Steve Sawyer and I organizing the second IFIP 9.1 workshop on IT and the Future of Work. With all the research focus on technologies and business models, we believe that significant changes to the nature of work itself might not be getting the attention they deserve. That’s why we’re so excited about this paper line-up for the workshop:
- “The role of professional networking websites in business relationship building” by Lih-Bin Oh (National University of Singapore) and Yao Zhang (Xiamen University)
- “The establishment of pervasive control mechanisms as a consequence of compliance with the Sarbanes-Oxley act” by Gasparas Jarulaitis (Norwegian University of Science and Technology)
- “Is IT employment in the United States really hurt by offshoring and work immigration?” by Sonia Vilvovsky (Bentley College)
- “A longitudinal investigation of practice adaptation in a successful open source development project” by Mary Beth Watson-Manheim (University of Illinois, Chicago), Katherine M. Chuboda (Utah State University), and Sanjeev Jha (University of Illinois, Chicago)
- “The integration of tools and systems in inter-disciplinary work” by Torstein Hjelle (Norwegian University of Science and Technology)
- “The three modalities of work and their needs for IT support” by Markku I. Nurminen (University of Turku)
- “How the new web is embedding itself in everyday life and work” by me (USF)
- “Users and information systems: Two empty concepts that mean so much” by Steve Sawyer (Penn State University).
Why not join us in Montréal on Wednesday, December 12th?
What’s really new about the new generation of web sites and services?
Whether we call it Web 2.0, mass collaboration, online community, or social networking, I believe what’s really new is how large-scale knowledge sharing, and the services built on top of this knowledge, are allowing the web to deeply embed itself in normal, everyday life.
Research has shown how the boundaries between online and off, private and public, work and living are all being blurred by mobile phone use (see my review essay in The Information Society, January 2007, for more details). I argue that these boundaries are also blurring on the new web.
“Worklife is being affected by the ‘consumerization’ of IT, and everyday non-working activities are being subjected to analytic scrutiny normally reserved for the working world: detailed peer review, in-depth data collection and analysis, and rapid experimentation.”
The abstract for my presentation on “How the new web is embedding itself in everyday work and life“, to be delivered at the 2007 IFIP 9.1 post-ICIS workshop on Computers and Work is available online. Slides to come.
Working Group 9.1 is the division within IFIP (the International Federation for Information Processing) responsible for research on computers and work.
After a few years of inactivity, a team of new officers is working to ‘relaunch’ IFIP WG 9.1. As the newly elected Secretary of the group, I will be the true power behind the throne, with the new Chair (Steve Sawyer, Penn State) and Vice Chair (Rudi Schmiede, Technische Universität Darmstadt) filling out the rest of the management team.
One of our first tasks is to create a new mission statement for the group. The current draft is:
The mission of IFIP Working Group 9.1 (Computers and Work) is to promote, facilitate and disseminate research on ICTs and work, in order to promote quality of life, technology that meets human needs, and social accountability. IFIP WG 9.1 strives to identify important new perspectives on the future of ICTs and new ways of working, and to communicate the social and organizational consequences of ICTs and work.
If you have comments or suggestions, we would love to hear them, either here on the blog, or at the new official IFIP WG 9.1 website.
Our next official workshop and meeting will be immediately after the ICIS 2007 conference in Montréal. Please join us!
A big part of the web’s future impact on business will be through its ability to share knowledge almost effortlessly over large social networks. I call this ‘lightweight knowledge sharing’ (LKS - licks? lucks?), and in an upcoming presentation I’ll be contrasting LKS with what I call ‘traditional Knowledge Management’ (KM).
Traditional KM assumes that people need to be bribed or coerced into sharing knowledge. KM also requires a large up-front investment on pre-defined categorization schemes, and large knowledge bases. Lightweight knowledge sharing, in contrast, assumes that people want to share. Simple tools such as blogs and wikis can become a means for large-scale knowledge sharing through the combination of: 1) simple syndication (subscription), and 2) simple ’social graphs’ that naturally define which subscriptions are of interest. LinkedIn and Facebook are two interesting examples of this trend.
Both the slides and the abstract are available online. These slides will be presented at IFIP 9.1 Computers & Work workshop in St. Gallen, Switzerland.
J.P. Allen is an Associate Professor of Information Technology at the School of Business and Management, University of San Francisco. 