How technology can move in concert with organizational change

1. How technology can move in concert with organizational change Don Turnbull University of Texas at Austin School of Information American Society of Information Science & Technology Annual Meeting November 2, 2005

2. Technology Causes & Effects • Rapid pace of technology development • The fluid nature of 21st century organizations • Increasing pressure of competitive advantages in using technology • Technological advancements that either fuel or foul personal efforts • “New information technologies make this revolution possible.” Tom Malone • Connected by technology, not physically • Make decisions at new scales & effects • How can Information Professionals manage this state?

3. The Future of Work • Are the reduced costs of IT “taking us across a threshold into a place where dramatically more decentralized ways of organizing work become at once possible and desirable”? • Is this a new world, where organizations have no center (at all)? • Should technology have no center (centralized control)? • How can we shape the future of work, not just predict it? • Can we use technology to “fight fire with fire”?

4. Future Work & Technology • Decisions can be made anywhere, not bound by (most) physical rules • The Costs of Communication • Lower now, even lower next • There is both organizational & individual information overload • Does cheap communication always help? • Scale • Rapid decision making • New kinds of management, new kinds of knowledge? • Changes in economies, orgs & cultures • The Network is the metaphor for Organizational Work

5. The Network: A New World • “The Web has sent a jolt through our culture, zapping our economy, our ideas about sharing creative works, and possibly even institutions” Weinberger, “Small Pieces” (p 8) • Is it about speed, reach or a coincidence of technology, a lack of rules? • Is this new world simply a mirror that reflects us as individuals & groups in a new way?

6. Perfection - Loosely Joined • How fortuitous are the accidental encounters with people & information? • How can we manage & promote this process? • Opening a conversation can be easy, and doesn’t have to be perfect. • Tools on the Web aren’t perfect • People still will work with a broken tool in comparison to not having it. • Is the Web broken on purpose? • Are people “broken” the same? • “Good enough” and “It works for me”

7. Perfection & Tools • How difficult is it to support imperfect work with logical tools (& systems)? • Do centralized (top-down, logical) power and efficiency go hand in hand? • The larger the system is, the more control required • Does larger always mean more complex? • How does management work in the extremes of these new worlds? • In between? • Reactive, not proactive? • Not fearing tech, but steering it

8. The Creative Intranet • Intranets support & facilitate corporate creativity and the knowledge creation process • Managing creativity is about raising the probability of creative acts by stimulating the factors that foster creativity. • Characteristics of WWW and intranets • Hyperlinked (user can visit any page/site in any order) • Networked (all sites are connected) • Open (unrestricted content and accessibility) • Organizational restricted (intranets only) • The ad hoc nature of these technologies may be their best feature • The newness of intranets and their features may bring about new uses

9. The Creative Intranet factors 1. Alignment (being aware of, and working towards, the same set of key goals) 2. Skunk Works (working outside established bureaucracy and with minimal management control) 3. Serendipity (recognizing the potential in accidents) 4. Diverse Stimuli (exposing employees to new input) 5. Within-Company Communication and Co-operation (meeting informally and sharing ideas) 6. Trust and Reciprocity (declaring officially the importance of these values) 7. Intrinsic Motivation (cultivating employee interest and enjoyment in their work) 8. Rich information provision (providing direct access to search-and-retrieval media)

10. Goals for Portals

11. Corporate Portal as info infrastructure • Trend towards Information on the Desktop • (Web) Infrastructure for MIS • Content access & viewing for better sense • Organizational Communications for engagement, negotiations • Collaboration for workflow between groups & K workers • The new, new portal • RSS, Blogs, Wikis and RSS readers • Adaptive Web Services • Usage based • Rule based (quarterly reports, etc.) • Focus on people (to drive usage) • Interactive interfaces • Customization (content & services) • Open access • What percentage of portal work should be on Search?

12. Is it all about Search? • What is the most popular information management & discovery tool? • Google • What does it tell us that this is something that Organizational IT doesn’t control or maintain? • Leverage workers’ love of search engines to entice them towards new tools that are as pleasing, interactive & full of dynamic content as they experience when using the internet • Making search part of intranet work is essential, getting information online in searchable form is easier said than done • Focus on creating new information that is natively searchable using existing technology

13. A Case Study (in one slide) • Large financial institution designing an intranet portal • Required rapid communications to link IT with users • Focused on networked, distributed technology • Implemented blogs for individual contributors to post status, documents, questions & answers • Used Feed Readers (RSS readers) to keep up & comment on others blogs • Totally transformed nature of status meetings from review to real-time collaboration

14. Case Study: Phase 2 • Change the nature of how the organization uses email • Cultural reduction of one to many distribution • Technology upgrade to new client or server interfaces & applications • Develop Wikis for document creation collaboration • WYSIWYE content creation • (Imperfect, but easy) version control • Speed up the pace of collaboration with Instant Messaging • Cultural norms for interruption & types of messages • Transform MIS into coordination tool R & D

15. The PIKII • Personal Information & Knowledge Infrastructure Integrator • Web-enabled, knowledge manager • Uses standard formats and protocols • Works with new internet-based info formats • RSS, XML, XML-RPC, URIs, MIME types, Trackbacks • Creation, retrieval & sharing all in the same interface • Allows for annotation of personal documents • A personal portal with links to networked documents • It’s already here, just needs embracing • Broadband keeps up connection (almost) continuously • All operating systems since 2001 include Web servers • Easier to build, configure & deploy than the combination of tools it replaces

16. What’s next? • The new, new portal & the death of centralized control • Centralized coordination & managing collaboration • Improving email & offloading email functionality • The Wiki, the blog & real time micro-interaction • “Small pieces” as iterative posts, fluid responses & networked, aggregate documents • P2P technologies decentralize media • Podcasting as MediaRSS allows for one click rich communication • Audio, video & traditional documents • Imperfect, “loosely joined” document management but highly interactive & redundant • Renewed focus on Leadership, not management • Setting corporate culture by example • Allowing for collaboration and acknowledging the network

17. For more information • Don Turnbull - donturn@ischool.utexas.edu • http://www.ischool.utexas.edu/~donturn • This presentation: • http://www.ischool.utexas.edu/~donturn/Turnbull-2005-Technology_Change.ppt