Information Systems and the Financial Crisis:
Is technology to blame?

The11th Social Study of ICT workshop (SSIT11) at LSE

Monday 28 March 2011

Hong Kong Theatre, LSE

SSIT11 home page
SSIT11 programme
 

Speaker biographies

Roman Beck

is the E-Finance and Services Science Chair at the Institute of Information Systems at the Goethe University, Frankfurt, Germany. Roman is initiator and project coordinator of the BMBF-funded joint research project “Financial Business Grids” and heads research on services sourcing, services management, and services engineering at the E-Finance Lab. He also conducts research in the area of IT co-operations within public private partnerships together with the ISPRAT institute. Previously, Roman coordinated the research project IT Standards and Network Effects, funded by the German National Science Foundation. Since 2001 he was responsible for the German part of the multi-national research project Globalization and E-commerce, coordinated by CRITO, University of California at Irvine. His research in services science focuses on the role of IT in information management, creating new IT services, Enterprise 2.0 and Mashups, and IT project management.  As a visiting scholar, he spent three months at CRITO, University of California at Irvine in 2003 and further two months at the School of Information, University of Michigan at Ann Arbor in 2004. In 2008, he was visiting professor at the CIS Robinson College of Business, Georgia State University in Atlanta for three months and has spent another two months at NYU Stern in 2010.   Roman publishes on a wide array of topics in the field of IT services creation, management, and sourcing and has received several best paper nominations and awards at conferences.

Magí Clavé

graduated from the University of Barcelona in Computer Sciences and obtained an MBA from ESADE & MBS Manchester Business School. He also attended the Advanced Management Programme in IESE (Spain) and collaborated with Oxford University and the Gartner CIO Academy. He started his professional career in the IT software development centre at the headquarters of Siemens in Munich, later managing IT banking projects for international clients in Germany, Canada, Portugal, and Spain.   From 1995 to 2004 he was Director of IT at the Deutsche Bank in Spain; his responsibilities included the establishment of a Pan European Centre of Competence in order to develop banking applications for Deutsche Bank Retail & Private Banking subsidiaries across Europe. In 2005, he joined the European Central Bank as Senior Manager in the IT Projects Directorate; with the main mission was to professionalise IT services within the Bank, transform the current IT application landscape and to strengthen the unit in order to face the future incorporation of new countries to the Euro. Following a restructuring of the IT department Magí was appointed as Deputy Director General of Information Systems in January 2010.

Elena Esposito

teaches Sociology of Communication at the University of Modena-Reggio Emilia. She published many works on the theory of social systems, media theory and sociology of financial markets. Among them: Il futuro dei futures. Il tempo del denaro nella finanza e nella società, ETS, Pisa, 2009 (German tr. Carl Auer 2010, English tr. Elgar forthcoming); Die Fiktion der wahrscheinlichen Realität, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt a.M., 2007 (Italian Meltemi, Roma, 2008); I paradossi della moda. Originalità e transitorietà nella società moderna, Baskerville, Bologna, 2004 (German tr. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt a.M. 2004; Portug. tr. forthcoming); Soziales Vergessen. Formen und Medien des Gedächtnisses der Gesellschaft, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt a.M., 2002 (Italian Laterza, Roma, 2001); Luhmann In Glossario, Angeli, Milano, 1995 (German tr. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt a.M., 1997; Spanish tr. Iberoamericana, Mexico City, 1996; Japanese tr. Kokubun-sha, Tokio 2002). Among the English articles: “The Certainty of Risk in the Markets of Uncertainty” in Wolfgang Hafner/Heinz Zimmermann  (Eds.), Vinzenz Bronzin’s Option Pricing Models: Exposition and Appraisal, Springer, Berlin/Heidelberg 2009; “Social Forgetting: A Systems-Theory Approach”, in  Astrid Erll/Ansgar Nünning (Eds.), Cultural Memory Studies: An Interdisciplinary and International Handbook, de Gruyter, Berlin/New York, 2008; “The Arts of Contingency”, Critical Inquiryry, 32, 2004.

Robert J. Kauffman

is Distinguished Visiting Scholar, Tuck School of Business, Dartmouth College. He has served as the W.P. Carey Chair in IS at the Arizona State University, and as a Professor and Chair of Information and Decision Science, and Center Director of the MIS Research Center at the University of Minnesota. He has also been a Visiting Associate Professor at the University of Rochester, a Visiting Scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, and an Assistant and Associate Professor at the Stern School of Business at New York University.He worked in international banking and finance on Wall Street in New York City, and is a past graduate of the University of Colorado, Boulder (B.A.), Cornell University (M.A.) and Carnegie Mellon University (M.S., Ph.D.). His research focuses on senior management issues that span the economics of IS, competitive strategy and technology, IT value, strategic pricing, e-commerce, risk management, and supply chain management. He blends theory development and modelling with empirical methods and data collection in a variety of leading company and industry settings, including air travel, financial services, hospitality, and e-commerce. He has published more than 100 articles in refereed journals, and has won numerous awards for his innovative research, academic service, and graduate student advising. He will chair the 2011 ICIS Doctoral Consortium in Shanghai, and the 2012 International Conference on Electronic Commerce in Singapore. He is currently Editor in Chief of Electronic Commerce Research and Applications.

M. Lynne Markus

is the John W. . Poduska, Sr. Professor of Information and Process Management at Bentley University. Professor Markus’s teaching, research, and consulting interests include enterprise and inter-enterprise systems, IT governance, and IT-enabled organization change. Her paper “Industry-wide IS Standardization as Collective Action: The Case of the US Residential Mortgage Industry” (MIS Quarterly, 2006, with Charles W. Steinfield, Rolf T. Wigand, and Gabe Minton) won three best paper awards. She was named Fellow of the Association for Information Systems in 2004 and received the AIS LEO Award for Exceptional Lifetime Achievement in Information Systems in 2008. You can learn more about her at https://faculty.bentley.edu/details.asp?uname=mlmarkus and about her work in the mortgage industry at http://ebusiness.tc.msu.edu/vista/index.html.

