Audrey Grace

Biography

Dr. Grace is a lecturer and researcher with the Cork University Business School. Her research interests include: (i) service innovation and the role of information systems (IS) in the creation and delivery of complex services; (ii) how IS can enable individuals to manage their own wellness and to better collaborate with healthcare professionals on the management of their healthcare; (iii) learning management systems for maximizing human capital within organisations; and (iv) e-government, socio-technical systems and how 'information technology tools' can be combined with 'psychological tools' to achieve better outcomes. Dr. Grace is on the Governing Council of the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) Europe (see www.himss.eu). She also has over twelve years of industry experience, having previously held a number of senior positions with business solutions providers and financial institutions in Ireland.

Research Interest

Publically provided healthcare systems, worldwide, are coming under increasing pressures because of aging populations, increased prevalence of chronic disease and spiralling healthcare costs. It is widely recognized that such pressures can be somewhat alleviated by focusing on community-based healthcare and empowering people to manage their own wellness. To this end, a range of employee wellness programs have been launched and wellness gadgets that measure specific aspects of wellness abound. However, wellness is a poorly understood term and little is known about how one can go about managing one’s general wellness - outside of and in collaboration with of the healthcare system. In light of this deficit, I am currently researching how wellness is managed among the various actors involved (i.e. the individual themselves, family carers, home and community care workers, and healthcare professionals, etc.). In particular, I am exploring how information systems can be employed to better support an individual and/or their family carer in managing their wellness. Service co-production between a service professional and an individual client involves collaborative decision making between these two parties which necessitates high levels of interaction and information sharing between them. These types of collaborative decisions are under-researched and this poses a significant constraint on organizations who are encountering a growing demand for individually tailored services from their clients. With this in mind, I am undertaking ongoing research on co-production and the role and limitations of information systems in supporting these types of processes. For example, I am co-supervising a PhD study to explore how IS/IT services are co-produced between a firm’s project group and its customers (the project community); and examine the impact of IS capabilities on this process. This is an important study as organisations can draw on this research to improve and innovate how they invest and support: (i) their employees, (ii) the environment in which they operate, (iii) the information systems that they use, and (iv) the networks that they employ for co-producing services with customers. Governments, worldwide, are increasingly recognising the advantages of interacting with their citizens by electronic means (i.e. e-government) and as a result, this area is receiving growing attention both from research and practice. While much work has been done to establish various factors that impact on the success of particular e-government initiatives, little has been done to understand the role and significance of public administrators in this process. Understanding how they adapt to and interact with e-government systems is important because doing so would inform the design of optimal e-government implementation and training approaches that seek to avoid negative behaviours and to maximize the potential of benefits of e-government initiatives. I am co-supervising a PhD study to address this deficit. While much IS research heretofore has concentrated on how information systems facilitate information processing and the decision making of individuals in an organization, there is a growing need within organisations to analyse and understand how information systems facilitate both internal and external information sharing and collaboration (e.g. with customers, suppliers and partners). I am an advocate of the use of activity theory as a lens for IS research as it provides a holistic and insightful evaluation methodology which allows researchers to investigate how collaboration is achieved through all elements of IS (people, process, technology).