Sundeep Sahay har fått utmerkelsen Stafford Beer Medal

The Stafford Beer Medal for the best paper to be published in EJIS, KMRP or OR Insight in 2004 is awarded to S Sarker(Washington State University)and S Sahay University of Oslo) for their paper"Implications of space and time for distributed work: an interpretive study of US-Norwegian systems development teams"In the introduction to their paper the authors state " while popular press continues to extol the virtues of virtual teams, researchers in the field have noted that not much is known regarding how virtual teamwork is carried out in practice". This highly relevant piece of research goes a long way to making good that shortfall. The paper describes an investigation into how a virtual software development project split across two continents worked in practice. In fact their findings are generic and can be extended to most virtual teams. As such they are relevant not only to those working in information systems and services, but anyone involved in what is becoming an increasingly common workplace paradigm. We commend this paper for the Stafford Beer Medal and congratulate its authors for bringing the rigour of IS research to current business and organisational issues. Beer himself focused his energies on facilitating the introduction of new ways of working and thinking. This paper fits in that mould and recognises that harnessing technology is dependent on understanding how people behave and interact with each other.