Links

Related blogs and websites

Academia.edu
I am using Academia.edu to share my academic papers.  Click here to go to my Academia.edu page.

Connectivity Scorecard
Orginally sponsored by Nokia Siemens, this is a great interactive resource that shows a 'connectivity score' for over 50 countries.  See how your country rates.  I sometimes use this as a conversation starter in my classes.

Information Overload Research Group (IORG)
This not-for-profit research network was founded in 1992 by Nathan Zeldes and contains loads of resources, including scholarly articles, around the predecessor condition and one of the main outcomes of hyper-connectivity.  Deeply useful and well-organised.  This group meets once a year to discuss issues associated with information overload.

Dynamics of Virtual Work: A European Collaborative Research Network
European network of researchers interested in studying virtual and other new forms of work and organization in an Internet age.  Includes conferences and workshops, as well as other research funding and resources.  Supported by Collaboration in Science and Technology (COST).

Nathan Zeldes
Founder of the Information Overload Research Group, thought leader and speaker, Nathan's website and blogs provide valuable insights into the issues facing individuals, teams and organizations in a digital age.

Backed By Research (BBR) - Kai Riemer's blog
Kai Riemer at the University of Sydney posts insightful observations, commentary and the occasional polite rant on the socio-technical world around us.  Well worth a read and/or following Kai as a thought leader.

The Future of Work
Lynda Gratton's blog considers a range of issues and opportunities associated with the evolving nature of work.  Well-crafted and thought-provoking, Professor's Gratton's insights hold general optimism coupled with critical reflection on multiple human dimensions of work and life in a digital age.

Learning On-line
If you're interested in on-line learning programs and resources, see the Online MBA site.  In a hurry?  The Minute MBA can give you a creative kick-start into a general or current business topic.

The cellphone turns 40

3 April 1973 -- Martin Cooper of Motorola makes the first call on a cellphone.  You can see his witty reflections on that fatal first mobile call (to his counterpart at ATT, who actually pioneered the concept of mobile telephony), the cellphone's impact on society and his vision of the future  in this CNN interview.

Cooper is right in saying that our lives have changed since the introduction of this device, but as Manuel Castells and colleagues suggest, it is not 'mobility' that makes the cell or mobile phone so powerful a tool, as they put it:

"The key feature in the practice of mobile communication is connectivity rather than mobility. This is because, increasingly, mobile communication takes place from stable locations, such as the home, work, or school.  But it is also used from everywhere else, and accessibility operates at any time.  So, while in the early stages of wireless communication it was a substitute for the fixed-line phone when people were on the move, mobile communication now represents the individualized, distributed capacity to access the local/global communication network from any place at any time.  This is how it is perceived by users, and this is how it is used.  With the diffusion of wireless access to the Internet, and to computer networks and information systems everywhere, mobile communication is better defined by its capacity for ubiquitous and permanent connectivity rather than its potential mobility (Castells, Fernandez-Ardevol, Qiu and Sey, Mobile communication and society: A global perspective. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007, p. 248) (emphasis added)." 


Back to Martin Cooper, his vision of the future has cellular/wireless devices continuing to evolve to be even more hands-free and embedded.  And, interestingly, in a sign of the times, the remote interview with Cooper in 2013 was conducted via Skype.

Update: May 2013
M.I.T.'s Technology Review suggests that the move to mobile business models is just beginning.  See article, 'Mobile Computing is Just Getting Started.'

Telecommuting, Yahoo!-style

It is fair and easy to suggest that the whole Marissa Mayer incident at Yahoo! regarding telecommuting has touched a nerve about when, where and how we work.  Yahoo! has turned our attention to Telecommuting!

On the one hand, cool campuses have become du rigour for knowledge work.  For example, the New York Times recently ran a piece on Google's cool New York digs, which is an extension of Google's now famous reputation for being a great, physically attractive place to work.  The article reports that, "Craig Nevill-Manning, a New Zealand native and Google’s engineering director in Manhattan, was the impetus behind the company’s decision to hire a cadre of engineers in New York, and he led an exodus to Chelsea from what was a small outpost near Times Square. “I lobbied for this building,” he told me. “I love the neighborhood. You can live across the street. There are bars and restaurants.”  

