physical sciences are at the forefront of using digital tools and methods to work with information and data. However, the fields and disciplines that make up the physical sciences are by no means uniform, and... more
Abstract: In many ways, the physical sciences are at the forefront of using digital tools and methods to work with information and data. However, the fields and disciplines that make up the physical sciences are by no means uniform, and physical scientists find, use, and disseminate information in a variety of ways. This report examines information practices in the physical sciences across seven cases, and demonstrates the richly varied ways in which physical scientists work, collaborate, and share information and data.
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This paper describes the use of Oval Mapping Technique (OMY) to combine the insights gained from multiple research sites by a team of researchers drawn from three universities and represented through Soft Systems Methodology rich... more
This paper describes the use of Oval Mapping Technique (OMY) to combine the insights gained from multiple research sites by a team of researchers drawn from three universities and represented through Soft Systems Methodology rich pictures. The research team were confronted with ...
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ABSTRACT: This paper presents a new model of intra-organisational knowledge management in terms of motility of knowledge practices. While existing conceptualisations of knowledge, such a tacit and explicit have proved a valuable lens for... more
ABSTRACT: This paper presents a new model of intra-organisational knowledge management in terms of motility of knowledge practices. While existing conceptualisations of knowledge, such a tacit and explicit have proved a valuable lens for focusing on knowledge practices within organisations and in relatively well understood or stable contexts, this paper argues that their use may be less effective in considering knowledge practices shared and communicated between organisations and when knowledge needs are still being negotiated. Based on research into the construction industry’s approach to the issue of sustainability and the knowledge challenges it poses, this paper introduces the concept of motile knowledge practices as an alternative lens through which to make sense of, and improve, the industry’s ability to support innovation for sustainability. The notion of motile knowledge helps us to focus on the fundamental property of knowledge practices as they move, mutate and decay. Seei...
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This paper introduces a model of intra-organisational knowledge management in terms of motility of practiced knowledge. While existing conceptualisations of knowledge, such a tacit and explicit, have proved a valuable lens for focusing on... more
This paper introduces a model of intra-organisational knowledge management in terms of motility of practiced knowledge. While existing conceptualisations of knowledge, such a tacit and explicit, have proved a valuable lens for focusing on knowledgeable practices within organisations and in relatively well understood or stable contexts, this paper argues that their use may be less effective in considering practiced knowledge as it is shared and communicated between organisations and when knowledge needs are still being negotiated. Based on research into the construction industry’s approach to the issue of sustainability and the knowledge challenges it poses, this paper introduces the concept of motility of knowledge as an alternative lens through which to make sense of, and improve, the industry’s ability to support innovation for sustainability. A motile account of knowledgeable practice helps us to focus on movement, mutation and decay, and to question the application of existing a...
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This paper proposes a sociology of knowledge approach as a basis for understanding the potential of knowledge management for a complex inter-organisational domain-- the UK construction industry--with a specific aim of increasing the... more
This paper proposes a sociology of knowledge approach as a basis for understanding the potential of knowledge management for a complex inter-organisational domain-- the UK construction industry--with a specific aim of increasing the sustainability of the processes and products of the industry. To this end, soft systems methodology is introduced as a method of conceptualising the industry's knowledge environment and moving towards technological interventions which enable a move towards sustainability in construction practice.
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We discuss the little-explored construct of situational awareness, which will arguably become increasingly important for strategic decision-making in the age of distributed service ecosystems, digital infrastructures, and microservices.... more
We discuss the little-explored construct of situational awareness, which will arguably become increasingly important for strategic decision-making in the age of distributed service ecosystems, digital infrastructures, and microservices. Guided by a design science approach, we introduce a mapping artefact with the ability to enhance situational awareness within, and across, horizontal value chains, and evaluate its application in the field amongst both IS practitioners and IS researchers. We make suggestions for further research into both construct and artefact, and provide insights on their use in practice.
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The research reported here grows out of the concern and pressures felt by the construction sector as it tries to respond to a complex and intensifying sustainability agenda. These pressures are seen by the industry itself as implying a... more
The research reported here grows out of the concern and pressures felt by the construction sector as it tries to respond to a complex and intensifying sustainability agenda. These pressures are seen by the industry itself as implying a need for new knowledge, new work practices and new ways managing knowledge. In the construction industry, sustainability is still seen as a novel and contestable concept, with no settled or focused understanding of what it means, the drivers that propel it, the bounds of its operationalization or the locus of its practice (Kibert, 1999). A sustainability agenda may be drawn very narrowly, as say low energy consumption, or it may go beyond, to consideration of environmental management and audit systems, or yet wider still to ecological sustainability, economic viability and social acceptability (Spencer-Cooke, 1998). At whatever level this is addressed (and even if these levels are not agreed), this produces new knowledge challenges for construction pr...
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Grid computing promises to distribute and share computing resources “on tap” and provide transparent communication and collaboration between virtual groups (Foster and Kesselman 2003). Yet developing and implementing such complex... more
Grid computing promises to distribute and share computing resources “on tap” and provide transparent communication and collaboration between virtual groups (Foster and Kesselman 2003). Yet developing and implementing such complex information infrastructures requires collaboration among a range of dispersed groups, and flexibility and adaptability to volatile requirements (Berman, Geoffrey et al. 2003). Here, we examine a case-study of Grid development within particle physics, the LCG (Large hadron collider (LHC) Computing Grid), in an attempt to explore how such a large-scale distributed system is developed collaboratively in a global way in readiness for the launch of the LHC at CERN in September 2008. The particle physics community is well-known for the development of other cutting edge distributed systems (notably the web) and is itself highly distributed, so presenting a context where distinctive collaborative practices emerge.