The J.P. Allen Blog

IT and the Future of Work

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?

The New Web, blurring the boundaries

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.