How technology can move in concert with organizational change

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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

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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?

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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

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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?

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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 doesnt
  have to be perfect.
• Tools on the Web arent 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

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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

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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

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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)

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Goals for Portals
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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?

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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 doesnt 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

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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

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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

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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
• Its 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

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Whats 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

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For more information

• Don Turnbull - donturn_at_ischool.utexas.edu
• http//www.ischool.utexas.edu/donturn
• This presentation
• http//www.ischool.utexas.edu/donturn/Turnbull-20
  05-Technology_Change.ppt