Chapter 7

Information Technology

Information Technology

• Information Technology and Change

• Traditional Perspective

• Interpretive Perspective

• Critical Perspective

• The Technologized Life

Information Technology and Change

• Information Technology is Pervasive in today’s world

Two Views of Technology’s Impact• Information Technology is the force that

causes organizational and social change [Technological Determinism]

• Change is produced by the choices made by humans in their use of technology

Information Technology and Change

Impact of Information Technology• Emergence of Virtual Organizations• Global Economy supported by a Global

Internet• Inequalities Resulting from the Digital Divide• The Need for Technological Fluency• 24/7 Accessibility

Traditional Perspective

• Purposes of Information Technology

• The Digital Divide and Information Technology Fluency

• Organizational Impact of Information Technology

Purposes of Information Technology

• Productivity

• Knowledge Management

• Control

Productivity

• Information technology (IT) contributed more than 70% of the total gain in U.S. business productivity from 1995-2000

• Productivity increase is not due to IT alone but to the reengineering of business practices in conjunction with technology

• IT applications have to be tailored to sector-specific business practices to improve productivity

Knowledge Management

• Knowledge requires information, but information in and of itself is not knowledge, and a management information system is not the same thing as a knowledge management system.

• Knowledge is not just the information in one’s possession, but also one’s understanding of that information, i.e., how to interpret and act on information as well as where and how to find it.

• Without a system to manage it, organizational knowledge walks out the door everyday at closing time.

Knowledge Management

• Generating new knowledge• Representing knowledge in documents and databases• Embedding knowledge in products, services, and

organizational processes• Diffusing or transferring knowledge within the

organization• Using accessible knowledge in decision-making• Providing incentives and a culture to facilitate

knowledge growth• Measuring the value of knowledge as an organizational

asset (Galagan, 1997)

Knowledge Management

• In some situations, information technology (IT) is used mainly to create electronic knowledge repositories (codification).

• The idea in codification is to turn knowledge into a commodity and put it where everyone can find it.

• In other situations, IT is used mainly to help people find and communicate with one another (personalization).

• Personalization focuses on people and the transactions among people as sources of knowledge, so the objective is to connect people.

Knowledge Management• Computers were supposed to make it easier to manage

information, and the Internet was supposed to make it easier to find it, yet most of us have found ourselves completely overwhelmed (Greengard, 2000)

• Technology does make it easier to find and manage information, but it also gives all of us the ability to produce it and disseminate it at quantities and rates that are greater than we can process

• The glut of information, rather than enabling people to do their jobs better, threatens to engulf and diminish their control over the situation (Edmunds & Morris, 2000)

Knowledge Management• Hewlett Packard’s (HP) problem is no longer one of

storing, retrieving, and shaping information for managerial decisions. It is the gulf between the company’s wealth of absolute knowledge and the distribution of that knowledge within a complex organization in a highly volatile environment (HP Executive, John Doyle)

• With the new reality that information vital to your job and your company could be just a few clicks away on the Web, information overload went from a theoretical concept to a visceral everyday reality (Charles Sieloff, HP Program Manager)

Control• Information technology is tied to objectives of

efficiency, effectiveness, and productivity • Managers use technology directly for control

(surveillance of employees) • Control Paradox 1: Technology can overwhelm

organization members, demolishing any sense of control that one has over their environment. Hence, it is both indispensable and disruptive.

• Control Paradox 2: The same technology that enables those at the top echelons of the organization also enables people in many other areas and levels of the organization as well

Digital Divide

• Definition: The differences between those with and those without access to computers and the Internet (Robinson, 2003)

• Associated variously with differences in race, gender, ethnicity, economic status, educational level, and geography

• Minorities, the poor, the less educated, the rural, and those in developing countries are less likely to have access to information technology, a situation that would only reinforce second class citizenry in the information age

Reducing the Digital Divide

• Many billions of dollars have been expended nationally and internationally to close the divide on the assumption that access and computer skills will ensure upward mobility for economically disadvantaged people.

• The transfer of wealth from the information technology industry to ordinary people is not automatic, however. A number of studies suggest that information technology alone is not a “magic bullet” for alleviating poverty and inequality.

