Back

Biography: Thomas W. Malone is the Patrick J. McGovern Professor of Information Systems at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He is also the founder and director of the MIT Center for Coordination Science and one of two founding co-directors of the MIT Initiative on Inventing the Organizations of the 21st Century. Prof. Malone's research focuses on how new organizations can be designed to take advantage of the possibilities provided by information technology.

Among other things, Prof. Malone is known for having led the MIT team that developed the Information Lens system, a pioneering groupware tool in which intelligent agents help users find, filter, and sort large volumes of electronic information. He also predicted, long before these things became widely believed, that information technology would lead to more electronic buying and selling, to more outsourcing of non-core functions in a firm, and to smaller firms.

Prof. Malone has been a co-founder of three software companies and has consulted and served as a board member for a number of other organizations. He has published over 50 research papers and book chapters and has been frequently quoted in publications such as Fortune, Scientific American, and Wired. Before joining the MIT faculty, Prof. Malone was a research scientist at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) where his research involved designing educational software and office information systems. He holds a Ph.D. from Stanford University and degrees in applied mathematics, engineering, and psychology.