4

INFORMATION SYSTEMS AND THE DESIGN OF WORK

Best Buy, the leading U.S. retailer in electronics, completely transformed its view of the ordinary workday. Once known for killer hours and herd-riding bosses, it ushered in a new approach to work: Results-Only Work Environment (ROWE). ROWE was the brainchild of two passionate employees who thought that Best Buy managers were mired in analog-age inertia and did not recognize that employees could use technology to perform work from a variety of places. The ROWE developers thought implementing a flextime program “stigmatizes those who use it. . . and keeps companies acting like the military (fixated on schedules) when they should behave more like MySpace (social networks where real-time innovation can flourish).”¹

ROWE is a program that allows limitless flexibility when it comes to work hours. Employees can choose where and when they will do their work—as long as project goals are satisfied. IS enhance the flexibility of ROWE programs because they make it possible for workers to be away from the office but still connected when needed. Employee decisions about working hours and location are framed by 13 guideposts—the most surprising of which is “Every meeting is optional.”

How can Best Buy's approach work? Since the program's implementation, average voluntary turnover has fallen by 45%,² whereas productivity is up an average 35% in departments that have switched to ROWE. Overall employee satisfaction is up as well.³ This is credited to the greater flexibility in handling the balance between their work and personal lives—a flexibility that would not be possible without IT to keep them connected. Best Buy clearly has adopted one of the most accommodating approaches to work hours, but 79% of employers now allow their employees some flexibility. A third or more of IBM and AT&T employees have no official office, and Sun Microsystems Inc. calculates that it has saved over $400 million in real estate costs by allowing nearly half of its employees to work anywhere they want.⁴

The Best Buy example illustrates how the nature of work is changing before our eyes—and information technology is supporting, if not propelling, the changes. In preindustrial societies, work was seamlessly interwoven into everyday life. Activities all revolved around nature's cyclical rhythms (i.e., the season, day and night, the pangs of hunger) and the necessities of living. The Industrial Revolution changed this. With the advent of clocks and the ability to divide time into measurable, homogeneous units for which they could be paid, people started to separate work from other spheres of life. Their workday was distinguished from family, community, and leisure time by punching a time clock or responding to the blast of a factory whistle. Work was also separated into space as well as time as people started going to a particular place to work.⁵

Technology has now brought the approach to work full circle in that the time and place of work are increasingly blended with other aspects of living. People now can do their work in their own homes at times that accommodate home life and leisure activities. They are able to enter cyberspace—a virtually unlimited space full of opportunities.⁶ Paradoxically, however, they want to create a sense of belonging within that space. That is, they wish to create a sense of “place,” which is a bounded domain in space that structures their experiences and interactions with objects that they use and others that they meet in this “place.” People learn to identify with these places, or locations in space, based on a personal sharing of experiences with others within the space. Over time visitors to the place associate with it a set of appropriate behaviors.⁷ Increasingly places are being constructed in space with Web 2.0 tools that encourage collaboration, allowing people to easily communicate on an ongoing basis.

The Information Systems Strategy Triangle, discussed in Chapters 1 and 3, suggests that changing IS results in altered organizational characteristics. Significant changes in IS and the work environments in which they function are bound to coincide with significant changes in the way that companies are structured and how people experience work in their daily lives. Chapter 3 explores how IT influences organizational design. This chapter examines how IT is related to changing the nature of work, the rise of new work environments, and IT's impact on different types of workers where and when they do their work, and how they work with one another. This chapter looks at how IT enables and facilitates a shift toward collaborative work. The terms IS and IT are used interchangeably in this chapter, and only basic details are provided on technologies used. The point of this chapter is to look at the impact of IT on the way work is done by individuals and teams. This chapter should help managers understand the challenges in designing technology-intensive work and develop a sense of how to address these challenges and overcome resistance to IT in our rapidly changing world.

WORK DESIGN FRAMEWORK

As the place and time of work becomes less distinguishable from other aspects of people's lives, the concept of “jobs” is changing and being replaced by the concept of work. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, a job meant a discrete task of a short duration with a clear beginning and end.⁸ By the mid-20th century the concept of job had evolved into an ongoing, often unending stream of meaningful activities that allowed the worker to fulfill a distinct role. More recently organizations are moving away from organization structures built around particular jobs to a setting in which a person's work is defined in terms of what needs to be done.⁹ In many organizations it is no longer appropriate for people to establish their turfs and narrowly define their jobs to only address specific functions. Yet, as jobs “disappear,” IT can enable workers to better perform their roles in tomorrow's workplace; that is, IT can help workers function and collaborate in accomplishing work that more broadly encompasses all the tasks that need to be done.

