eMail Paul@Swatman.net.au
Headline 2
Professor Paul A. Swatman BAppSc, PGDipCompSc, PhD, FACS, MACM, MIEEE, MAIS
Prof Swatman has held Professorial Chairs at a number of universities in Australia and Europe and visiting professorships in Australia, Europe and the US. He now focuses on consultancy and applied research in ICT-enabled organisational change through Solution Forest but retains university links as Adjunct Professor of Information Systems at the University of Tasmania and as Honorary Research Fellow at the Informatics Institute, University of Zurich
Consultancy
Prof Swatman has maintained a consultancy practice during the whole of his academic career, the focus of his consultancy work and his research developing in parallel.
He currently leads two projects each of which focuses on the implementation of formal information systems within a not-for-profit organisation. While the organisations in question are quite dissimilar in size and structure, there are significant common issues to be overcome. By far the most significant challenge is the establishment of a systematic approach to information management while maintaining (ideally, enhancing) the motivation of a vocational and in significant part, voluntary workforce.
Research
Prof Swatman’s research has focussed on socio-organisational enquiry and the application of associated enquiry techniques to socially pervasive ICT innovation, ICT-mediated organisational change and team (initially teams of requirements engineers, later with a much broader focus) support. The core piece of work from which all this research grew was systems analysis/requirements engineering methodological work undertaken from two perspectives:
· How analysts/requirements engineers understand and model the problem domain.
· The application of the RE methodological outcomes “in the field”.
Studies originally focussed mainly on the eCommerce domain and, within that domain, on change within organisations, organisational networks (virtual organisations), and communities resulting from and enabled by telecommunications-based systems. Of course, the insights gained from this strand of research feed the first, more abstract, strand of research.
More recently, Prof Swatman’s main focus has been on stimulating and managing effective change in organisations (such as non-profits, hospitals, universities) where there the workforce exhibits a strong vocational (or “intrinsic”) motivation. Frey’s work on “Motivation Crowding Theory” explains why such organisations respond badly to conventional approaches which are typically founded on extrinsic incentives to change and penalties for failing to change
The Research Programme showing project linkages: Blue (methodological influence); Red (direct dependency)
Research Supervision & Education
Prof Swatman has supervised 8 Honours, 7 Masters/Diplom and 14 PhD theses to successful completion and is currently supervising 2 PhD students.
The education of research students continues to be a major focus of Prof Swatman’s academic career. Paul and Paula Swatman have developed and continuously enhanced a course in research design and methodology for research students in the information systems/technology domain. This course, designed around the independent development of a thesis research proposal by each student, has been offered at Curtin, Swinburne, Monash, Deakin and South Australia universities in Australia, and at SIMT and the universities of Koblenz and Zurich in Europe.
Prof Swatman has acted and external examiner of 10 Masters, 8 Doctoral and 2 Habilitation theses for Universities in Australia (Monash, Queensland, UTS, Deakin, Macquarrie, Flinders and Western Australia), Germany (Koblenz and Mannheim), Singapore (NUS) and Switzerland (Zurich and St Gallen)
Publication and Refereeing
Professor Swatman has published more than 150 articles in refereed academic journals, books and conferences and has refereed articles for most of the major journals and conferences in the Information Systems and Requirements Engineering domains.