John Leslie King, John King, John L. King, J. King, J.L. King

John Leslie King - Home Page

  • Position: Vice Provost for Academic Information, and Professor in the School of Information at the University of Michigan
  • Address: 3042 Fleming Administration Building, 503 Thompson Street, Ann Arbor MI 48109-1340
  • Telephone: +1(734)764-2571
  • Direct Fax: +1(734)764-4546
  • E-mail: jlking at umich dot edu

Recent Stuff

From January 2000 to the end of May 2006 I was Dean of the School of Information -- the best job I have ever had, working with the best people you can imagine. (I still work with them, but just not as often or as closely as I'd like.) At the beginning of June 2006 I left the SI Deanship and assumed the role of Vice Provost for Academic Information, a newly created position working for the Provost. This job entails working with the university's IT infrastructure at all levels, as well as the university libraries and other knowledge assets, as we prepare the University of Michigan and all of higher education for a major transformation that is emerging for the coming decade.

I published a paper on distributed collective practice in transport in the June, 2006 issue of Computer-Supported Cooperative Work. It examines the ways in which deep information infrastructure has increasingly placed control of larger physical infrastructure into the hands of individual users. In the case of this paper, I focus on the air passage infrastructure, and describe how this shift in access and control enalbed the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

Kalle Lyytinen and I published a book in summer of 2006 with John Wiley and Sons titled Information Systems: The State of the Field. It expores the recent controversies facing the academic field of information as it searches for identity and legitimacy. The book contain our papers Reach and Grasp and Nothing at the Center: Academic Legitimacy in the Information Systems Field. We are just finishing up a special issue of MIS Quarterly on starndardization as a focus of research in the information system field that should appear in late-2006.

I spent four months in Germany in spring/summer of 2005 at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main, as Fulbright Distinguished Chair in American Sudies. This visit was supported by the German Fulbright Commission as well as the university. I was hosted by the Fachbereich Wirtschaftswissenschaften (the faculty of economnics and business) and the Institut fur Wirtschafts Informatik (institute for information systems).

Margaret Hedstrom and I have continued our work on epistemic infrastructure. The original paper we did for the OECD a while back. A more recent paper has been published in a book from MIT Press . The former is a longer and more complete explication of the ideas; the latter is shorter and focuses on one part of the overall argument.

Kalle Lyytinen and I published our paper on Automotive Informatics in Transforming Enterprise, edited by Bill Dutton, Brian Kahin, Ramon OCallaghan, and Andrew Wycoff, and published by MIT Press in 2004.

Margaret Elliott and I have published a paper, A Common Information Space in Criminal Courts: Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) Case Management Systems in the Proceedings of the 28th Hawaii International Conference on Systems Sciences, 2005.

Ken Kraemer and I have a paper titled Information Technology and Administrative Reform: Will E-Government Be Different? in the International Journal of Electronic Government Research

Teaching

At the moment, I am not teaching scheduled courses.

Research

Click here to get a sense of my research and a PDF version of my cv.

Other Interests

Editor-in-Chief, 1993-1998, of the INFORMS journal Information Systems Research.

Working for the past three years as a senior scientific advisor for cyberinfrastructure at the National Sciecne Foundation directorates for Computer and Information Science and Engineering, and Social, Behavioral, and Economnic Sciences.