In this chapter a simple framework is used to assess how emerging technologies may affect work. As is suggested by the Information Systems Strategy Triangle (in Chapter 1), this framework links the organizational strategy with IS decisions. This framework is useful in designing key characteristics of work by asking key questions and helping identify where IS can affect how the work is done. Consider the following questions:

• What work will be performed? Understanding what tasks are needed to complete the process being done by the worker requires an assessment of specific desired outcomes, inputs, and the transformation needed to turn inputs into outcomes. Many types of work are based upon recurring operations such as those found in manufacturing plants or service industries. The value chain helps understand the workflow for key tasks that are performed (i.e., purchasing, materials handling, manufacturing, customer service, repair). Increasingly work involves managing knowledge, which typically displays different patterns of tasks. Understanding changes in tasks helps better understand changes in the nature of work.
• Who is going to do the work? Sometimes the work can be automated. However, if a person is going to do the work, who should that person be? What skills are needed? From what part of the organization should that person come? If a team is going to do the work, many of these same questions need to be asked. However, they are asked within the context of the team: Who should be on the team? What skills do the team members need? What parts of the organization need to be represented by the team? Will the team members be dispersed?
• Where will the work be performed? With the increasing availability of networks, Web 2.0 tools, and the Internet, managers can now design work for workers who are not physically near them. Does the work need to be performed locally at a company office? Can it be done remotely at home? On the road?
• When will the work be performed? In many parts of the world, a job between 9-5 is an anomaly. Increasingly we are seeing companies adopting flexible scheduling such as Best Buy did. The reality of modern technologies is that they often tether employees to a 24 hours a day/7 days a week (24/7) schedule where they always have to respond to their mobile.
• How can IT increase the effectiveness of the workers doing the work? How can IT help workers communicate with other workers to get the work done? How can IT support collaboration? What can be done to increase the acceptance of IT-induced change? In this text the overarching questions are how to leverage IT to help improve work and how to keep IT from inhibiting work. Sometimes this means automating certain tasks. For example, computers are much better at keeping track of inventory, calculating compensation, and many other repetitious tasks that are opportunities for human error. On the other hand, ITs provide increasing support for communication and collaboration tasks among workers.

Figure 4.1 shows how these questions can be used in a framework to incorporate IS into the design of work. Although it is outside the scope of this chapter to discuss the current research on either work or job design, the reader is encouraged to read these rich literatures.

FIGURE 4.1 Framework for work design.

HOW INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY SUPPORTS COMMUNICATION AND COLLABORATION

Though it may seem like putting the cart before the horse, the discussion will respond to the last question in Figure 4.1 first. This is because many of the changes that are described in later sections of this chapter have been supported, if not propelled, by IT. Some of these technologies such as social networking and blogs seem to have been introduced into the workplace by digital natives when they started their first full-time jobs. However, businesses are still trying to get a handle on how these technologies can be applied to work-related applications. Figure 4.2 describes major technologies that have affected communications in today's work environment.

The IT support for communication is considerable and growing. It includes technologies such as e-mail, intranets, instant messaging, VoIP, video teleconferencing, unified communications, RSS, virtual private networks, and file transfer.

In addition to communication, collaboration also is a key task in many work processes. IS greatly changed how collaboration is done. It is important for an organization's survival. Thomas Friedman, the author of the popular The World is Flat, and other books, argues that collaboration is the way that small companies can “act big” and flourish in today's flat world. The key to success is for such companies “to take advantage of all the new tools for collaboration to reach farther, faster, wider and deeper.”¹⁰ Collaboration tools include social networking sites, virtual worlds, Web logs (blogs), wikis, and groupware. They often leverage collaboration by increasing available connections. The major collaboration tools also are described in Figure 4.2.

HOW INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY CHANGES THE NATURE OF WORK

Advances in IT provide an expanding set of tools that make individual workers more productive and broaden their capabilities. They transform the way work is performed—and the nature of the work itself. This section examines three ways in which new IT alters employee life: by creating new types of work, by enabling new ways to do traditional work, and by supporting new ways to manage talent.

