Technology and Organizations

Organizations are global, partnered with other organizations, and more and more run via virtual teams with limited physical interaction… and those are the recognizable organizations. There are other organizations that remain on the fringe in that their work is done by freelancers so indirectly connected to the organization that it’s hard describe them in organizational terms. Wired’s recent article (by Daniel Roth), The Answer Factory describes one organization where clear decisions have been made to freelance some work, and turn other work over to computer algorithms. True, and thought provoking, integration of technology, organizations, and people.

My university had the honor of hosting a presentation by Jonathan Zittrain, cyberlaw expert and Harvard Law Professor (currently a Visiting Professor at Stanford). His presentation, “Minds for Sale,” focused on “the application of human brainpower as purchasable and fungible as additional server rackspace.” He opened with a pyramid similar to this one:

Each of the organizations in the pyramid uses the Internet to recruit people to do work. At the highest level of Zittrain’s pyramid is InnoCentive, a market for innovation. “Seekers” describe challenges and offer rewards for the solution. Many (most?) of these are serious scientific challenges like this one ($50K reward): “The Seeker is looking for a method to produce a hardened sharp edge from a polymeric, polymer-like, or composite material using a low cost rapid production technology.” At the next level is LiveOps. They also provide a market, but for on-demand call-center workers. LiveOps adds value by training and screening the providers, and then linking providers to companies with call center needs. Mechanical Turk (Amazon) is a self-described “Artificial Artificial Intelligence.” This is another market to match tasks and people, but the tasks are smaller and sometimes routine (e.g., creating key words for images, identifying web sites, writing short paragraphs) — many pay just few cents for completion.

The ESP Game and Google Search are fundamentally different. These are not markets for work, but work is still being done. In the ESP Game you look at images and try and guess a keyword that someone else on the Internet is also adding to that image. You get points for correct matches. It’s a game, but a “game with a purpose.” In the case of ESP, Internet search engines will do a better job because of the keywords added by the people playing the game. The matching of the keywords serves as an easy form of quality control.

Then there is Google Search. Zittrain’s comments gave me a context for thinking about how Google benefits from the fruits of my labor. Every time any of us creates a web link (for example, each of the links I use here as a way of providing a reference), we are adding the the intelligence Google’s search engine uses to pick what search results to show. If I, and many others, link to a place to buy Zittrain’s book The Future of the Internet, then that link is likely to show up near the top of searches on Zittrain’s name, the keywords/title of the book, etc. We’ve done some of Google’s work for them.

An thus the ordering of the pyramid. At the top are clear job opportunities. With InnoCentive, Seekers and Problem Solvers are actually in contact and can interactively refine the work task. LiveOps doesn’t have a direct connection between the person taking the calls and their temporary employer, but there is an interactive training and evaluation process between the call taker and LiveOps. Mechanical Turk and the ESP Game are both instances where the tasks are broken down into relatively small bites, with commensurate rewards. And finally, our work for Google (and all the other search engines) has no interaction, nor explicit permission to use our labor.

Zittrain’s ideas around “Minds for Sale” is that the Internet enables a whole slew of new ways to work for organizations — sometimes without even knowing that you are working for the organization! His discussion goes into far greater and more sophisticated detail, touching on child labor laws, your rights to carry your reputation with you from one market to another, and privacy. This last raised the issue that without interaction, we may not understand the ultimate consequences of the work we are doing. One of his examples highlighted the possibility for the mass identification of dissenters — you can’t hide in the crowd if thousands of people are available to match international identification pictures with pictures from a protest.

