The Workplace Blog

By Shiv Singh

An often forgotten fact about collaboration is that the people who typically want to collaborate are also the ones who trust each other the most. They are also the people who recognize that they can benefit in some manner by collaborating. Those benefits usually extend beyond just learning from one another to also recognizing that their reputations get enhanced as more peers observe their ongoing collaborations. But these people aren’t always in the majority.

As we design and analyze Enterprise 2.0 solutions, many of us work with the assumption that people inherently want to collaborate and that they will given the appropriate tools and motivations. That’s not necessarily true. Some people are more prone towards collaboration - they are the ones that see the obvious benefits. But there are others too - people who don’t recognize the benefits (and in some cases there may not be any at all) and people who fear that the collaboration can limit their competitive advantages among their peers. In other cases, its also simply a matter of trust. People may not want to collaborate with each other because they don’t trust the other people to recognize their contributions and play fairly.

The next generation Enterprise 2.0 applications, won’t just make collaboration easy. They will need to focus on helping organizations to identify who are more naturally inclined to collaborate and who need to collaborate for their jobs. These future applications will give those people the right collaboration tools based on what they’re trying to do and with whom. They will also recognize that there’s a difference between providing sharing capability and allowing for collaborative production. The applications will also be designed with the assumption that not everyone needs to collaborate or should be pushed to collaborate. That’s a different mindset from today but a more practical, logical and desirable one. Hopefully, we will get to that place soon.

by Shiv Singh

The other day a friend over at PricewaterhouseCoopers told me about a computing policy whereby employees receive notices discouraging them from sending emails over the weekend. They get these emails only when they log into their network during the weekend. (Coincidentally, Businessweek covered this policy in its latest issue).

Is this the future of work? A world in which we need guidance on when to send and when not send emails? Have we lost all sense of control over our lives that we need the technology to tell us what to do? Are we turning social construction of technology on its head with our obsessive computer habits? It certainly seems like it.

Social construction of technology or SCOT as its commonly referred to is a theory within the field of Science and Technology Studies which argues that human action shapes technology rather than technology determining human action. As a direct response to technology determinism, social construction of technology also argues that to understand a piece of technology, you have to understand it in its context of use.

But here we are using a piece of technology so obsessively that we need it to tell us when to stop using it. We have human action not just shaping the technology but shaping how the technology needs to guide us towards specific human action in the future. When email was invented, was this a fear that we’d need help in limiting our use?

I believe in social construction of technology and furthermore in the theory that technology cannot be understood devoid of context. I want to find out what aspects of the PricewaterhouseCoopers culture encourages people to email each other over the weekend. I also want to learn about the thinking behind the policy and whether that was something driven by a cultural nuance too. Are some organizations more culturally attuned to policies and procedures that such a policy seems normal in it? Is this the next stage of social construction of technology? This week I have more questions than I have answers.