Speaker: Prof. Isabel Ramos

Abstract: William Ocasio defines organizational attention as the “noticing, encoding, interpreting, and focusing of time and effort by organizational decision makers on issues and answers” (p. 189). Attention is a scarce and critical resource that is distributed in the organization to foster the focus on a diverse set of issues and action alternatives. Organizational strategy acts as a guide to the distribution of the attention effort in the organization, coherent interconnection between pockets of shared attention and development of collective capacity to respond coherently to internal and external stimuli. Changes in the organizational strategy often arise as result of changes in the external environment or when the usual problem solving logic is no longer effective.
Readiness for strategic change requires that attention structures and communication channels are flexible and adaptable to the new needs of collective attention. According to (William Ocasio et al., 2018) there’s “a rather limited understanding of communicative practices in various communication channels and particularly the extent to which they reinforce existing patterns of organizational attention or facilitate the formulation and implementation of strategic change” (p. 159). The talk addresses research carried out with the objective of providing empirical evidence for the role that communicative practices play in facilitating the formulation and implementation of strategic change, with a particular focus on communicative practices supported or enabled by information systems.

Short Bio: Isabel Ramos is Associate Professor (PhD, Habilitation) at the Department of Information Systems of the University of Minho in Portugal. She has a PhD in Information Technologies and Systems, specialization in Information Systems Engineering and Management, since 2001. Isabel Ramos is Director of the Doctoral Programme in Information Systems and Technologies and President of the Portuguese Association for Information Systems/ Portuguese Chapter of the Association for Information Systems. She is the Secretary of the Technical Committee 8 (Information Systems) of IFIP – International Federation for Information Systems.  She was member of the AIS Communications Committee and the AIS LEO award Committee. She was awarded the IFIP Outstanding Service Award and IFIP Silver Core Award. Isabel Ramos coordinated the research group Information Systems and Technologies for the Transformation of Organizations and Society (ISTTOS) from 2008-2015 and the Thematic Research Stream Resilience and Agility of Organizations of the Algoritmi centre of the University of Minho. She advises several fellowships, PhD and Master dissertations in the areas of Knowledge and Innovation Management and IST for Organizational Resilience. She is the principal researcher in several projects in partnership with Portuguese companies and governmental agencies as well as in European funded projects. She is co-author / co-editor of 9 books and more than 120 scientific and technical papers.