Information Alignment and Task Coordination in Organizations: An ‘Information Clutch’ Metaphor

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• Citation information:
• Available online: 24 Feb 2011

Author affiliations

• ^a Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA
• ^b SA Technologies, Orlando, FL, USA

Author biographies

Barrett S. Caldwell, Ph.D. Prof. Caldwell is an Associate Professor in Industrial Engineering, and Aeronautics and Astronautics, at Purdue University. His background includes two undergraduate degrees (one in Astronautics; one in Humanities) from MIT (1985) and a Ph.D. (1990) in Social Psychology from the University of California-Davis. His research examines human factors engineering aspects of information flow, task coordination, and team performance, as affected by information technology. Prof. Caldwell's interdisciplinary work studies the effects of contextual factors such as task demands, user expectations of technology performance, and other constraints (such as time or limited expertise) that influence human-system interactions and team coordination to manage system behavior. His research efforts have resulted in over 100 scientific publications. His approach emphasizes field studies of team-based knowledge sharing and task coordination in complex settings (such as healthcare facilities and spaceflight mission control). These field studies are supplemented by efforts to develop appropriate mathematical models and simulations of individual and group human behavior, and smaller laboratory projects involving human participants. His projects since 2000 have been funded by a variety of sources including Motorola, NASA, and the Regenstrief Center for Healthcare Engineering.

Ralph C. Palmer, III, M.S. Mr. Palmer is currently a Ph.D. student in Industrial Engineering at Purdue University. He received a Bachelor of Science in Industrial and Systems Engineering at North Carolina A&T State University. He began his studies at Purdue University in 2003 and completed a Master of Science in Industrial Engineering in 2005. Mr. Palmer has worked for many companies during global or site reorganization. His diverse defense industry experience has tailored his research interest toward organization change management, knowledge capture, and information alignment. His master thesis analyzed an organization during a site implementation of SAP. The research analyzed the alignment and transformation from a paper / meeting based planning organization to a paperless computer prompted planning organization.

Haydee M. Cuevas, Ph.D. Dr. Cuevas has a Ph.D. in Applied Experimental and Human Factors Psychology (2004) and a Bachelor of Arts degree in Psychology (1997), both from the University of Central Florida. She has worked on projects funded by the National Science Foundation, Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Army Research Laboratory, Office of Naval Research, and Office of the Secretary of Defense. Her research has primarily focused on investigating the use of interactive computer-based training technology, such as enhanced displays, to support the acquisition, development, and transfer of knowledge related to critical linkages in domain knowledge for complex task training environments (e.g., aviation, distributed decision making). Also of interest is investigating how technology can best be used to support the attitudinal, behavioral, and cognitive processes of teams performing in distributed environments. Dr. Cuevas has presented her research at numerous conferences and has authored and co-authored several papers on this work in peer-reviewed journals. She is currently employed as a Research Associate II at SA Technologies.