Beginning with HP and Apple, and emulated by just about everyone, tech campuses are now legendary for their attractiveness and presumably their productivity as places to work.  Indeed, the benefits of Google culture is what Marissa Mayer no doubt wanted for Yahoo!

On the other hand, there are sensible alternatives to fighting traffic, contributing to global warming and generally giving up hours every day in non-productive commuting. For a summary of the benefits of teleworking, see the Minute MBA video on 'Why telecommuting is good for you and business,' developed by Amy Clark and colleagues at OnLineMBA.com.  Here is their informed take on the situation.

"Here are a handful of the benefits Yahoo will be missing out on by disallowing telecommuting:

1) Increased Productivity: One Stanford study shows call center employees increased their productivity 13% when allowed to work from home. A study from University of Texas Austin shows telecommuters work 5-7 hours more than their in-office counterparts. While it’s easy to think there are too many distractions for employees working from home, the truth is quite the contrary.

2) Reduced Turnover: The cost of turnover is relative to each company – but always considerable. By allowing telecommuting, employees will be happier and therefore less likely to quit. Studies show 73% of telecommuters reporting being happy with their employer compared to just 64% of commuters. Allowing employees to telecommute isn’t just about working in pajamas – it shows employees that their manager’s trust them, boosting esteem and motivation.

3) Improved Morale, Reduce Stress: Americans hate driving to work, and telecommuting reduces employees need to spend money on expensive clothes, fuel, and more. Plus, there is less stress in preparing for a day of work from home. A study from Pennsylvania State University shows telecommuters are regularly less stressed and happier than people working in office.

4) Saving the World: Alright, saving the world is a tall order, but the Consumer Electronics Association did a study that showed telecommuting saves enough energy to power 1 million homes in the United States for an entire year, making telecommuting just another way businesses can reduce their carbon footprint."  Source: Amy Clark, http://www.onlinemba.com/

Teleworking has been a technical option for decades, but the social and managerial resistance to it is still palpable. And that is where Yahoo!'s decision to herd their cats into a single corral has met with a mixture of disbelief and considerable conversation, not least of all because the flexibility offered by telecommuting can be extremely important to working women. How could Marissa have done such a thing?  Harvard's Lakshmi Ramarajan has commented on Mayer's decision and articulates some ways the situation may have been avoided.  See her comments on the HBS blog.

What we need is more research on 'work' as opposed to organizations and management, wherein we understand the shifts in where, when and how work gets done in a digital age.  My other post about telecommuting.

Nathan Zeldes provides an excellent commentary on the Marissa Mayer Yahoo! situation, including his comparison on why telecommuting works at Intel and key questions to determine if and how to implement teleworking.

For more on why the issue of when and how to work seems to be cropping so much lately, see the recent Harvard blog on who should be responsible for time management.

Thanks for reading this.  Now, get back to work.  :-)

Minds for Sale

Hi all,

Yesterday my fantastic Executive MBA class and I were discussing crowdsourcing.  I had seen Paulo Goes earlier in the week talking about this phenomenon, i.e., collective 'intelligence' and super-cheap distributed work.

I have since discovered an entertaining, yet critical, talk that covers crowdsourcing, including optimistic and pessimistic or less optimistic scenarios about the buying and selling human work via ubiquitous computing networks.

"Minds for Sale" is well worth a look.  (Note, it runs over 50 minutes, so you might want to watch when you're at work, or supposed to be working.)  Jonathan Zittrain is from the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet and Society and author of The Future of the Internet and How We Can Stop it (Yale University Press).

Zittrain describes Amazon's Mechanical Turks and other less famous crowdsourcing sites and experiments, including paid product and service reviews for hire. See my post on the cult of rating, ranking and reviewing.

Enjoy!

The Autonomy Paradox

Melissa Mazmanian, Wanda Orlikowski and JoAnne Yates have recently published a great paper on the use of smartphones by professionals.  Entitled 'The autonomy paradox: The implications of mobile email devices for knowledge professionals,' they find that contrary to the literature on autonomy at work, where loss of control is almost universally seen as a negative thing, work-extending technologies, like smartphones, paradoxically both provide flexibility and control over work (especially communication 'flow') and constricts one's ability to get away from work.

