Steve Sawyer

Steve Sawyer is a Professor in the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University and currently serves as Associate Dean for Research and Doctoral Programs. He does social informatics research, with a particular focus on the ways in which people work together and use information and communication technologies. His research has been supported by Credit Suisse, Corning, IBM, Sonoco, Xerox, the Lattanze Foundation, Lockheed Martin, Lucent Technologies, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the National Center for Real Estate Research, and the National Science Foundation.

Designing Collaborative Networks: Lessons Learned from Public Safety

This report offers practical advice to public managers and political leaders who are addressing complex public challenges through multi-organizational networks.  The use of collaborative networks of organizations has matured in the past decade.  However, the developers of collaborative networks face political, organizational, and technological challenges in a world accustomed to the traditional, hierarchical approach to problem-solving and accountability.

Professor
Syracuse University
School of Information Studies 344 Hinds Hall
Syracuse, NY 13244
United States
315-443-6147

Steve Sawyer is a Professor in the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University and currently serves as Associate Dean for Research and Doctoral Programs. He does social informatics research, with a particular focus on the ways in which people work together and use information and communication technologies. His research has been supported by Credit Suisse, Corning, IBM, Sonoco, Xerox, the Lattanze Foundation, Lockheed Martin, Lucent Technologies, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the National Center for Real Estate Research, and the National Science Foundation.

Prior to rejoining Syracuse University (where he first worked as a faculty member from 1994–1999), he helped start Penn State’s College of Information Sciences and Technology and served on the faculty from 1999–2008. At Syracuse he was named Professor of the Year in 1997 and served as the Director of its Ph.D. program. At Penn State, Steve was named the first IST Faculty Member of the Year in 2001. In 2002, he won Penn State’s inaugural George McMurtry Award for Teaching.

Since 1995, Steve has published nearly 100 works, including two books, and papers in a range of journals such as Communications of the ACM, European Journal of Information Systems, Information Technology & People, The IBM Systems Journal, The Information Society, The Information Systems Journal, and Computer Personnel. Sawyer is a senior editor with the Journal of Information Technology, and an associate editor at The Information Society and the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology.

Steve is a member of the American Society of Information Science and Technology, the Academy of Management, Association of Computing Machinery (ACM), Association for Information Systems (AIS) and the International Federation of Information Processing’s (IFIP) working groups on information systems in organization and society (IFIP WG8.2) and on computers and work (IFIP WG9.1), which he chairs.

Sawyer earned his Doctorate in Business Administration from Boston University in 1995. He also has master’s degrees in both Ocean Engineering and Information Systems.