Creating New Types of Work

IT often leads to the creation of new jobs or redefines existing ones. The high-tech field emerged in its entirety over the past 60 years and has created a wide range of positions in the IT sector, such as programmers, analysts, IT managers, hardware assemblers, Web site designers, software sales personnel, social media specialists, and IT consultants. A study based on the Bureau of Labor Statistics places the number of IT workers in the United States at an all-time high of 4.1 million workers.¹¹ Even within traditional non-IT organizations, the growing reliance on IS creates new types of jobs, such as knowledge managers who manage firms' knowledge systems (see Chapter 11 for more on knowledge management), community managers who manage the firm's online communities, and communications managers, who manage the use of communication technologies for the business. IS departments also employ individuals who help create and manage the technologies, such as systems analysts, database administrators, network administrators, and network security advisors. The Internet has given rise to many other types of jobs, such as Web masters and site designers. Virtually every department in every business has someone who “knows the computer” as part of their job.

FIGURE 4.2 IT tools for communication and collaboration.

New Ways to Do Traditional Work

Changing the Way Work Is Done

IT has changed the way work is done. Many traditional jobs are now done by computers. For example, computers can check spelling of documents, whereas traditionally that was the job of an editor or writer. Jobs once done by art and skill are often greatly changed by the introduction of IT. Workers at one time needed an understanding of not only what to do, but also how to do it; now their main task often is to make sure the computer is working because the computer does the task for them. Sadly, many cashiers no longer seem to be able to add, subtract, or take discounts because they have grown so used to letting the computer in POS terminal do the calculations for them. Workers once were familiar with others in their organization because they passed work to them; now they may never know those co-workers because the computer routes the work. In sum, the introduction of IT into an organization can greatly change the day-to-day tasks performed by the workers in the organization.

In her landmark research, Shoshana Zuboff describes a paper mill, where papermakers' jobs were radically changed with the introduction of computers.¹² The papermakers mixed big vats of paper and knew when the paper was ready by the smell, consistency, and other subjective attributes of the mixture. For example, one worker could judge the amount of chlorine in the mixture by sniffing and squeezing the pulp. They were masters at their craft, but they were not able to explicitly describe to anyone else exactly what was done to make paper. The company, in an effort to increase productivity in the papermaking process, installed an information and control system. Instead of the workers looking at and personally testing the vats of paper, the system continuously tested parameters and displayed the results on a panel located in the control room. The papermakers sat in the control room, reading the numbers, and making decisions on how to make the paper. Many found it much more difficult, if not impossible, to make the same quality paper when watching the control panel instead of personally testing, smelling, and looking at the vats. The introduction of the information system resulted in different skills needed to make paper. Abstracting the entire process and displaying the results on electronic readouts required skills to interpret the measurements, conditions, and data generated by the new computer system.

In another example, salespeople at a snack company have portable terminals that not only keep track of inventory, but also help them in the selling function. Prior to the information system, the salespeople used manual processes to keep track of inventory in their trucks. When visiting customers, it was only possible to tell them what was missing from their shelves and to replenish any stock they wanted. With IT, the salespeople have become more like marketing and sales consultants, helping the customers with models and data of previous sales, floor layouts, and replenishment as well as forecasting demand based on analysis of the data histories stored in the IS. The salespeople need to do more than just be persuasive. They now must also do data analysis and floor plan design, in addition to using the computer. Thus, the skills needed by the salespeople, as well as the workflow, have greatly changed with the introduction of IT.

One of the biggest changes in workflow has been in the area of data entry. In the past the workflow included capturing the data, keying it into the system, rekeying it to check its accuracy, and then processing it. The workflow is now changed to capture the data directly when it is entered by the user in a variety of ways including on the Web, with a GPS signal, or by reading the RFID code. A program may check its accuracy when it is captured and then it is processed. Thus, the steps in the workflow are drastically reduced and the process is much faster.

