Petri Hallikainen

Biography

Dr Petri Hallikainen holds a D.Sc. (Econ.) degree from the Helsinki School of Economics, Finland. He earned his M.Sc. and L.Sc. degrees from the same institution. He was also awarded the title of Adjunct Professor at the Aalto University School of Business, Helsinki, Finland. Before joining the discipline of Business Information Systems at The University of Sydney Business School he worked as Assistant Professor at the Aalto University School of Business, Department of Business Technology, discipline of Information Systems Science. Petri’s research focuses on understanding the use of novel digital technologies in organisations. Particularly, he is interested in understanding the managerial challenges and the organisational changes that are caused by the introduction of the new digital technologies. He is doing case study research aiming at understanding the adoption of the digital technologies in their organisational context. He has conducted or is currently conducting case studies on topics, such as Robotic Process Automation, the use of the Internet of Things technology in organisations and the application of the Blockchain technology in organisations. He serves as associate editor for the Communications of the Association for Information Systems (CAIS) journal. He has taught a range of topics both on the undergraduate and postgraduate levels, including topics such as Enterprise Systems, Project Management and Information Systems Sourcing.

Research Interest

Petri’s research focuses on understanding the use of novel digital technologies in organisations. Because of the challenging economic conditions, changing behaviour of customers and the fast pace of the digitalisation of products and services, both public and private organisations need to adapt to these new demands from the markets and from the customers. Learning becomes a key capability for contemporary organisations. Information technology is the backbone of most of the companies nowadays and the capability to adapt the technology to the changing conditions and requirements can be considered to be the key to success in the current business environment. Petri’s first research stream aims at understanding the managerial challenges related to responding to the new demands created by digitalisation in “traditional” industries. As part of this research stream he aims to understand what kind of capabilities organisations need to develop in order to be successful in the current business environment. Moreover, he aims to understand what is the role of different organisational actors in facilitating the transformation to increasingly digitalised business processes, particularly the role of middle managers. Middle managers play a very important role in organisations because of their understanding of daily business practices and because of their interaction channels towards top management. The research tries to understand how middle managers may have a critical role in both exploiting the existing technologies and in the exploration of novel technologies. His second research stream focuses on understanding the use of new digital technologies in organisations. Particularly, he is interested in understanding the related managerial challenges and the organisational changes that are caused by the introduction of the new digital technologies. His research follows the case study research methodology aiming at understanding the adoption of the digital technologies in their organisational context. He has conducted and is currently conducting case studies on topics, such as Robotic Process Automation, application of the Blockchain technology and the use of data analytics in the mobile gaming industry.