Reducing the Digital Divide

• The issue is not just access to computers and the Internet, nor even basic skills in using software, but also access to and facility with large-scale enterprise systems for managing information and business processes

• Wal-Mart not only can afford the highly sophisticated, state-of-the-art emergency operations center that we described in Chapter 1, but also the people who know how to use that center to manage a crisis

• Could a smaller enterprise or even a city like New Orleans ever afford this kind of investment?

Information Technology (IT) Fluency

• Knowing how to write formulas in a spreadsheet, construct a relational database, or create a PowerPointTM slide is, by today’s standards, just basic computer literacy

• Producing knowledge management, innovation, or other value-added outcomes with these skills is something else

• Computer literacy is not sufficient to become a creative and competent user of information technology

IT Fluency• Engage in sustained reasoning. Be able to

understand exactly what problem is to be solved and when it has been solved.

• Manage complexity. Be able to deal with the complexity of problems to which IT is applied, the resources provided by the technology, and the inter-dependencies of technology-based systems.

• Test a solution. Be able to determine that both the design and implementation of a solution are correct.

• Manage problems in faulty solutions. Be able to diagnose and correct problems when technological tools fail.

IT Fluency

• Organize and navigate information structures and evaluate information. Be able to find information, make judgments about its reliability and validity, and structure it to make it useful and meaningful.

• Collaborate. Know how to collaborate within and between groups and also how technology changes the way in which collaboration takes place.

• Communicate to other audiences. Be able to understand audiences and adapt messages and information as well as technological tools to the audience.

IT Fluency

• Expect the unexpected. Be able to anticipate and adjust to unexpected or unintended consequences of technological systems.

• Anticipate changing technologies. Know when it is appropriate to use an IT tool, how many features to learn, when to upgrade or adopt new technology.

• Think about IT abstractly. Be able to transfer principles of technological solutions from one situation to another and understand the policy and social implications of technology.

Organizational Impact of IT

• Organizational Structure– Centralized Versus Decentralized– Virtual Organizations

• Organizational Processes

• Work and Workers– E-Mail– Group Support Software

Organizational StructureCentralized Versus Decentralized• New-form organizational theory asserts that

technology enables structural changes with pressure toward greater flexibility, decentralization, and shifts in authority relationships (Schwarz, 2002).

• In some cases, IT has led to more centralization, in others to more decentralization, and in still others, it appears to have no effect at all (Malone, 1999).

• IT may also be paradoxical in this respect; it can have both centralizing and decentralizing consequences, even within the same organization.

Organizational StructureCentralized Versus Decentralized• Transition from workers with lesser skills to knowledge

workers (collecting, analyzing, and integrating information and also handling complex transactions that require integrated skills)

• Knowledge workers have e-mail and other communication tools that are powerful because they are not constrained by formal hierarchy and chains of command

• Top managers and executives are not the only people who have the knowledge and the tools to operate with some degree of autonomy and organizational influence, creating potentially decentralizing forces in organizations

Virtual Organizations

• Definition: IT-dependent linkages among persons or organizations sharing knowledge and skills or collaborating in nontraditional ways

• Simple Form: a team of individuals who collaborate from remote locations using e-mail, groupware and other information technologies

• Complex Form: a cooperative arrangement of companies or institutions that deliver a product or service on the basis of a common business understanding and present themselves as a unified organization (Pang, 2001)

Virtual OrganizationsVirtual Ownership and Outsourcing• Dell Computers assembles, markets, and provides

customer support for computers, but just about everything that goes into a Dell computer is made by other companies

• The kind of supply chain management that Dell requires to support this enterprise would not be possible without today’s information technology

• Consider the level of coordination required to make such an arrangement work, and the importance of current information and communications technologies

Organizational Processes• Reengineering or redesigning organizational

processes in ways that take advantage of IT• Concerned mainly with gaining efficiencies through

elimination of unnecessary processes, but it can involve radical change

• In business process reengineering, processes are scrutinized to eliminate those that do not add value to the enterprise, to automate wherever feasible, to simplify workflow procedures, and to improve anything that can be improved (logistics, operations, sales, and customer service in terms of criteria such as quality, cost, speed, and innovation)

Work and Workers• E-mail

• Privacy of Employee E-Mail Communications

• Group Support Software

E-Mail• E-mail contributes to communication load since it

requires effort to construct messages or to do something in response to messages.

• In one study about 20% of the time that participants spent on e-mail was used just to find or organize messages and attachments (Bellotti, et a.l, 2005).

