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.