As an Internet optimist, I’m focused on how organizations and workers can find new value from boundaryless organizational forms. Zittrain’s work helps me understand new “people” implications that can result from our integration of technology and organizations. In my consideration of TOP (Technology, Organization, People) Management I generally think of people as relating to skills and capabilities, not human implications. Minds for Sale was of value across the full range TOP issues.

pdf of Zittrain’s paper Ubiquitous Human Computing

Y2K, 9/11, H1N1, the financial crisis.  Crises trigger change.  Thank goodness. Otherwise many organizations would look the same today as 20 years ago.  Crises push people to look at opportunities within technology and organizations for responses to the crises — or to take the steps to go along with already built, yet sometimes ignored, technological and organizational innovations.  (Great example of this at UPS in a comment to a prior post.  Thanks, Paul!)  Crises are a case where the People dimension of TOP Management provides extra value.  Our human reaction to crisis gives us an opportunity for change. Managed well, we get to make lemonade out of lemons.

After Y2K, Chris Farrell interviewed (Transcript, Audio) Paul Saffo, Suhas Patil, AnnaLee Saxenian, Rafiq Dossani, Shankar Muniyappa, and others.  Farrell’s analysis included:

Economists initially looked at Y2K as a productivity killer.  Imagine a town threatened by a rising river. Every able-bodied person in town is put to work stacking sandbags. It’s necessary work to save the town – but it’s unproductive work. Nothing gets built. No food gets grown.  With the Y2K bug, programmers, chief information officers, project managers, and other digital workers were getting paid to do unproductive work – stacking sandbags of silicon. No innovative investments. No new productivity enhancing software.  But economists were wrong. Y2K wasn’t a flood.  Instead, think of it as clearing a path choked with underbrush.  Once the trail is open, it is much easier to zip from point A to point B. Y2K gave companies an excuse to clean up their software and hardware underbrush – a critical factor in today’s improved business productivity.

H1N1 may be our next “opportunity.”

In a comment to Rosabeth Moss Kanter’s post, Stay Home and Work,  Jennifer Fraone of the Boston College Center for Work & Family (on Twitter @BCCWF) notes:

…in light of the recent H1N1 flu pandemic, we should also add the fact that telecommuting programs should be implemented in organizations for business continuity reasons. Organizations that utilize regular telecommuting, and develop the technology to support it, will be better prepared for employees to work from home in the event of a disaster or pandemic.

At the Boston College Center for Work & Family, we have long been advocates of fostering more flexible workplaces. We would be happy to join with you in the dialogue to promote flexibility in the “re-invented” modern workplace.

Prof. Kanter had made the point that the barriers to remote work “are the usual human ones” — the P in TOP Management.  It may take a crisis, sadly, to push us to deal more effectively with Kanter’s stated issues of trust and culture.

The tech community is seeing the need to get ahead of the possible H1N1 pandemic.  In a current white paper, Cisco Systems offers: “To ensure business continuity during disaster or pandemic events, it is critical to enable fully functional virtual offices for their workforce.”  In another blog supporting the tech community, Kristen Caretta writes “…for those with no business continuity plans, it’s not too late to craft communication and other policies to ensure that business continues uninterrupted should conditions deteriorate.”  The post also notes that you need to walk a tightrope in terms of being prepared while not scaring employees.

Managers with TOP Management skills will use the threat of H1N1 to prepare for risks, remove barriers to flexible work, and focus the energy in broadly productive ways. They will:

• Weave together technical solutions that can support their organizations under extreme conditions (e.g., vast increase in employees working from home, customer call center increases for health related products)
• Build organizational systems that focus on collaboration skills, productivity, and awareness of others — even when not face to face
• Engage people in innovation and change such that the technology and organizational improvements stick

Have you noticed your organization taking steps to prepare for an H1N1 outbreak?  Has the focus been on the health and safety issues, or are they looking at broader issues?

I don’t generally make futurist-style statements, but the last two days are begging for one: A big piece of Web 3.0 is going to be the transition from “Live in your In-Box” to “Live in your Browser.” The quote “I live in my in-box” came from a participant in a workshop I co-presented with Scott Schnaars of Socialtext. We were talking about the value and methods of moving from an email centric workflow to one more focused on portals and collaboration workspaces (building from my Kill Email post). The idea isn’t that the work we do while “in our in-box” isn’t valuable — it is real work: we are often communicating about projects, ideas, etc. The idea is that the in-box work carries with it more overhead than the same work would if it were done within a project workspace.

