Research profile: Paola Gonzalez

Paola Gonzalez researches and teaches in the areas of IT leadership, digital strategy and innovation. Her research focuses on understanding the factors that drive organizations forward in the planning and execution of digital transformation initiatives. Within this research, she has centred her interest on the role of IT leaders in creating value from IT investments. Some of her projects have examined the leadership challenges of chief information officers (CIOs). In these studies, she has identified the role of perceptions (e.g., professional stereotypes) as an influencing factor in driving a successful digital transformation.

Paola also has a keen interest in the healthcare sector and has co-supervised the development by students of low-cost digital solutions to healthcare problems like detection and monitoring of autism, diabetes, hypertension in pregnancy and prevention of femicide. Within these projects, she also explores the role of SMACIT (Social, Mobile, Analytics, Cloud, IoT) technologies in driving frugal innovation. Paola is part of the Dalhousie University–based Safe Assured research team, which studies the Canadian experience with community pharmacy safety. She is currently investigating the role that learning digital systems (e.g., medication incident reporting) play in enabling a safe and sustainable community pharmacy and patient safety services.