A secondary area of interest and research is on what might be characterised as 'technologies of leadership' - the use of information and communications technologies to support leadership work. Given the potentially transformative capacity of information and communications technology (ICT), the challenge lies in using information systems to organise, store and present information in a timely and efficient manner for effective decision-making. Leaders in the education sector face a range of problems in their everyday use of information systems. They have to cope with legacy issues. They have to concern themselves with the collection, utilisation and integration of data. They also have to disseminate such data to staff and higher level management. The overall objective of the research, therefore, is to uncover - through an ethnographic study of managerial users and systems in use - the nature, value, and possible future development of the information systems currently being utilised.

Our investigation explores a number of issues:

1. The complexities involved in the use of ICT in the provision of information, the production and utilisation of that information in everyday leadership work, and the variegated skill factors relevant to information use.

2. The use of ICT in support of decision-making and in managing and motivating distributed teams in everyday work.

3. The articulation in practice of the cultural, organisational and technical arrangements for the use of ICT in working across organisational boundaries.

Our aim is to study these issues through the investigation of the ‘hands on’ everyday work of implementing and managing multi-levelled technological and organizational innovations within the sector. As such the project provides an opportunity to examine and report on the intense and complex learning process that is induced by extensive technological and organisational innovation. This in turn will enable us to consider more general lessons that are learned but rarely captured or communicated.