The Internet enables changes in many types of work. For example, within minutes, financial analysts can download an annual report from a corporate Web site to their smartphones and check what others have said about the company's growth prospects. They can automatically receive RSS Web feeds for stock updates from Google every few seconds. Librarians can check the holdings of other libraries online and request that particular volumes be routed to their own clients, or download the articles from a growing number of databases. Marketing professionals can pretest the reactions of consumers to potential products in virtual worlds. Sales jobs are radically changing to complement online ordering systems. Technical support agents diagnose and resolve problems on client computers using the Internet and software from Motive Communications. The cost and time required to access information has plummeted, increasing personal productivity and giving workers new tools. It is hard to imagine a job today that doesn't have a significant information systems component.

Changing Communication Patterns

All one has to do is observe people walking down a busy downtown street or a college campus to note changes in communication patterns over a period as short as the last decade. Some people are talking on their cell phones, but even more are texting or using apps for all kinds of reasons such as checking out game scores, specials at nearby restaurants, or movie times. Or observe what happens when a plane lands. It is possible that as many as half the people on the plane whip out their portable devices or cell phones as soon as the plane touches down. They are busy making arrangements to meet the people who are picking them up at the airport or checking to see the calls they missed while in flight. Finally, consider meeting a friend at a busy subway station in Hong Kong. It is virtually impossible, without the aid of a cell phone, to locate one another.

Applications (Apps) such as Skype, Twitter, and Sina Weibo (Chinese Twitter) have changed how people communicate. Traditionally, people found each other in person to have a conversation. With the telephone, people called each other. Along came e-mail, which rapidly became the communication technology of choice since it decoupled the time the sender sends the message from the time the recipient receives it. Today, people have an array of communications technology and once again IT is changing communication patterns. Some rely on texting, others on Skype, still others on social networks such as Facebook or Renren for their primary communications channel. The challenge created by the large number of choices is that it's now much more difficult to communicate with others. Individuals now have to have a presence in numerous platforms in order to ensure they can be contacted. Worse still is that one must not only know how to contact someone, but the preferred medium might change during the day, week, or month. For example, while during normal business hours, an employee might prefer to receive an e-mail or a phone all. After hours, he might prefer a text, and late at night, while surfing the Web, he may prefer a chat line, or Facebook message, or even Skype. Without knowledge of the recipients' preferences for how to receive the message, the sender is likely to be unsuccessful in communicating with the recipient over the proper channel. If a sender doesn't know which medium the recipient prefers, he might use one medium (e.g., e-mail) to see if the recipient minds using another medium (e.g., phone).

Similarly, IT is changing the communication patterns of workers. There are still some workers who do not need to communicate with other workers for the bulk of their workday—however that workday is defined. For example, many truck drivers do not interact with others in their organization. But consider the example of a Walmart driver who picks up goods dropped off by manufacturers at the Walmart distribution center and then delivers those goods in small batches to each of the Walmart stores. Walmart has connected its drivers with radios and satellites so that they can pick up goods from manufacturers on the return trip after they have dropped off their goods at the Walmart stores. In this way, Walmart saves the delivery charges from that manufacturer and conserves energy in the process. Walmart drivers use IT to save money by enhancing their communications with suppliers.¹³

Changing Organizational Decision Making and Information Processing

IT changes not only organizational decision-making processes, but also the information used in making those decisions. Data processed to create more accurate and timely information are being captured earlier in the process. Through technologies such as RSS Web feeds, information that they need to do their job can be pushed to them.

IT can change the amount and type of information available to workers. For example, salespeople can use technology to get quick answers to customer questions. Further, Web 2.0 tools allow salespeople to search for best practices on a marketing topic over a social network and to benefit from blogs and wikis written by informed employees in their company. Furthermore, organizations now maintain large historical business databases, called data warehouses, which can be mined by using tools to analyze patterns, trends, and relationships in the data warehouses. We discuss data management in Chapter 11.

In their classic 1958 Harvard Business Review article, Leavitt and Whisler boldly predicted that IT would shrink the ranks of middle management by the 1980s.¹⁴ Because of IT, top-level executives would have access to information and decision-making tools and models that would allow them to easily assume tasks previously performed by middle managers. Other tasks clearly in the typical job description of middle managers at the time would become so routinized and programmed because of IT that they could be performed by lower-level managers. As Leavitt and Whisler predicted, the 1980s saw a shrinking in the ranks of middle managers. This trend was partly attributable to widespread corporate downsizing. However, it was also attributable to changes in decision making induced by IT. Since the 1980s, IT has become an even more commonly employed tool of executive decision makers. IT has increased the flow of information to these decision makers and provided tools for filtering and analyzing the information.

