The Information Systems and Innovation Faculty (ISI) Research Group is a centre of expertise on information technology (IT) innovation and concomitant organisational and social change. The Group has its origin in the pioneering studies of the sociotechnical processes of IT applications development and use in organizations that were conducted at LSE in the 1970s and 1980s.
We study digital innovation in a variety of human activity contexts, including business, health care, government, and developing countries. In our research we engage critically with the construction and management of digital technologies that open immense opportunities for material and social improvements of life conditions but also unprecedented risks as they disrupt existing areas of human activity. Such scholarship is becoming crucially important as the digital technologies of AI, data analytics and blockchain are diffused in business and government and the speculative discourses about their potentially revolutionary impact confront actual practices and experienced effects.
Research areas of the Group include:
- The creation and management of digital platform ecosystems
- Digital identity and privacy
- Digitalization, the development of AI systems and their impacts
- IT in health care
- Information Technologies and socio-economic development
Research by the Group in these areas is theory driven and theory contributing, and empirically grounded using a variety of research designs.
The ISI Group enjoys an international reputation for its contribution to theory about interactions between information technologies (IT) and socially embedded individual actors. A number of ISI faculty have been recognised by the Association for Information Systems at the highest level. Chrisanthi Avgerou, Richard Baskerville, Rudy Hirschheim, Bob Galliers and Frank Land have all received the LEO Award for exceptional lifetime achievement in information systems. Leslie Willcocks, Rudy Hirscheim, Bob Galliers, Frank Land and Chrisanthi Avgerou have all been recognised as AIS Fellows. Past and current visiting staff have also been recognised by AIS with Allen S. Lee and M. Lynne Markus being LEO Award winners and Mary Lacity, Youngjin Yoo, Suprateek Sarker, John Leslie King, Allen S. Lee and M. Lynne Markus being AIS Fellows. No other IS group in the world has had so many faculty, former students and academic visitors recognised at this level.
ISI faculty have made significant policy contributions. For example, Edgar Whitley was the research coordinator of the LSE Identity Project on the UK’s proposals to introduce biometric identity cards that influenced the scrapping of the proposals in 2010; and is a member of the Colleges of Experts for the UK Department of Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) and the UK Department of Media, Culture and Sport (DCMS).