Stephen Norman

is Chief Information Officer for the investment bank division of RBS, known as Global Banking & Markets.  He joined in 2005 and is responsible for GBM Technology - an organisation of more than 5000 Technology professionals who are located and closely aligned to the business in London, Stamford, New Delhi, Hong Kong, Singapore, Tokyo and Sydney. Since arriving at RBS, Stephen and his team have delivered for the business by working through the largest bank integration in history, the UK Government investment in RBS, the overhaul of regulation systems and a major investment programme.  These efforts have received industry endorsement for the team and recognition for Stephen who was named 'Chief Information Officer of the Year' at the 2010 Banking Technology Awards. 2010 was also the year that Stephen established the GBM Technology Academy in Gurgaon, 20 miles outside New Delhi in India, a centre of excellence for training and developing GBM's technologists from across the globe. Prior to joining RBS in 2005, Stephen worked at Merrill Lynch (1996 - 2005) and before that at Paribas Capital markets (1991 - 1996).  He has worked in a variety of IT roles in London, New York and Asia including managing large-scale software projects and departments, global infrastructure and sourcing strategies. Capital Markets IT is a second career for Stephen.  After finishing his education, he founded and ran a software company, Direct Technology Ltd.  Stephen has a PhD from Stanford University, California and an MA from Balliol College Oxford (Physics & Philosophy). Stephen has four grown up children.  His personal interests include cycling, running and travelling.  He believes that intelligent tutoring software will one day transform the lives of children and teachers, and actively supports research in this area.

Jean-Pierre Zigrand

is a Reader in Finance at the London School of Economics with research interests in the areas of derivatives markets, asset pricing, financial market regulation, and financial intermediation, in which he has an extensive publication record. His teaching is principally in quantitative finance at masters and PhD levels. He gained his PhD in Economics from the University of Chicago. Dr Zigrand is a consultant to the Asset Pricing and Portfolio Management, the Regulation and Financial Stability and the Risk Management and Fixed Income Markets sections of the Financial Markets Group at LSE (FMG), to private sector financial institutions, to the Luxembourgish Central Bank as well as to regulatory bodies.

The chairs:

Chrisanthi Avgerou

is Professor of Information Systems at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her main research interests concern the relationship of ICT to organizational change and the role of ICT in socio-economic development.  She is Fellow of the Association for Information Systems (AIS), and chaired the IFIP Technical Committee 9 on Social Implications of Information Technology from 2005 till 2010 and the IFIP WG 9.4 group on computers in developing countries from 1996 till 2003. Among her recent publications are Information Systems and Global Diversity, The Social Study of Information and Communication Technology: Innovation, Actors, and Contexts, and The Oxford Handbook of Information and Communication Technologies all published by Oxford University Press.

Alexandros-Andreas Kyrtsis

is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Athens, in the Department of Political Science and Public Administration. His current research focuses on the analysis of the techno-organizational backstage of financial markets. He has been an academic visitor at MIT, LSE, the University of Edinburgh, at the Institute of Advanced Studies on Science, Technology and Society in Graz, and at the Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich. He has also been active as adviser to Greek banks, to the Hellenic Bankers Association, and to IT companies with projects in the financial sector. In 2008 he published a book (in Greek) on the evolution of the information systems of the National Bank of Greece and the role of IT and operations managers in the period 1950–2000. Latest publication: Financial Markets and Organizational Technologies; System Architectures, Practices and Risks in the Era of Deregulation, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.

Susan Scott

is a Senior Lecturer in the Information Systems and Innovation Group, Department of Management, at The London School of Economics and Political Science. Her research focuses on technology, work and organization from a management studies perspective. Susan has developed a corpus of research examining the role of information systems in the transformation of work practices within the financial services sector. She has published on: the implementation of information systems for risk management; electronic trading; the strategic organization of post-trade services; enterprise resource planning; organizational best practice; and organizational reputation risk management. She is currently involved in research projects exploring the materiality of service innovation. Her background includes a B.A. in History and Politics (SOAS), M.Sc. in Analysis, Design and Management of Information Systems (LSE), and a Ph.D. in Management Studies (University of Cambridge).

 

Leslie Willcocks

is a Professor in ISIG and the Department of Management at LSE. He heads up the LSE Outsourcing Unit. He is Joint Editor of the Journal of Information Technology and JIT (Teaching Cases) and is internationally recognized for his academic research, media contributions, and his advisory work for major corporations and government agencies. He is co-author of 33 books and over 190 refereed papers in journals such as Harvard Business Review, Sloan Management Review, California Management Review, MIS Quarterly, Journal of Management Studies and MISQ Executive. In February 2001 he won the Price Waterhouse Coopers/Michael Corbett Associates World Outsourcing Achievement Award for his contribution to this field. He is a regular keynote speaker at international practitioner and academic conferences, and has been retained as adviser by major corporations and several government institutions in the UK, USA and Australia. Recent books include The Outsourcing Enterprise (Palgrave, 2011) and China's Emerging Outsourcing Capabilities (Palgrave, 2010) Professor Willcocks major research interests include outsourcing, IT management, large scale complex projects, eg, CRM, ERP, organisational change and IT measurement. He is also engaged in looking at technology in globalisation and the strategic use of IT, IT leadership, IT enabled organisational change as well as business process outsourcing and offshoring, organisational behaviour, social theory and philosophy for information systems, and public sector IT policy.

page last updated 03 March, 2011