The Organisational Theory and Information Systems subject group

Examples of engagement projects

Examples of recent impact and engagement projects carried out by faculty members of the OTIS group include: 

• Professor Mark de Rond recently completed 3 years of embedded fieldwork with one of the UK’s most active paedophile hunting teams to answer a question put to him by police: “Why do paedophile hunters persist with extreme methods given that less harmful alternatives to keeping children safe are readily available?” This research feeds into a UK task force to combat child sexual abuse comprising all UK Police Chiefs and senior representatives of the Home Office, Crown Prosecution Service, National Crime Agency and College of Policing.
• In the last few years, Professor Jennifer Howard-Grenville has been working with British Telecom and Huawei to help them address sustainability issues through suppliers’ engagement. The work led to the publication of Engagement for Supply Chain Sustainability: A Guide, which presents a “spectrum” of approaches that companies can adopt to engage with supply chains on sustainability, depending on their practices, specific circumstances and issues.
• Dr Thomas Roulet has engaged in several collaborations. He is currently working with Vitality on evaluating the impact of remote and hybrid work on health – collecting large scale survey data. He also worked on a large mixed-method empirical project, together with consulting firm Altermind, to capture the culture of Suez (a waste and water company in France) for its defence in a hostile takeover by competitor Veolia. In 2021, he ran seminars for HM Treasury for their transition to hybrid work and a session on remote working for the law firm Gide.
• Dr Helen Haugh is involved in a collaborative research project with the Diocese of Ely to help communities make fuller use of their historic churches through social entrepreneurial approaches. She also serves on the Diocese of Ely Buildings Oversight Board.
• Professor Michael Barrett is working with the Moorfields Eye Hospital and Sheba City of Health in Israel to digitalise some of their healthcare services through telemedicine technology, following the changes brought by the COVID-19 pandemic. Previously, he worked with Addenbrooke’s hospital in Cambridge to understand how their restructuring affected clinical leadership and accountability.
• Dr Karla Sayegh examined how 2 of Canada’s largest tertiary care hospitals merged their people, technologies and operations into one university-affiliated ‘superhospital’. Additionally, she recently researched how a university health network in Canada relocated its hospitals from older facilities to a newly built and equipped state-of the-art campus, and how a tertiary-level emergency department (ED) in a Canadian university health network adapted its organising processes following an unanticipated shift in patient population.
• Professor Paul Tracey and Dr Neil Stott are supporting many social innovators through the Master’s in Social Innovation delivered by the Cambridge Centre for Social Innovation that they direct, and have been working with several social enterprises and charities to help them foster local development.
• Dr Stella Pachidi recently conducted an ethnographic study at a business implementing a new technology to manage customers and partners, to understand what worked well and what didn’t.
• Dr Matthew Jones has been working with Royal Papworth Hospital, evaluating their use of clinical information systems in critical care. Recently he has also studied the effect of the hospital’s relocation to the Cambridge Biomedical Campus on work practices in critical care.
• Through the Cambridge Judge Entrepreneurship Centre Professor Matthew Grimes is engaged with a wide range of entrepreneurial startups, accelerators, angel investors and other ecosystem partners from across Cambridge and beyond to support IP commercialisation, venture development and growth, and ecosystem design.
• Dr Virginia Leavell conducted a 3-year field study of advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) at 2 water agencies in the Western United States. AMI is an important technology that can enable greater water conservation, supply planning, and customer service for water users. During her research she provided support to agency workers and management in many ways, including conducting and synthesising case studies of comparable agencies that had already adopted similar technologies, consulting on digital transformation strategies, collecting organisational social network data and providing feedback, and advising on the quantification of water usage on monthly customer billing. At the national level, Virginia helped produce a report and guide for practitioners with the American Water Works Association (AWWA) entitled “Increasing consumer benefits and engagement in AMI-based conservation programs”.