Changing Collaboration

Whereas decision making in organizations is often viewed as deliberate and distinct acts, an increasing amount of work being performed by teams is definitely more fluid.¹⁵ Teams have learned to collaborate by continually structuring and restructuring their work—constantly adjusting their highly entwined actions—to respond to their ever-evolving environments.

IT helps make work more team-oriented and collaborative. Technologies such as blogs, virtual worlds, wikis, social networking, and video teleconferencing provide collaborative applications that facilitate creating groups that form around a large number of goals at a rate much faster than ever before. Workers can more easily share information with their teammates. They can send documents over computer networks to others, and they can more easily ask questions using e-mail or instant messaging.

The president of a New York-based marketing firm, CoActive Digital, decided to implement a wiki to have a common place where 25 to 30 people could go to share a variety of documents ranging from large files to meeting notes and PowerPoint presentations.¹⁶ An added benefit is that the wiki is encrypted, protected, and used with a VPN. The president recognized that the challenge for implementing the wiki would be to change a culture in which e-mail had long been the staple for communication. Consequently, he decided to work closely with the business leader of the business development group. This group handles inquiries from customers and coordinates how the work (i.e., marketing campaigns) gets done internally. The group has lots of meetings and lots of work that needs to be shared. He populated the wiki site with documents that had been traded over e-mail, such as meeting notes, and with relevant documents and asked the business leader to encourage her group members to use the wikis. It took some effort, but eventually the group learned to appreciate the benefits of the wiki for collaboration.

Verifone's company culture is one that encourages information sharing. A story is told of a new salesperson who was trying to close a particularly big deal. He was about to get a customer signature on the contract when he was asked about the competition's system. Being new to the company, he did not have an answer, but he knew he could count on the company's information network for help. He asked his customer for 24 hours to research the answer. He then sent a note to everyone in the company asking the questions posed by the customer. The next morning, he had several responses from others around the company. He went to his client with the answers and closed the deal. What is interesting about this example is that the “new guy” was treated as a colleague by others around the world, even though they did not know him personally. He was also able to collaborate with them instantaneously. It was standard procedure, not panic time, because of the culture of collaboration in this company. With increased use of social networks and other social tools, instantaneous collaboration is commonplace.¹⁷

The Internet greatly enhances collaboration. Beyond sharing and conversation, teams can also use the Internet and Web 2.0 to create something together. An example here is the well-known Web-based site Wikipedia. Further, teams can undertake collective action that creates a situation for its members to share something and make something happen For example, IBM's ThinkPlace, is an open intranet forum for presenting, developing, and implementing ideas throughout the company. Once an idea is posted on ThinkPlace, it is immediately available for comments and suggestions by other employees. Since the third quarter of 2005 when it was launched, more than 160,000 users introduced over 18,000 ideas. Of the more than 350 ideas that were already adopted, savings of over $500 million were generated. Typically the ideas start small and morph into inexpensive implementable ideas. For instance, in response to a question about recapturing third-party software licenses that had been lost when employees left the company, a formal license tracking process was proposed that led to the transfer of licenses to employees who could use them. Further discussion led to an implementation as a mashup, or combination of data, presentation, or functionality from two or more sources, which was sponsored by an IBM director responsible for the Situational Applications Environment.¹⁸

Changing the Ways to Connect

Probably one of the biggest changes that people are experiencing as a result of new technologies is that they are always connected. In fact, many feel tethered to their mobile phones or laptop to the extent that they must be available at all times to respond to requests from their boss or customers. As a result the boundaries between work and play are being blurred and people often struggle with work-life balance.