• Complexity in Message Requirements: E-mail messages concerning interdependent tasks require coordination with others and contribute heavily to a sense of overload and are difficult to manage (Bellotti, et al., 2005).

Privacy of Employee E-Mail Communications

• Organizations frequently subject employee e-mail to surveillance.

• An American Management Association survey in 2004 found that 60% of surveyed companies monitor e-mail entering and leaving the company, and 27% also monitor internal e-mail messages (Kierkegaard, 2005).

• United States law provides very little privacy protection for employee communications.

E-Mail Privacy• The U. S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled

that retrieval of e-mail archived on a company server does not constitute “interception” because it already has been transmitted and processed

• In a case involving the Pillsbury Company, a court ruled that an employee had no reasonable expectation of privacy for messages sent over an e-mail system owned by an employer

Group Support Software• Groupware combines e-mail with tools such as

scheduling, note taking, conferencing, posting, and project tracking

• Groupware is the basic instrument for enabling virtual teams

• With groupware, each computer screen becomes the participant’s blackboard or the flipchart located at the staff conference

• Simply put, groupware simulates the experience of a group working in the same room, but the group participants are in different geographic locations

Group Support Software• Unlike the blackboard or flip-chart, the collaborative

work product produced with groupware can be printed, stored, copied, re-read, or forwarded to and from other people

• Involves more than mere teleconferencing or videoconferencing where remotely separate participants can hear and/or see each other

• Groupware adds computer-based tools to facilitate collaboration and to document the work product

• Group members may work at the same time (synchronous communication), or at different times (asynchronous)

Group Support Software

Sophisticated Form of Groupware

• Groupware provides group decision support systems (GDSS)

• Collaborative systems document the process used by a group to arrive at a decision while GDSS actually structures the decision making process

• GDSS software for group conferencing not only provides tools for creating, exchanging, and printing computer messages, but also for decision-making and voting procedures

• GDSS may provide users with a choice among different models or protocols for decision-making or problem-solving, typically from a menu of options (guiding the group through each step)

Group Support Software• Most GDSS software products are based on a common,

underlying phase model (problem identification, development of alternative solutions, analysis of alternatives, and choice of one alternative for implementation)

• A newer approach relies on development of multiple perspectives of a problem, then synthesis of these perspectives as a basis for generating possible solutions and defining actions

• GDSS “can make a well-planned meeting better, and it can make a poorly planned meeting worse” (Nunamaker, et al., 1997).

Interpretive Perspective on IT

• Technology’s Influence on Sense-Making• Social Construction of IT

Technology’s Influence on Sense-Making

• People sustain reciprocity in ordinary interaction, but computer mediation requires users to actively find evidence that they share meanings with others in the communication

• People use “normal form” terms and utterances in ordinary interaction to describe their environment and experiences (until just a few years ago, nobody had ever googled anything)

Technology’s Influence on Sense-Making

• Much of the knowledge that supports ordinary interaction is tacit and not explicit, and utterances are incomplete, vague, and ambiguous.

• We assume that others will fill in the right meanings or that meanings will be clarified in the on-going conversation.

• In computer-mediated communication, one must actively seek additional information to interpret events [and] wait for this information to emerge

Technology’s Influence on Sense-Making

• In ordinary interaction, participants expect each other to “look beyond the surface meanings of words” for understanding.

• Various aspects of context enable us to do this, e.g., knowledge about the other person, the situation, or the setting.

• Computer-mediated communication brings its own kind of demand for this ability to comprehend computer displays and communications by using contextual information (Gephart, 2004)

Social Construction of IT• Understanding the meanings that technology

has for its users and how these meanings are constituted through communication

• Interpretive flexibility: the emergence of multiple understandings for the same technology

• For example: The divergence between the technologist who designs, implements, and/or supports the technology and the ordinary user who applies that technology to tasks and problems [SNL’s Your Company’s Computer Guy] (Gephart, 2004)

Social Construction of IT• Interpretive flexibility also involves variations in

users’ understandings of IT as well • Any given member might experience both

positive and negative feelings about a new technology, being open to it on the one hand, but harboring reservations about it on the other

• Also, members are open to influence and members do attempt to influence one another about IT

Critical Perspective on IT

• Technology and Managerial Authority• Technology and Neo-Liberal Hegemony• Technology and Global Control• Technology and Resistance

