The rest of the economy may be going to hell, but American tech companies are still going strong. Last week’s article in Network World featured some of my thoughts on why tech is holding up, and whether we’re headed for a repeat of the early 2000’s recesssion that started the dot.com crash.
Why might this downturn different from the dot.com days? From the article:
“Back then, company value was based on the stock price and now it’s based on revenues,” Allen says. “We used to talk about the New Economy. Now it’s the Real Economy. . . . You see over and over again that the financial results in the tech industry are based in reality. They’re not based on speculation about share prices or hopes that you can monetize visitors to your Web site.”
I go on to talk about how Enterprise 2.0 and analytics are hot areas for investment growth, how the U.S. IT labor force is larger than its ever been in history (including during the dot.com days), and how there’s real money behind these trends. It sounds like the happy days might be here again. Or maybe today’s days are even better, because they’re no longer based on fantasy (except for the multi-billion dollar online role-playing games industry, of course…).
Network World 4/25/08: “No slowdown for U.S. tech industry”. Also published on CIO.com.
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.
J.P. Allen is an Associate Professor of Information Technology at the School of Business and Management, University of San Francisco. 