James D. Herbsleb's Home page, ISR, SIC, SCS, CMU

James D. Herbsleb

Professor, Institute for Software Research
Director, Software Industry Center
School of Computer Science
Carnegie Mellon University

Jim Herbsleb's Home Page

New organizational forms are breaking down traditional barriers and moving us toward a post-bureaucratic world. Flattened hierarchies, permable organizational boundaries, network organizations, and continuous adaptation are driving innovation. From open source ecologies to wikipedia to globally-distributed product development, technology provides unprecedented opportunities to connect and create.

All we need to do is to figure out how to make all this work. With new opportunities come new problems, often more wicked than the old. When will network organizations end in chaos rather than creativity? How are diverse ideas generated by far-flung communities integrated so we have a coherent result in the end? How can the participants even understand what is going on and who is doing what? How do decisions get made?

These are the kinds of questions that drive my research group. We are an interdisciplinary collection of graduate students, post docs, and faculty who collaborate, learn from each other, and form partnerships with other departments, universities, and corporations. We study collaboration in the field, develop theory, design and deploy technologies, and consult with industry and communities to solve problems. We are funded by the National Science Foundation, the Sloan Foundation, Accenture, Bosch, Siemens, and IBM.