Mazmanian and colleagues find that, 'rather than feeling frustrated or trapped, they (knowledge professionals) report that using the mobile device offers them flexibility and capacity to perform their work, and it increases their sense of competence and being in control' (p. 2).  They go on to suggest,

'Our research offers insights into how the use of mobile technologies amplifies practices and capacities of communication, reinforcing professional norms on the one hand and shifting them on the other hand, to engender a new dynamic of continuous--and compulsive--connectivity' (p. 2).

'We identify how professionals rationalise their diminishing autonomy, framing this outcome not as an encroachment but as indispensable to helping them achieve flexibility and accountability in their work' (p. 2).

This is a very well-crafted and readable scholarly article, which I highly recommend to anyone interested in the study of ubiquitous and work-extending technologies. It is based on a qualitative field study and as such has lots of great quotes about smartphone use by knowledge professionals.

This message will self-destruct

Writing for the New York Times, Jenna Wortham suggests that snapchat, an app currently associated with, among other things, teenage sexting may in fact herald a more widely useful feature of messaging, i.e., vanishing after the message is received.  See full NY Times article.  While this seems radically unique, it is basically what our mental image of impromptu messages should be - quickly delivered and quickly discarded.

Years ago, working with a global IT consulting firm, I discovered that instant messaging (IM), which was relatively new, was very popular with employees in this high-tech firm because they believed that, unlike email, the messages were not recorded on company servers.  In reality, most message applications are more like 'email lite,' meaning they are backed up on memory drives and stored for a long time.  But the perception of invisibility to others was appealing then, just as it is now with apps like snapchat.

Interestingly, and somewhat uniquely, now-you-see-it, now-you-don't messaging could be considered a hybrid form of connectivity, that is a Type 3 disconnect for the sender (they control the connection) and Type 2 disconnect for the receiver (the connection is controlled by others).

Smartphones, silly users

In a recent Harvard Business Review blog, 'Smartphones, silly people,' Daniel Gulati provides some great commentary on mobile connectivity and suggests that smartphones are not so much the issue as the bad habits we form around them.

Gulati notes:

'First, we don't remember anything anymore. Research shows that we're increasingly outsourcing our personal memory banks to Google and other search engines, effectively wiping our own brains of easily accessible information. But as the growth of apps per device skyrockets and user interfaces simplify, we're relying on more cognitive crutches than ever. Can't recall the name of your coworker? Don't worry; their LinkedIn profile is just a few taps away. Forgotten the name of that Japanese restaurant down the street? Yelp it up! Look for our memory gaps to grow as we train our brains to recall where information is located, rather than remembering the information itself.

Second, we waste time preserving optionality. As the global smartphone user base surpasses 1 billion, more of us are caught in a terrifying, mobile version of the responsiveness trap. As one young entrepreneur remarked, "It's gotten so ridiculous...I spend more time trading Facebook messages about where to meet, who to invite, and what to talk about than actually sitting in meetings themselves." ...

Finally, we get stuck in the infinite notification loop. As we accumulate newer and more apps, the competition for our limited attention intensifies. As a result, developers are aggressivelybombarding our screens with dozens of daily push notifications in the hope of pulling us back into their individual app. These digital nudges aren't costless — they tax our attention. Psychologists argue that we're all cognitive misers, able to focus effectively on a few key tasks per day. ...

He concludes, 

'As smartphone technology becomes increasingly sophisticated, we can't fool ourselves into thinking that our lives will automatically benefit. Instead of passively falling into costly behavioral traps, actively manage your mobile matters. If you're reading this, you probably own a smartphone. Now, ensure your smartphone doesn't own you.'

Relatedly, Steve Lohr writes in the New York Times recently that 'big data' should not override the uniquely human capacity for intuition and tacit understanding.  See article.

These articles remind us that, when it comes to technology and people, we, the people, make the difference.

For an academic summary of why and how technological 'determinism' is 'well and truly dead.' see Paul Leonardi and Steve Barley's article, link in Reading Corner.