Current Projects
- Development and Deployment of Municipal Wireless Broadband Networks (with Carleen Maitland)
- Broadband access is commonly believed to be essential for all, yet is not available to all. The skills necessary to use information and communications technologies are not universally prevalent, yet seen as becoming more centrally necessary to navigate everyday tasks. The slower adoption of broadband service in the U.S. is likely due in part to high prices. Prices for broadband access via wired media (DSL or cable) have steadily risen to hover around the $50.00 per month mark, making broadband connectivity too expensive for many lower income households. Thus, it is in this context, where broadband internet access is becoming essential and yet Americans face relatively high prices for that access as compared to other industrialized nations, that municipal governments are attempting to provide this service. Recently over 100 cities in the United States have announced plans to deploy wireless broadband networks. As a public entity charged with providing high quality services for citizens, some municipalities feel compelled to act. In order to fill the gap, municipalities are stepping in to offer wireless broadband access, turning the top-down traditional means of supplying telecommunication service and policy on its head. These municipal actions have provoked a flurry of responses from concerned constituents, including fixed line operators, and state legislators and the U.S. Congress. Currently legislation pending exists at both state and federal levels to address this issue.
- Increased Competition and Professionalization Among IT Employees: Implications for the Self-Educated
- Since the bursting of the dot com bubble the demand for skilled IT workers in the United States has fallen off. This drop in demand has had the dual effect of increasing competition and professionalization for the multifaceted occupation of IT employee. Prior to this, the majority of IT employees did not possess a degree in an IT-related field. With the introduction of more degrees and training options for the education of IT personnel, the number of workers that have entered the profession without holding an IT degree have diminished. The central question that drives this research is how does an organization find and recruit those talented information technology workers who have no formal information technology training and/ or professional organizational experience? In the current market setting of increased competition and professionalization among IT job seekers what are the implications for the self-educated? As competition grows among potential IT employees, employers will tend to weed out employees who do not possess degrees in IT, certifications in IT and formal training in IT, while experience and knowledge will become less valuable. There are significant implications for both sides of the employment relationship due to this ramp up of IT professionalization.
- Mobility, Work and Governance: A Field Study of Public Safety (with Steve Sawyer)
- Examining criminal justice personnel, work-oriented access to organizational computing infrastructure via public networks (via third generation (3G) high-speed data networks) Focus on impact on individual work activities and the organizational and institutional level relative to governance of mobile workers.
- Life Cycle of the Dot-Com, IT, Organizational Culture and Managerial Control Structures
- Relationship between Information Technology Environments: E-commerce software, Dynamic data-driven web pages and the Social Organization of Software Engineers and System Administrators
- The Digital Divide, La Casa Virtual de la Fraternidad
- Examine intersection between IT, ethnicity and student organizations. Examine the effect IT has on social capital and social ties within these student orgs. Examine student organization development, which have low levels of local/community support.
- Y2K
- The year 2000 (Y2K) computer software problem was framed as a technological boundary and cultural object. I documented and analyzed three subcultures? construction of Y2K. The three subcultures are Millennial (Evangelical-Charismatic-Pentecostal) Christians, Militia-Patriot Survivalists and Computer Professionals. Each subculture interpreted, received, comprehended and explained the cultural object of Y2K. Each subculture created a subcultural filter based on previously held value and belief systems, attitudes toward technology and computers, and interpretations of their social environment to create a unique picture of Y2K. I examined how each of the subcultures framed technology through the framing of it as a technological object. Each response was located within the technological determinism vs. social determinism debate and juxtaposed with their place in the technology as utopian or dystopian.
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Institute for Social Research
University of New Mexico
Project Manager/Research Assistant
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Project List Los Pasos- UNMH Evaluation (Drug Affected Infant) Oregon State Bar Minority Disparity Affirmative Action Evaluation Quay County Alcohol and Substance Abuse Coalition Project Evaluation New Mexico Boot Camp Planning Evaluation New Mexico's Primary Care Network - Medicaid Evaluation Adult Community Corrections Evaluation Juvenile Community Corrections Evaluation
NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION: HUMAN SOCIAL DYNAMICS
Inter-organizational decision making and organization design for improved ICT coordination in disaster relief
With Carleen Maitland, John Yen at the College of IST at Penn State and Benita Beamon, University of Washington.
Highly complex decision making involving multiple organizations, which have both shared and private interests, pose many challenges for organizational scholars. While agent-based simulations address some of these challenges they are often limited in studying how these different interests may influence an organization’s information sharing policies and hence inter-organizational decision making. Further, simulations are sometimes criticized for a lack of grounding in real world environments and may fail to assess the impacts of improved organizational decision making in the broader industry context.
We will address these limitations by integrating agent-based research on information sharing and decision making with a qualitative study of organization designs that influence information sharing, and analytic assessments of the industry-level performance improvements resulting from improved decision making. In particular, the research will address problems of information and communication technology (ICT) coordination in humanitarian relief, which were exemplified by the communication failures in the relief effort for hurricane Katrina. To facilitate coordination of ICT-related relief activities, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), a subset of the relief industry, have developed coordination bodies through which decisions are made. Our research on decision making will contribute badly needed knowledge in the critical area of disaster relief, while making fundamental advancements to theories of organization science, artificial intelligence and logistics.
In particular we seek to answer the question: How do organizational designs and decision making processes for ICT-related coordination bodies in the disaster relief industry affect performance in both the organization itself and subsequently in the relief supply chain? The research will be undertaken by a team of academics from Penn State’s interdisciplinary College of Information Sciences and Technology and the University of Washington’s (UW) Interdisciplinary Program on Humanitarian Relief (IPHR), who are joined by an international humanitarian relief consultant. This team will work on three integrated research tasks that will: 1.use qualitative methods to gather and analyze data on the organization designs and decision making processes of two coordination bodies, 2. use that data to modify an agent-based architecture to perform sensitivity analyses of the effects of these designs on decision making, generating recommendations for improved designs, and 3. employ analytic methods that use the outputs of the simulation to predict the effects of decision making improvements on disaster relief supply chain performance. The coordination bodies who will participate in this study are the International Working Group for Emergency Capacity Building (IWG ECB), consisting of representatives from the largest relief NGOs, including CARE, Oxfam and Save the Children, among others, and HumaniNet, consisting of primarily smaller NGOs. This research will leverage existing assets of both the Penn State and UW teams, including the extension of a team-based intelligent agent architecture (R-CAST), a disaster event data set, and analytic models and frameworks for measuring relief supply chain performance.