Moving into your browser may be a more efficient place to be, and Gen Y may be there ahead of us. Gen Y doesn’t have to unlearn our (Baby Boomer) email habits.

The other event that pushed me to join the futurists was a discussion I had with Caleb Carter, CEO and Founder of ExistInts. ExistInts joins Google, Facebook, and many others in trying to provide you with a new web home. ExistInts adds a local flavor, while also striving to cross work and social boundaries — smart as many of us have woven our work and social networks and activities together already. Having a “home” that is built to support that model makes sense.

The organizational question is what is the right level? Your social network does provide you work value, and vice versa. These are going to be tied together in our workspace. Should organizations be building portal homes at a company level or at the level of the project? Should individuals be building their own portal homes with rooms for work and play?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/nwseaport/ / CC BY 2.0

I feel like we are at the stage of construction where the ground has been cleared and the materials are beginning to arrive. Google is gearing up (pun intended) with Google Wave and the Chrome OS:

We designed Google Chrome for people who live on the web — searching for information, checking email, catching up on the news, shopping or just staying in touch with friends. However, the operating systems that browsers run on were designed in an era where there was no web. So today, we’re announcing a new project that’s a natural extension of Google Chrome — the Google Chrome Operating System. It’s our attempt to re-think what operating systems should be.

.. while smaller firms like Socialtext and ExistInts are providing purpose-built capabilities.

We all need to consider what’s going to make the best neighborhood and architecture for getting our work done. I’m sure it’s going to be in the browser. Have you already moved? In my case, I think I’ve moved, but haven’t completely unpacked. Email still makes up the majority of my work communication and my organization has not yet taken the big step to a web-based workflow. Suggestions appreciated from those of you who’ve moved, unpacked, and finished putting up your pictures.

Tuesday morning I’m representing the sociotechnical view on a panel focused on virtual work. This panel is part of the 2009 Academy of Management meetings in Chicago and will be attended by both novice and expert virtual work researchers. The goal of the panel is to help the group think about important next steps for research and practice. My goal is to raise the issue of individual responsibility in work design.

To prepare for this session I went back to early sociotechnical discussions of work design. In 1951 Trist and Bamforth used the “longwall method of coal-getting” as a backdrop to call for the joint optimization of social (structure & people) and technical (task and technology) systems in work. They call for “those in authority” to take task and social structures into account. In 1977 Bostrom and Heinen (here and here presented a clear sociotechnical approach to the design and implementation of information systems. They speak of the role of the “steering committee” in the integration of social and technical systems for work. In 2008 Chen and Nath note that “Organizations need to understand” the interrelated roles of the social and technical systems.

These approaches highlight the role management plays in work design. In my presentation I’m going to highlight the role the individual can play in work design. My colleagues and I acknowledged the role of the individual in our paper Information Technology and the Changing Fabric of Organization – but in Tuesday’s talk I’m going to make the individual the focus. This is a chance to bring my perspective of “all of us as systems designers” into a formal research setting. My past blog discussions have touched on ideas of owning your own tools, the extent to which individuals have the systems savvy to see both organizational and technical opportunities, how individuals can get more from learning by understanding their own learning styles. The point is that many of us have much more control over our own work design (thanks to increased flexibility in both technologies and work practices), yet little sociotechnical work design research has looked at how individuals can be sociotechnical designers for their own work. (Parker, Wall, & Cordery, 2001, note that work design models should include how individuals might mold the job, but do not point to particular research findings.)

As managers we are responsible for providing our employees with the skills to do their jobs. I’m going to argue Tuesday that, especially in the world of virtual work, managers are responsible for providing employees with the skills to design their jobs as well. Anyone care to start the discussion a couple days early?

