About Me & This Website

Hello There! Welcome to my Website & Blog.

My name is Umar Ruhi, and I am an Associate Professor of Information Systems & E-Business at the Telfer School of Management at University of Ottawa. You may also know (of) me by my Internet alias and social media handle: “informatician” (more on this below).

This Website provides summarized and somewhat diffident information about me and my current professional endeavors. Also, if you’re interested, there are some prolix personal tidbits included along the way.

The website includes information about my teaching portfolio, research programs, consulting experience, speaking engagements, and media commentaries. Additionally, the website includes my own blog posts on various events, projects, courses and other undertakings of mine. I also use my blog to discuss current and upcoming information and communication technologies (ICTs) and their business and end-user applications.

I encourage you to browse the various pages and blog posts on this site at your pleasure, and feel free to drop me a line if you have any comments or questions.

What is an Informatician?

(A Super Brief Overview of Informatics)

My philosophy as an informatician is fundamentally based on my conviction that the design and deployment of technologies is more than just a technical pursuit, and as informaticians, we strive to bring attention to the intricate relationship between technologies and their social and organizational context of use in real-world settings.

In terms of its ontological underpinnings, informatics provides an interdisciplinary lens to study the design, uses and consequences of information technologies in a variety of application domains. Some examples include health informatics (applications of IT-based innovations in healthcare services delivery, management and planning); community informatics (ICT applications to empower members of communities and support their social, cultural, and economic development); social informatics (study of ICTs in cultural or institutional contexts); and business informatics (applications of ICTs addressing business challenges, and implications for organizational systems – people, processes, structures etc.).

My own predilection as an informatician is at the intersection of management, sociology, and health, and most of my work as an academic and an industry consultant has been in the areas of social informatics, business informatics, and health informatics (specifically, consumer health informatics).

Below is a visual depiction illustrating my perspective on informatics – highlighting the notion that informatics is more of an “applied” field which draws upon the core discipline of information systems, but within specific investigative and application contexts (health, business, community etc.). Please note that this is purely my own viewpoint, and other academics may have similar or divergent viewpoints.