Technology and Managerial Authority

• Information technology innovations tend to reinforce rather than change existing organizational structures and systems of authority (Schwarz, 2002)

• Study of two Australian organizations implementing major information technology initiatives

• The new systems did not lead to structural transformations and did not alter the existing systems of hierarchy and authority

Technology and Managerial Authority

• Management announced the at the outset that IT would fundamentally alter the organization, but as soon as implementation was completed, they began to nudge it back into conformity with their pre-existing values

• Instead of enabling decentralization, management used the system for closer supervision and scrutiny, and individual roles remained much the same

• Non-managers used IT in ways that sustained managerial control because they were “socialized to hierarchy” (Schwarz, 2002)

Technology and Neo-Liberal Hegemony

• Neo-liberal hegemony: a revival and transformation of the economic liberalism that flourished in the United States until the Great Depression in the 1930s.

• Economic liberalism was predicated on free enterprise and free trade with little or no government intervention in the form of controls, barriers, and restrictions.

• Neo-liberalism is a return to basic principles of economic liberalism, but with a new twist involving belief in the primacy of market forces.

Technology and Neo-Liberal Hegemony

• Belief in the primacy of market forces is no longer based on the production of goods and services. The market is an end in itself. Every human transaction is a market transaction, potentially competing with and influencing every other transaction.

• Since the market is the standard and the guide for all human action, it supplants any other system of ethics and beliefs.

• Now how is this connected with technology?

Technology and Neo-Liberal Hegemony

• The neo-liberal position envisions a global, economic order where traditional bureaucratic organization and hierarchy are outmoded. Organizations are boundary-less and do not require centralized systems of authority. The new order is one of flexibility and adaptability to take advantage of the opportunities that the market presents. In other words, the new order is a virtual order that is enabled by technology and also obliges a virtual consciousness.

Technology and Neo-Liberal Hegemony

• Thorne (2005) describes virtual consciousness as a pervasive worldview in which globalization is an inevitable historical framework where virtual organizations are the only viable organizational form. Resistance is pointless.

• Virtual consciousness obscures the capitalist forces that drive the virtual enterprise, reinforce inequalities in wealth and power, and make individuals dispensable. It also ignores the fact that even terrorist and criminal organizations have many characteristics of virtual organizations, including mastery of cyberspace and the global, digital domain.

Technology and Global Control

• If virtual consciousness is pushed beyond the bounds of Western culture, the implication is not just for a global economy, but also for a condition of global control.

• In the present day, new technologies that might seem to be liberating and empowering for the individual as tools have shifted the balance of global power to a cadre of financiers and major multinational corporate executives.

Technology and Global Control

• The concern is mainly about control of corporations and financial institutions over telematics and transnational data flows that enable them to locate the means of production anywhere and control it from anywhere (McMahon, 2002)

• How can a labor union or even a national government negotiate with a multinational enterprise when that enterprise can move jobs to another country?

Technology and Global Control

• What about the differences in influence and effectiveness between large corporations and institutions with the resources to leverage technology in support of their goals and less well-to-do non-profit or non-governmental organizations that lack this capability? [Vegh, 2003]

Technology and Resistance

• Hacktivism: a movement that combines oppositional political activism with the methods and techniques of computer hacking

• Similar to other resistance groups that act by disrupting the processes of dominant systems

• Consider the case of Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT) and its alliance with the anti-government Zapatista movement in Mexico.

Technology and Resistance

• EDT has on various occasions coordinated web sit-ins for the Zapatistas and used a software system known as Floodnet to disrupt the websites of corporations and financial institutions.

• The effectiveness of Floodnet depends on how many web browsers simultaneously use it on a given web site, so its strength from EDT’s standpoint is demonstration of “the solidarity of simultaneous collective action” in electronic civil disobedience (Taylor, 2005).

The Technologized Life

• We would be lost without our laptops, PDAs, and wireless phones

• Gen-Xers and Millennials, having grown up with the technology, may take it for granted, but they might be even more lost without it

• 21st century life for many of us is more thoroughly technologized than ever before

The Technologized Life

• The line between work life and personal life is being obliterated by the extension of work into leisure time and home life

• The pace of technological change obliges continuous adaptation and upgrading of skills. And once an infrastructure is in place for virtual work, it can be accomplished anytime, anywhere, by anyone with the requisite skill sets.