One thing the zillions of pilots attending AirVenture 2009 have in common is the need to grasp a great deal of disparate information, and then maintain that information for on-going testing. They are similar in this way to doctors, lawyers, and others who either have to prove their proficiency on some schedule, or whose knowledge base changes such that they must have on-going education. Personal computers and the Internet have changed the options for professional and most other learning. We can now often choose between face-to-face instructor-led, online, dvd-based, or a blend for our learning. When we have the luxury of making the choice ourselves, what’s the best choice to make?

The Oracle of Apollo at Delphi is to have said “Know Thyself” in response to the question “What is best for man?” I have said something similar, though not in Greek, in terms of self-selecting formal (e.g., a formal class) versus informal learning (e.g., searching the internet) based on your level of competency (low competency: pick formal, high competency: informal). Here I’ll focus on rank beginners so the choice of formal has already been made. How do you use knowledge of your own learning style and context to effectively pick the best way to learn? For example, how do choose between face-to-face, online, dvd-based, or some combination for ground school?

Today I talked to representatives from two of the top pilot training materials providers: Gleim & King. Both companies provide the full range of topics and formats. I’ll focus on Gleim as I had the greatest chance to chat at their booth. I asked Katie (Thanks, Katie) what the issues were in making the choice between an instructor-led face-to-face (my local flight school uses Gleim books) and the home-study options.

She asked many good questions, including:

• Do I have the ability to make a weekly course? In my case, not really: 10 Wed nights, I’d miss some for work.
• Do I mind asking questions in front of others in the class? No, I probably ask too many for the instructor’s comfort, though.
• Would I be paying by the hour? No, so the overall cost of the course is not a determinant in my case.
• Do I need a schedule to keep me going? Probably not, I’m pretty disciplined about some things — and many of the home-study programs track you and will make contact if you seem to be slipping.

These points focus on schedule and discipline.

She also covered topics that I’ll call “learning style.” Do you learn best when you read things over at your own pace? Do you learn best when you print things out to go back to? All the pilot education programs have options for computer-based instruction that includes videos, testing, and review. Here’s where it is helpful to know your learning style.

Learning style speaks to how people take in and process information. However, the learning style you are most comfortable with may not be the style where you will learn the most (pdf).

Moallem provides an approach to evaluating learning style:

• What type of information is best perceived? Concrete, practical, oriented toward facts and procedures; or conceptual, innovative, oriented toward theories and meanings?
• What modality is most effective? Visual representations of presented material—pictures, diagrams, flow charts; or written and spoken explanations?
• What organization of information is preferred? Presentations that proceed from the specific to the general; or presentations that go from the general to the specific?
• How is information best processed? Learning by trying things out, working with others; or learning by thinking things through, working alone?
• How does understanding generally progress? Linear, orderly, learning in small incremental steps; or holistic, system thinking, learning in large leaps?

Courses, instructors, and individual decisions about how to study can all be tailored to the above. I expect people reading this blog have enough educational experiences to draw upon to make judgments about the forms where they have been most successful. Using these questions I can see that a self-study approach is likely to serve me best, especially when combined with my scheduling problems.

I know myself enough to focus on the frameworks, visual presentation, and general to specific – this is possible in either instructor-led or self-study. Self-study, however, wins out in my case for learning by thinking things through, making mistakes on my own and in developing a holistic, systematic understanding of the material (rather than a more linear approach). This last is hard in setting where a class agenda must be followed for a group of people.

Generalizing back to more common settings: when organizational learning experts make decisions about how to provide training for the whole organization, they are doing it from the perspective of what is going to be best on-average. It is rare that they can focus on an individual’s particular needs. That said, as individuals within organizations, we have the ability and responsibility to find the best way to maintain our own knowledge. Many organizations do provide options in the forms of education they make available. We are all learning all the time, even if we don’t have to prove it to maintain our professional standing or licensure. Given available options, we are all becoming learning system designers (just as we are all becoming systems designers of our work settings in other ways).  At the same time, knowledge is becoming more of a currency. Use your knowledge of your schedule, your learning style, and your own discipline to stock your account.