DrJulian Prester

Dr Julian Prester is a researcher and tool-builder, and Senior Lecturer in Business Information Systems at the University of Sydney Business School. His research investigates how digital technologies are transforming knowledge work, professional identity, and organisational life. He combines ethnographic fieldwork with software development, building open-source tools for the research community alongside his academic work. You can explore his research on his personal website or Google Scholar profile.

Julian completed his Ph.D. as a Scientia Scholar at the University of New South Wales, where he received the Weinstock Memorial Prize for the most innovative Information Systems thesis. He holds an M.S. in Management Information Systems and a B.S. in Business Informatics from the University of Regensburg, Germany. He joined the University of Sydney in February 2022.

At the University of Sydney his research focuses on two interconnected fields — the future of digital work and the tools and methods that researchers use to make sense of it.

Future of Digital Work

Julian studies how people work, organise, and build professional identities in digitally-mediated settings. His fieldwork has taken him into digital nomad communities across Southeast Asia, the Americas, and Europe, into fully remote technology organisations that operate without offices or traditional management hierarchies, and into workplaces where AI is reshaping what it means to be a knowledge worker.

His ethnographic research on digital nomadism — high-skilled professionals who use digital technologies to work remotely while leading a nomadic lifestyle — produced a process-relational theory of identity performance in unsettled digital work, published in the Journal of Information Technology. Drawing on process philosophy, particularly the work of Tim Ingold and Gilbert Simondon, this work shows how professional identity is not something workers have but something they continuously perform through ongoing lines of journeying, work-living, and digital-agencing.

Julian is currently extending this research in several directions. He is studying how humans and AI co-configure in knowledge work settings, developing a theoretical framework based on Ingold's concept of correspondence. He is investigating how all-remote organisations like GitLab achieve coordination through bots, automated pipelines, and publicly editable handbooks — a phenomenon he calls algorithmic organising. And he is examining the emerging inequalities in AI-augmented remote work. His research on digital platforms for knowledge work — platforms like Upwork and Fiverr that connect clients with freelance workers — was published in The Journal of Strategic Information Systems.

Building Tools for Researchers

Julian believes that researchers should build the tools they need, not just write about them. He is the co-developer of CoLRev, an open-source platform for collaborative literature reviews that brings version control and reproducibility to the review process. CoLRev is designed to make literature reviews more transparent, efficient, and collaborative, and is used by research teams internationally. He also created callsforpapers.org, a community resource that tracks calls for papers from academic journals in Information Systems and related fields.

His meta-research on how to conduct and publish impactful review articles has been published in the Journal of Decision Systems, Information & Management, Decision Support Systems, and Research Synthesis Methods. His recent work on generative AI for literature reviews, published in the Journal of Information Technology, examines how large language models are changing the practice of research synthesis.

Julian serves as Managing Editor and Editorial Review Board member of the Journal of the Association for Information Systems (JAIS), one of the top journals in the field. He regularly reviews for MIS Quarterly and the Journal of Information Technology, and has received multiple awards for editorial service at the International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS) and the European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS). He is Track Co-Chair for the "Future of Work" track at PACIS 2027 (Auckland).

A full list of publications is available on Google Scholar and ORCID.

Julian supervises doctoral students working on digital health technologies, data governance, and the translation of digitally-enabled practices for human development. He welcomes enquiries from prospective research students interested in digital work, AI and organising, qualitative methods, or process philosophy. See Research Projects & Activities for current PhD opportunities, or get in touch via his personal website.

More?

Julian has an unusual background for an Information Systems researcher — trained in Germany, fieldwork across four continents, and a habit of building software alongside writing theory. You can find his code on GitHub and his papers on Google Scholar.