Informatics Research Centre (IRC)

Description

The Informatics Research Centre (IRC) at Henley Business School provides a centre of gravity for interdisciplinary research in informatics and digital transformation in business.

The IRC's mission is to become a centre of excellence in informatics – the study of the creation, management and utilisation of information in scientific and economic activities.

The IRC undertakes both theoretical and applied research within the defined themes, with research funded by research grants, Post Graduate Research (PGR) and collaborative partnerships with organisations to deliver impactful research that matters.

The research is currently undertaken in three targeted thematic areas of Health, Service Operations and Innovation, and User Experience:

The Health theme focuses on addressing real world healthcare challenges using informatics and inter-disciplinary methods. It includes healthcare information systems such as Electronic Health Records, decision support system and interoperability; data-driven healthcare such as advanced analytics, artificial Intelligence, machine learning, real-world data and evidence research for life science and healthcare; healthcare management such as integrated care system, health policy, hospital service and operation management and health inequality. Health theme in IRC emphasise on the co- creation of digital health research with end users such as clinicians and patients as well as industry to achieve real-world impact. It also brings together a multidisciplinary community of researchers across engineering, physical science, ICT and computation, medical and social science for novel digital health technologies.

This Service Operations and Innovation theme focusses on the design and innovation of organisations service delivery systems and business models. In particular, research in this theme focusses on the following topics:

• Supply Chain Resilience
• Servitisation
• Value co-creation and value co-destruction
• Process innovation through digitalisation
• Circular economy

The User Experience theme concerns how in the modern digital age, data and information pervasively surrounds everyone. Are people even aware of it? Do users’ really benefit from the potential of this information? User Experience (UX) research within BISA considers how people, businesses, and/or technologies perceive, assimilate, interpret, and use information in the process of knowledge or wealth creation.

Understanding people’s sense making and perception, cognition, motivation, requirements, and/or interaction is critical to understanding user behaviour, predicting future activity, and supporting the development of technology and business solutions that effectively enhance the users’ experience.

Research topics include:

• Human Computer/Interface Interaction
• Performance and cognitive modelling
• Usability / Use experience assessment
• Conflict analysis
• Information Assimilation
• Technology Acceptance

The thematic areas are supported by foundations in informatics that includes the following:

• Organisational Semiotics, developed in the 1970s, uses the concepts and methods of semiotics to study organisations, and has been applied to information systems over the years. Over the years, IRC has contributed to organisational semiotics through teaching and research, as well as the organisation of conferences, workshops and summer schools. *Enterprise architecture (EA) is a discipline that generates innovative and robust business and IT designs to guide the development of capabilities for enterprise strategy and its execution. EA has become increasingly important in a digitally disruptive world.

Henley Business School has a major expertise in Enterprise Architecture that is widely recognised by corporates, consultancies and collaborating universities. Its leading education programmes are supported by impactful research, most notably an EA collaboration with McKinsey over the last six years. This has resulted in several publications in the Journal of Enterprise Architecture.

Artificial intelligence (AI) and data science are among the key technologies that are increasingly being introduced in digital transformation.

Ethical issues underline any aspects of digital transformation, such as the use of AI.

Offers funding

No, this infrastructure does not provide funding.

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University of Reading
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