Research

The Junior Professorship in Information Systems, esp. Digital Society is part of the Department of Information Systems at the University of Paderborn.

Prof. Dr. Milad Mirbabaie has been conducting research on the topics of digital transformation since 2014, with digital society being a central component of his research. He sees the digital transformation as a comprehensive socio-economic process and does not view it solely in technical terms. For this reason, it is essential to address change management issues and the effects of digital transformation on individuals, but also on organizations. This also includes political and ethical aspects. From the perspective of business informatics, he looks in particular at the impact of digital transformation on society. Although concrete effects differ to some extent at the application level, overarching questions and processes emerge that he addresses theoretically in his research.

Central research questions are:

• What are the effects of new technologies on individuals, society, and organizations?
• What interactions exist between existing and new socio-technical systems and how can transformation processes be meaningfully designed?
• How can services be designed, built and used in the context of digitalization?

To this end, Prof. Dr. Mirbabaie has been working intensively on various domains in recent years. He has mainly devoted himself to the research field of crisis management in social media. In doing so, he has pursued the question of how information systems (esp. social media) can currently be used by people to engage in sense-making and close existing knowledge gaps. In particular, he has been interested in the collective behavior of people in damage situations.

Social media and also other technologies (such as virtual reality/augmented reality or wearables), play an important role or are gaining a lot of importance in society, economy, politics, the media landscape and in general in the formation of public opinion. This is happening at the level of individuals as well as organizations and society.

In this area he works closely with other universities but especially with companies and NGOs.

In addition to the domain of crisis management, he has also studied the impact of digital technologies on the future of work and new business models. In this context, he is investigating the influence of communication and collaboration systems on the behavior of people at work and how this behavior can be changed by the design of information systems (digital assistants/digital nudging).

• Supported by third-party funded projects (DFG, BMBF), he continuously deals with different aspects of new technologies. In this dynamic environment, he has been able to establish himself very successfully as an active, internationally recognized researcher.
• Lectures
• Seminars
• Workshops
• Research Institutions