Technology in the Organization

1. Technology in the Organization Amanda H. Rebecca M.

2. A Very Different Workplace • The ability to work in ‘virtual teams’ has created a very different type of workplace from only a decade ago • Real time web-conferencing, complete with virtual whiteboards, along with telecommuting, is becoming more and more common • Many employees telecommute from home in order to balance their work and family lives, blurring the boundaries between work and home • Can be seen as either a positive or a negative development Pg. 206-207

3. The Social Life of Information: Home Alone (Chapter 3) “Information, as the phrase has it, “wants to be free,” and that freedom, it is widely hoped, will in turn make people free.”

4. The Social Life of Information: Home Alone (Chapter 3) • Yearning to Breathe Free • The idea that technology can untie the unwanted ties that bind people together • Just a Click Away? • Home office predictions are highly ambiguous • 1 million to 41 million?

5. The Social Life of Information: Home Alone (Chapter 3) • “Hot Desking” • Def: the strategy of abandoning fixed desks and providing laptops, cell phones, and Internet connections so employees can work where they choose • OFFICEHOMEOFFICE • Misunderstanding of office work as information handling • Frailty of technological systems • Displaced burdens

6. The Social Life of Information: Home Alone (Chapter 3) • No Room of One’s Own • Hot Desking Experiment: Chait/Day • No assigned desks or offices • Checked out office equipment daily (laptop, cell phone) • Not to sit in the same place on consecutive days • Lockers to store files, papers, etc. • Establish a creative edge? • Four observations/outcomes

7. The Social Life of Paper: Looking for Method in the Mess “This is one of the great puzzles of the modern workplace. Computer technology was supposed to replace paper. But that hasn’t happened. Every country in the Western world uses more paper today, on a per-capita basis, than it did ten years ago.”

8. The Social Life of Paper: Looking for Method in the Mess • Cognitive psychologists and ergonomics experts: argue that when it comes to performing certain kinds of cognitive tasks, paper has many advantages over computers.

9. The Social Life of Paper: Looking for Method in the Mess • Paper has a unique set of “affordances” • Def. of “affordances”: qualities that permit specific kinds of uses. • Paper’s advantages: • Paper is tangible: we can pick up a document, flip through it, read little bits here and there, and quickly get a sense of it. • Paper is spatially flexible, meaning that we can spread it out and arrange it in the way that suits us best. • Paper is tailorable: we can easily annotate it, and scribble on it as we read, without altering the original text.

10. The Social Life of Paper: Looking for Method in the Mess • Digital documents’ affordances: • They can be easily: searched, shared, stored, accessed remotely, and linked to other relevant material • But they lack the affordances that really matter to a group of people working together on a report.

11. The Social Life of Paper: Looking for Method in the Mess • Paper enables a certain kind of thinking • Piles of papers on a desk look like a mess, but they aren’t. A study found that even the most disorderly piles usually make perfect sense to the piler, and that office workers could hold forth in great detail about the precise history and meaning of their pile. • Why do we pile documents instead of filing them? Because piles represent the process of active, ongoing thinking.

12. The Social Life of Paper: Looking for Method in the Mess “[We have been] confused by the assumption that the most important invention is always the most recent.”

13. Test Questions • What is the term for abandoning fixed desks and providing laptops, cell phones and Internet connections so employees can work where they choose? • What is the term for qualities that permit specific kinds of uses? • Name one advantage of paper and one advantage of digital documents.