KISS SIG > SIG Leadership Team

Linda A Macaulay

Professor of System Design

University of Manchester, UK

Linda Macaulay (B.Sc, M.Sc, PhD, CEng, Cert. Ed., FBCS) Professor of Information System Design Manchester Business School is twice holder of the prestigious IBM Faculty Award 2004 and 2006; a Fellow of the British Computer Society; an elected member of the EPSRC College for IT and Computer Science. She is co-Director of the Centre for Service Research and Principal Investigator on the SSME UK network project (see SSMEnetUK above). Linda is lead academic on Manchester Business School's Second Life project and Programme Director for the B.Sc IT Management for Business degree.

Professor Macaulay has proven leadership experience as Head of the Information Systems Research Group (13 staff; 40 researchers/doctoral students) from 2003 to 2006; Head of the Department of Computation at UMIST (75 staff; 750 students) from 2001 to 2003; member of UMIST Council and member of the Board of Directors, Project Unity CLG (UMIST and the Victoria University of Manchester). She has facilitated collaboration between academics and industry partners in her role as Director of the Centre of Expertise in e-Commerce from 1998 to 2001 and as Director of External Relations in the School of Informatics 2003-2005.

She has led over 25 externally funded projects. She was Principal Investigator on 'Human Issues in Privacy and Security in e-Commerce' funded jointly by the ESRC/DTI and the Co-operative Bank (project ref: L142251008) 2001 to 2004; co-investigators Professor Peter McGoldrick and Dr. Kathy Keeling. The bank contributed £300K to match funding from ESRC and the DTI, and it was rated ''outstanding'' by ESRC and scored an exceptional 9 out of 10 for industrial relevance by the DTI. The project is currently the subject of an ESRC study as an exemplar of university-industry collaboration.

She was Principal Investigator with Professor Peter McGoldrick on the EPSRC project GR/M33198 ‘Evaluation of Electronic Service Delivery Systems in Complex Environments’ 1998-2000; lead Investigator for UMIST on a European Information Society Technologies project: E-Factors (project ref: IST-2001-34868) 2002-2004. She was lead on the European Regional Development project, 2002-2005, with Tameside Council (a UK Beacon Council) working with 6000 SMEs to assist in the adoption of technology to facilitate collaboration between groups of SMEs. She has lead several DTI funded Knowledge Transfer Projects, 2002-2004, and has acted as consultant to the Office of the Information Commissioner, 2000 and 2002.

Professor Macaulay's research focus is on how technical system design can be informed by the needs of users and groups of users. Her areas of study include Human Computer Interaction, Requirements Engineering, e-Commerce and e-Business, and Collaboration Engineering. She is currently working with industrial and academic partners to help develop the SSME (Services Science, Management and Engineering) agenda within the UK; her specific interest within this and the focus of her IBM Faculty Awards is in e-Business Patterns for Facilitated Collaboration. Virtual Worlds bring a new dimension to e-business and facilitated collaboration and are increasingly part of her research direction.