The JP Allen Blog

The dynamic team of Steve Sawyer, Julie Rennecker, and myself pulled off another successful meeting of the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) Working Group 9.1, immediately after the ICIS 2009 conference in Phoenix. We went for a conversational format in small groups, rather than a barrage of presentations, and the participants agreed it was a winner.

You can see the high quality line-up of speakers and abstracts at our workshop website, available here.  (If anyone wants to know the pros and cons of building with Google Sites, I have some opinions…)

Looks like we’ll go for another post-ICIS workshop in St. Louis next year.

I gave two Instructional Technology talks recently, one formal and one spontaneous.

The formal one was a presentation to our USF Wikis and Blogs group on “Pro Blogging for Dorks Academics”. I talked about the main tradeoffs I see for academic blogging:

• The personal vs. professional balance
• The person vs. topic focus

I also talked about why academic blogging has been valuable for me:

• Self-expression – the usual reason to blog, but looking back over a year’s worth of posts, categories, topics and tags gives you a new perspective on your interests. Writing practice doesn’t hurt either.
• Republishing – I’ve had at least one example of a conference paper that was translated and published in a journal, after it was found on the blog.
• Connections – I’ve met people with similar interests, both academic and professional, that I wouldn’t have found otherwise. My biggest success was finding the designer of a web site I had used in a teaching case, with zero additional work on my part. I posted my case, and within 24 hours the designer, who I had never met before, left a comment with great behind-the-scenes information about the site.
• Media – I’ve had reporters find me through my blog, which can be good or annoying. I showed a recent example where my analytics data told me a reporter had spent almost half an hour on my blog before contacting me for an interview. That information gave me confidence this person was serious, and worth giving some time to.
• Explaining publications – hey, academic publications don’t make sense to a lot of people basically everyone, including people who might be able to use your findings. Blog posts give me the chance to explain publications and presentations in somewhat normal language.
• The living CV – I’m not sure if this is good or not, but I seem to do many things that wouldn’t make it to my academic CV.  The academic blog is a place to capture those. It’s great for those end-of-year reviews, promotion cases, and to quickly introduce others to my work and interests.

Two days later, I gave a spontaneous show-and-tell on my Moodle site (university.jpedia.org) that I use instead of our official Blackboard product. USF is considering Moodle as an alternative, but it will be another classic example of selling the unfamiliar benefits of open source to an institution that has spent serious time and energy on the proprietary path. In industry, open source can sneak in the back door on new projects, and gradually take over from within. Ripping out the existing system is a tougher sell, without some vision of the long-term innovation benefits.

Steve Sawyer and I organizing the second IFIP 9.1 workshop on IT and the Future of Work. With all the research focus on technologies and business models, we believe that significant changes to the nature of work itself might not be getting the attention they deserve. That’s why we’re so excited about this paper line-up for the workshop:

• “The role of professional networking websites in business relationship building” by Lih-Bin Oh (National University of Singapore) and Yao Zhang (Xiamen University)
• “The establishment of pervasive control mechanisms as a consequence of compliance with the Sarbanes-Oxley act” by Gasparas Jarulaitis (Norwegian University of Science and Technology)
• “Is IT employment in the United States really hurt by offshoring and work immigration?” by Sonia Vilvovsky (Bentley College)
• “A longitudinal investigation of practice adaptation in a successful open source development project” by Mary Beth Watson-Manheim (University of Illinois, Chicago), Katherine M. Chuboda (Utah State University), and Sanjeev Jha (University of Illinois, Chicago)
• “The integration of tools and systems in inter-disciplinary work” by Torstein Hjelle (Norwegian University of Science and Technology)
• “The three modalities of work and their needs for IT support” by Markku I. Nurminen (University of Turku)
• “How the new web is embedding itself in everyday life and work” by me (USF)
• “Users and information systems: Two empty concepts that mean so much” by Steve Sawyer (Penn State University).

Why not join us in Montréal on Wednesday, December 12th?

What’s really new about the new generation of web sites and services?

Whether we call it Web 2.0, mass collaboration, online community, or social networking, I believe what’s really new is how large-scale knowledge sharing, and the services built on top of this knowledge, are allowing the web to deeply embed itself in normal, everyday life.

Research has shown how the boundaries between online and off, private and public, work and living are all being blurred by mobile phone use (see my review essay in The Information Society, January 2007, for more details). I argue that these boundaries are also blurring on the new web.

“Worklife is being affected by the ‘consumerization’ of IT, and everyday non-working activities are being subjected to analytic scrutiny normally reserved for the working world: detailed peer review, in-depth data collection and analysis, and rapid experimentation.”

The abstract for my presentation on “How the new web is embedding itself in everyday work and life“, to be delivered at the 2007 IFIP 9.1 post-ICIS workshop on Computers and Work is available online. Slides to come.

Working Group 9.1 is the division within IFIP (the International Federation for Information Processing) responsible for research on computers and work.

After a few years of inactivity, a team of new officers is working to ‘relaunch’ IFIP WG 9.1. As the newly elected Secretary of the group, I will be the true power behind the throne, with the new Chair (Steve Sawyer, Penn State) and Vice Chair (Rudi Schmiede, Technische Universität Darmstadt) filling out the rest of the management team.

One of our first tasks is to create a new mission statement for the group. The current draft is:

The mission of IFIP Working Group 9.1 (Computers and Work) is to promote, facilitate and disseminate research on ICTs and work, in order to promote quality of life, technology that meets human needs, and social accountability. IFIP WG 9.1 strives to identify important new perspectives on the future of ICTs and new ways of working, and to communicate the social and organizational consequences of ICTs and work.

If you have comments or suggestions, we would love to hear them, either here on the blog, or at the new official IFIP WG 9.1 website.

Our next official workshop and meeting will be immediately after the ICIS 2007 conference in Montréal. Please join us!

A big part of the web’s future impact on business will be through its ability to share knowledge almost effortlessly over large social networks. I call this ‘lightweight knowledge sharing’ (LKS – licks? lucks?), and in an upcoming presentation I’ll be contrasting LKS with what I call ‘traditional Knowledge Management’ (KM).

Traditional KM assumes that people need to be bribed or coerced into sharing knowledge. KM also requires a large up-front investment on pre-defined categorization schemes, and large knowledge bases. Lightweight knowledge sharing, in contrast, assumes that people want to share. Simple tools such as blogs and wikis can become a means for large-scale knowledge sharing through the combination of: 1) simple syndication (subscription), and 2) simple ‘social graphs’ that naturally define which subscriptions are of interest. LinkedIn and Facebook are two interesting examples of this trend.

Both the slides and the abstract are available online. These slides will be presented at IFIP 9.1 Computers & Work workshop in St. Gallen, Switzerland.