Does our Information Technology match our values? That’s not a question you typically hear companies asking. They usually ask: does the technology match my business and technical requirements?
Requirements are the right way to think about technology needs, the argument goes, because requirements are objective, consistent, and can be ‘frozen’ to prevent changes. If someone were crazy enough to base technology decisions on an organization’s values, it would be doomed to failure, because values are fuzzy, changing, and usually self-contradictory.
But what if values are the bedrock that doesn’t change, while requirements come and go? Or, what if our attempts to define away conflicting values as ‘fixed’ requirements just don’t match reality? Can we find practical ways to accommodate differences between values (deeply-held beliefs about priorities) and goals (the temporarily negotiated requirements that allow work to continue) that do not go away?
I’m working on a new project with Karin Hedström at the Swedish Business School, Örebro University on how to cope with technology values in a practical way. She’s written extensively on technology values in health care, where values like quality care, administrative efficiency, and medical records security battle for supremacy in a very messy and complicated environment. I’m writing about the openness vs. accuracy tensions in new web communities such as wikipedia, where the technology builds in support for discussing how to resolve value conflicts.
Karin and her PhD student Ella Kolkowska were in San Francisco last week as Visiting Scholars at USF. It was wonderful having them here. Thanks to the Swedish Foundation for International Cooperation in Research and Higher Education (STINT) for sponsoring their visit.
Our paper on Web 2.0 and Social Informatics has now been published in issue #8 of the Journal of Social Informatics (JSI). JSI happens to be an online magazine published by the West University of Timisoara in Romania.
How’d it get there?
Simple: global ambition meets free global publishing. A university somewhere in the world decides to make a name for itself in a specialized niche they consider up-and-coming (in this case, Social Informatics). They start an online journal. They search the web for content. They find entry #17 on the J.P. Allen Blog, and the rest is history.
Another strategy for universities looking to make their mark on the world is to build a high-quality information portal. I fired up my google analytics yesterday and saw, for the first time, a visitor referred by a site called social-informatics.org. I clicked, and was surprised to find myself at the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia.
The good ol’ U of L has put together a quality information source on Social Informatics that I had no idea existed. And I’m not just saying that because they link to my blog! The publishing houses and established universities might own the big name journals, but what’s to stop a university on the other side of the world from having the premiere web destination for an academic topic?
Thanks to a humble blog, and free analytics, Romanians now know that Web 2.0 este un obiect de studiu important pentru cercetarea sistemelor informationale. And Slovenians can find out how to get people to invest in emerging technologies.
The newly-released book Computerization Movements and Technology Diffusion looks at how positive visions of the future convince people to invest in, adopt, and use new technologies. For many emerging technologies, rational arguments and financials aren’t enough, because of the uncertainty. At some point, there has to be a leap of faith. But how does this leap of faith happen?
My chapter, “Visions of the Next Big Thing: Computerization Movements and the Mobilization of Support for New Technologies,” is a study of more than 2,500 articles published over a 10 year period, to see how companies in the once-hot Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) space convinced themselves to make big investments in the technology.
Through arguments with colorful names such as new mass markets, killer features, inevitable progressions, bundling together, and the ever-popular horse race, 34 of the leading companies in computing, telecom, and consumer electronics convinced themselves to make major PDA investments, though most were soon abandoned. When success didn’t materialize as quickly as they hoped, they used variants of these arguments to rationalize their failures.
The chapter includes two short case studies of companies that were able to successfully resist the prevailing rhetoric of the day, and how they did it. The British PDA maker Psion managed to resist the craze for ‘pen-based computing’, while the American company Palm resisted the conventional wisdom of phone-based ‘communicator’ PDAs with their own vision of a ‘connected organizer’.
(Added 6/23/08) A nice review of the book here that mentions the chapter.
I’m pleased to present the paper lineup for the Social Theory in Information systems Research (STIR) track at the AMCIS (AMericas Conference on Information Systems) 2007 conference. For the past five years, my fellow track chairs and I have tried to bring together an international mix of research that shows how social theory, and social research methods, are useful for answering questions about the future of information technology.
This will be my final year as part of the STIR management team. If you are interested in becoming a track co-chair, please contact me or my colleagues Howard Rosenbaum and Pnina Shachaf at Indiana University.
The 2007 STIR papers:
- “Examining Alignment of Frames Using Actor-Network Constructs: The Implementation of an IT Project”, by Bijan Azad (American University of Beirut) and Samer Faraj (University of Maryland).
- “A Realist Social Theory of Information Systems”, by Michael Cuellar (Georgia State University).
- “Mediated Interaction: Social Informatics in the Era of Ubiquitous Computing”, by Hamid Ekbia (Indiana University).
- “Understanding Online Community Effectiveness: The Efficacy of Integrating Group Development and Social Capital Theories”, by Roderick Lee (Penn State University).
- “Internet Use from the Perspective of the Theory of Planned Behaviour”, by Johann Kerschbaum (University of Vienna), Elisabeth Donat (Donau-Universität Krems), and Roman Brandtweiner (Donau-Universität Krems).
- “Web 2.0: A Social Informatics Perspective”, by me (USF), Howard Rosenbaum (Indiana University) and Pnina Shachaf (Indiana University).
A draft version of a new position paper, “Web 2.0: A social informatics perspective“, is now available online. Any actual intelligence on its pages is the product of my co-authors Howard Rosenbaum and Pnina Shachaf, both at the School of Library and Information Science at Indiana University.
We’ll be presenting the paper at the Americas Conference on Information Systems (AMCIS) in Keystone, Colorado.
While you’re probably familiar with Web 2.0, you might not have heard of social informatics. Social informatics (SI) is an academic specialty that cuts across business, information science, and computer science. SI research looks at how technology design and use are affected by society, culture, and institutions.
When revolutionary new technologies emerge, the usual assumption is that technology will cause social and organizational change. SI argues it’s a two way street. Existing business practices, institutions, professions and culture don’t just sit back passively and let changes happen–they shape outcomes, and even the technology itself.
The paper has a short review of academic research on Wikipedia, which is interesting and growing.
It will be fascinating to watch the ‘people power’ revolution of Web 2.0 hit the complexity of large corporations, government agencies, and different national cultures.
J.P. Allen is an Associate Professor of Information Technology at the School of Business and Management, University of San Francisco. 