Research Interests

• Sociotechnical analysis of information technologies
• Organizational control and the self

Profile

One of Dr Karin Garrety’s current research projects has the potential to impact on anyone accessing the health care system in years to come. She’s looking at the issues involved in electronic health records management, and why so many systems have failed.

“IT has been used in medical care for decades but mostly for simple tasks like scheduling and billing. We’re now getting to the stage where organizations involved in healthcare want to exchange information so interorganizational processes can be more efficient,” she explains.

“The idea is that each of us will have an electronic health record, so for example if we went to Adelaide and had an accident, our medical information would be available there. It would work in ideal world, but it’s turned out to be hideously difficult to set up.”

Karin says the failure of the systems can’t be put down to technical problems, but to interorganizational political and privacy issues, workflow issues, problems associated with changing behaviour, and questions about who controls the information.

“There have been various attempts to set them up, including here in Illawarra, and they have been successful on a local scale,” she says. “We want to do a retrospective historical analysis of some of these attempts and comparative studies across them, to determine any common crucial elements that facilitated or hindered them.”

Another research area has been information security in the university environment, and people’s perception about risks and threats. This ties in with Karin’s general interest in the human and social aspects of information technology. She has also focused on technological change and organizational change in industry.

Other work has involved leadership training, including employee self-identity and the use of the Myers-Briggs self-analysis tool.

“I’m interested in what people do with it, how they are trying to use it to change patterns of conformity and deviance within an organization,” Karin says. “There used to be the idea that you had to be a certain way to get promotion. Now organizations realise they need diversity in the workplace.”

Karin says the People and Organization Research Centre is a focus for collaborations, and enables members to find out what other people do in related areas.

“Research is interesting. If I didn’t do research I would get very bored. I enjoy trying to understand the way the world actually works, not just the way it should work.”