Technology in organizations

1. Technology in organizations May 9,2008

2. Home Alone chapter from book by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid

3. Chiat Day • Chiat Day’s move to (& from) virtual office • Highlighted importance of material needs (ie desks, telephones) • Importance of co-location to support incidental learning • Workarounds: people found ways to be productive

4. Home Alone • Chiat-Day “hot-desking” plan reflects misunderstanding of office work (as being primarily about transmission of explicit knowledge) • Importance of co-location for knowledge sharing (tacit vs. explicit) through incidental learning • “Productivity Paradox” (and the “futz factor”)

5. Home Alone • Importance of co-location for knowledge sharing (tacit vs. explicit) through incidental learning • Importance of design (accurate conception of audience) and socialization of tech (Bell) • Work-arounds when design faulty

6. “These examples continue to suggest that, in order for people to be able to work alone, technology may have to reinforce their access to social networks. The home worker, from this perspective, resembles not the frontier pioneer, striking out alone and renouncing society, but more a deep-sea diver. The deeper a diver works alone beneath the ocean, the more sturdy the connections to the surface have to be” • -Brown and Duguid, Home Alone

7. Design Issues • Design needs to work with social context, not against it or in isolation (Example of socialization of the telephone) • Importance of design (accurate conception of audience) • “Work-arounds” for faulty design

8. Telecommuting Overview • Problems with definition and therefore with measurement (one to 41 million) • Early wave of telecommuting researchers predicted that as technology improved, almost all work would take place in home • Early, optimistic predictions not met.

9. Why not? • Management uncomfortable with lack of “line of sight” supervision • Traditional management done by observation, not results • Very hard to change, easier to see if someone in seat • Sharing of organizational knowledge harder when isolated • Socially isolating

10. Benefits of telecommuting • Environmental benefits • Less time spent commuting, more time working • Less expenses for employees (dry cleaning, lunches, etc) • Better home/work balance? • More productivity?

11. Telecommuting challenges • Management not comfortable not being able to see workers • Blurring of boundaries between home and work identities more difficult (role of commute). Workarounds: hat, separate door, etc. • Harder to share knowledge through incidental learning • Isolation (although some welcome the ability to spend time with family, friends); lack of opportunities to meet new people

12. Discussion - Incidential Learning • Think about the last time you learned a new technical skill • How did you find out about it? • How did you first learn about it? • How did you get additional information? • Think of one example of • Incidental learning • Design of product in which designers’ conception of user differed from actual usage

13. Division of Labor or Jack of All Trades? • “ [by overlooking these pts] design that attempts to replace conventional work systems may often merely displace the burdens of work. In the transition to home offices, these burdens pass from the social system, where tasks are shared, onto the lap of individuals. The desire to show that with a computer one person can do everything may not look forward, but back to the stage before [we realized] the benefits of the division of labor.”

14. Malcolm Gladwell on “Myth of the Paperless Office” Paper has unique set of “affordances” (qualities that permit a specific kind of use) • Tangible (able to browse) • Spatially flexible (can spread it out in way that makes sense to us) • Tailorable (annotate, scribble, cross out - and see history) • Digital docs have other affordances such as ability to store, share, search, send, link • For collaborative work: paper better?

15. Electronic media vs. Paper • Qualities of paper vs. electronic info • Do you print out articles for class, or read them on the screen? Why? • What kinds of documents/tasks do you read/process in digital form? • What kinds of documents/tasks do you prefer to read/process in digital form? • Bills, articles for class, news stories, email…

16. Conceptual qualities of paper • Paper: more important or actionable items on top and more visible; computer desktop equalizes all • Air traffic controllers use slips of paper, which can be kept in peripheral vision until needed • Piles: actually make sense to “piler” • They look like a mess, but they aren’t • “Piles represent the process of active, ongoing thought” • Analog vs. digital folders: How differ? • Electronic folders can only hold digital files • Analog folders can hold handwritten notes, business cards, photos, brochures, etc. • Research shows most knowledge workers don’t refer to documents once they’ve been filed away (contrast this to a pile)

17. The Messy Desk • “The messy desk is not necessarily a sign of disorganization. It may be a sign of complexity: those who deal with many unresolved ideas simultaneously cannot sort and file the papers on their desks, because they haven’t yet sorted and filed the ideas in their head….. What we see when we look at the piles on our desks is, in a sense, the contents of our brains.” • - Gladwell, Social Life Of Paper • Can we say the same about the messy desktop? • How do you indicate things like prioritization, temporal order, urgency on the computer desktop? How about on the actual desktop?

18. Food for thought • “Had the computer come first – and paper second – no one would raise an eyebrow at the flight strips cluttering our air-traffic-control centers.”

19. Reading Discussion Questions • Give an example of “incidental learning” • What was the main point of the Chiat-Day story in the article? • What is one way in which Alexander Graham Bell attempted to socialize people regarding the telephone?