Understanding user needs and requirements starts with understanding people in context. These discoveries can then be translated into visions of user experiences and used for driving the design of innovative IT solutions. The starting point of user-driven IT innovation is analyses of the needs of users, customers, teams of professionals, organizational units, and businesses. The goals of our research are to achieve more successful IT projects and greater benefits of using IT. We focus on how organizations manage, design, implement, and use IT to support users' needs and business strategies. Internationally this research is related to the widely established research community of information systems (IS).

Research Themes & Long-Term Goals

• Evaluation and effects-driven IT development. We investigate how the effects of IT usage can be specified and measured and how they can be assigned a prominent role in the management of IT projects. Our long-term goal is to develop an effects-based commercial contract model where the customer's payments are dependent on measurable effects of using the vendor's system.
• Computer-mediated communication and coordination in complex organizational contexts. We investigate how IT can be used to improve the coordination between professional groups in organizations. The long-term goal of this research is to devise conceptual frameworks, design principles, and prototypes to support system design.
• Software Process Improvement (SPI). We investigate how organizations can improve their software development processes. Our long term goal is to uncover the relationship between SPI and novel development approaches such as agile and lean development, as well as the role of user-driven SPI.
• Diffusion and adoption of IT. We investigate how IT is being disseminated throughout our society at large and at organizational and individual levels. Our long-term goal is to theorize and model how novel technologies are diffused and adopted in new ways by organizations and individuals.