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Michael Barrett

Professor of Information Systems & Innovation Studies
Fellow of Hughes Hall

BSc (Univ. of the West Indies), MSc (Univ. of Ottawa), MBA (McMaster Univ.), PhD (Univ. of Cambridge)

Professional experience

Michael is a member of the Steering Board of the Cambridge Service Alliance and a member of the Management Executive Group of the Collaborations for Leadership in Applied Health Research and Care at Cambridge University. He has served as Director of Programmes and as Director of the Innovation, Strategy & Organisation Programme at Cambridge Judge Business School. He is Co-Editor of a Special Issue of MIS Quarterly on Service Innovation in a Digital Age, Senior Editor of Information & Organization and Senior Editor of the Journal of the Association of Information Systems. Michael has served as an Associate Editor of MIS Quarterly, Information Systems Research and is a member of the Editorial Board of Organization Science. He has contributed to articles in The Economist, The Times, and The Financial Post, and has served as an external examiner at Oxford University, the University of Edinburgh and the London School of Economics.

Michael has worked as an industrial engineer for Colgate Palmolive and won the Most Valuable Employee award for consulting and business development at Oracle Canada. He continues to work closely in research and executive education for a number of organisations, including Bank of China, China Mobile, BT, IBM, HP, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Coventry Building Society, Shell Exploration, and the World Health Organization.

Michael is currently an implementation theme co-lead on a CLAHRC (Collaborations for Leadership in Applied Health Research and Care) multidisciplinary grant with the Department of Psychiatry, Engineering Design, and Public Health. The focus of this research in mental health is enabling service innovation through knowledge exchange. He is also the School's sponsor of the business models work on complex services in the Cambridge Service Alliance. He is also passionate about the use of mobile and other information technologies for business model innovation in emerging economies. Michael has researched the role of collaborative innovation between large and small hi-tech firms in the development of MPESA for financial inclusion in Kenya. He was recently commissioned by the World Bank to co-author a report on the use of information technologies, for improving access and affordability of rural workers in agriculture.

Previous appointments

Michael has held visiting appointments at MIT (2006) and the London School of Economics (2000). Prior to joining Cambridge Judge Business School, he was an assistant professor in information systems at the University of Alberta (1996-2001), and an Adjunct Professor at the International Institute of Qualitative Methodology (1999-2001), also at the University of Alberta.

Awards and scholarships

• European Case Award in the category 'Knowledge, Information and Communication Systems Management', 2012
• Best Interactive Paper Award, OCIS Division, Academy of Management, 2011
• European Case Award in the category 'Knowledge, Information and Communication Systems Management', 2008
• IBM Faculty Award, 2003
• IBM Faculty Fellowship
• Best Paper Award, OCIS Division, Academy of Management, 1999
• Mackenzie Undergraduate Teaching Award, University of Alberta, 1998
• JD Muir Fellowship, University of Alberta, 1998
• Centre for International Business Research Fellowship, University of Alberta, 1998
• Xerox Research Fellowship, University of Alberta, 1996
• Cambridge Commonwealth Trust Scholar, 1992-1995
• Most Valuable Employee, Oracle Canada, 1991
• CIDA McMaster Scholarship, 1988-1989
• Canadian Information Processing Society Scholarship, 1989-1990
• Commonwealth Scholarship, 1985-1988

Research interests

The role of social theory and discourse in understanding technology enabled processes of innovation and organisational change; longitudinal case study research using interpretive and multi-methods approaches; knowledge exchange in cross-cultural and multidisciplinary teams; service innovation in healthcare; use of mobile infrastructures to enable social innovation in emerging economies; open and collaborative innovation in financial markets; managing offshoring relationships.

Michael Barrett is a member of the Operations, Information & Technology subject group.

Selected publications

Barrett, M. and Walsham, G. (1999) "Electronic trading and work transformation in the London Insurance Market." Information Systems Research, 10(1): 1-22

Heracleous, L. and Barrett, M. (2001) "Organizational change as discourse: communicative actions and deep structures in the context of information technology implementation." Academy of Management Journal, 44(4): 755-778

Barrett, M. and Oborn, E. (2010) "Boundary object use in cross-cultural software development teams." Human Relations, 63(8): 1199-1221 (DOI: 10.1177/0018726709355657)

Oborn, E., Barrett, M. and Davidson, E. (2011) "Unity in diversity: electronic patient record use in multidisciplinary practice." Information Systems Research (forthcoming)

Barrett, M., Oborn, E., Orlikowski, W. and Yates, J. (2011) "Reconfiguring boundary relations: robotic innovations in pharmacy work." Organization Science (DOI: 10.1287/orsc.1100.0639) (forthcoming)

Barrett, M., Heracleous, L. and Walsham, G. (2012) "A rhetorical approach to IT diffusion: reconceptualizing the ideology-framing relationship in computerization movement." MIS Quarterly (forthcoming)

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