Businesses are still trying to get their arms around the technological advances that are becoming so commonplace. Many in the workforce find that their technology at home differs from that at work. Whereas many use social media tools on their iPads, laptops, or smartphones during the weekend at home, they find themselves on Monday mornings staring into a black screen with green letters on a monitor attached to a desktop that has little Internet connectivity.¹⁹ They find this quite bothersome. In fact, a recent Cisco Systems survey of young professionals and college students found that one in three believes the Internet is as important as air, water, food, and shelter and two in five say they would accept a lower-paying job that had more flexibility with regard to device choice, social media access, and mobility over a higher-paying job with less flexibility.²⁰ In commenting on the survey findings, Marie Hattar, vice president, Enterprise Marketing, Cisco, stated:

Hattar believes this has implications for CIOs:

CIOs have the ability to drastically improve productivity by making available directories of knowledge holders with these newer social media tools. Consider IBM's SmallBlue—an opt-in social network analysis tool that maps the knowledge and the connections of IBM employees. SmallBlue can be used to find employees with specific knowledge or skills, display employee networks on particular topics, validate a person's expertise based on their corporate profile, and display a visualization of an employees' personal social networks. IBM claims that SmallBlue has promoted innovation, effectiveness, and efficiency.²²

The preceding examples show how IS are a key component in the design of work. IS can greatly change the day-to-day tasks, which in turn change the skills needed by workers. The examples show that adding IS to a work environment change the way work is done.

New Challenges in Managing People

New working arrangements create new challenges in how workers are supervised, evaluated, compensated, and even hired. When most work was performed individually in a central location, supervision and evaluation were relatively easy. A manager could directly observe the employee who spent much of his or her day in an office. It was fairly simple to determine whether or not the employee was present and productive.

Modern organizations often face the challenge of managing a workforce that is spread across the world, working in isolation from direct supervision, and working more in teams. Rather than working in a central office, many salespeople labor remotely and rely on laptop computers, Web 2.0, and smart phones to link them to customers and their office colleagues. The technical complexity of certain products, such as enterprise software, necessitates a team-based sales approach combining the expertise of many individuals; it can be difficult to say which individual closed a sale, making it difficult to apportion individual-based rewards.

FIGURE 4.3 Changes to supervision, evaluations, compensation, and hiring.

One technological solution, electronic employee monitoring (introduced in Chapter 3), replaces direct supervision by automatically tracking certain activities, such as the number of calls processed, e-mail messages sent, or time spent surfing the Web. Direct employee evaluation can be replaced, in part, by pay-for-performance compensation strategies that reward employees for deliverables produced or targets met, as opposed to subjective factors such as “attitude” or “teamwork.” These changes are summarized in Figure 4.3.

The introduction of ROWE at Best Buy illustrates the need to change from an approach where managers watch employees and count the hours they spend at their desks, to one that focuses instead on the work they actually do. Best Buy's Senior Vice President, John “J.T.” Thompson admitted, “For years I had been focused on the wrong currency. I was always looking to see if people were here. I should have been looking at what they were getting done.”²³ He changed his mind when he realized that the benefits the ROWE program offered—and the managerial changes that it commanded.

Hiring is also different because of IT for four reasons. First, in IT-savvy firms, workers must either know how to use the technologies that support the work of the firm before they are hired, or they must be trainable in the requisite skills. Hiring procedures incorporate activities that determine the skills of applicants. For example, a company may ask a candidate to sit at a computer to answer a basic questionnaire, take a short quiz, or simply browse the Web to evaluate the applicant's skill level, or they may only accept applications submitted to a Web site.

Second, IT utilization affects the array of non-technical skills needed in the organization. Certain functions—many clerical tasks, for example—can be handled more expeditiously, so fewer workers adept in those skills are required. IT-savvy companies can eliminate clerical capabilities from their hiring practices and focus resources on more targeted skills.

Third, IT has become an essential part of the hiring process for many firms. Advertisements for positions are posted on the Web, and applicants send their resumes over the Web, complete applications on-line, or send potential employers to their Web sites. Companies, when researching candidates, often look at their Facebook pages (and in many cases, they do not like what they see). Social networking also involves informal introductions and casual conversations in cyberspace. Virtual interviews can be arranged in virtual worlds or via teleconferencing to reduce recruiting costs. A face-to-face interview is usually eventually required, but recruiters can significantly increase their chances of finding the right applicant with initial virtual interviews.

Fourth, companies increasingly realize that hiring is changing and that recruiting efforts should reflect the new approaches people are using to look for jobs. Tech-savvy job applicants are now using business-oriented social networks such as LinkedIn to seek out contacts for jobs and online job search engines like Monster.com and CareerBuilder.com to find job listings. A new Facebook app, BeKnown, provides a profile detailing an individual's work experience, a news feed for contact updates and actions, a search tool to locate people and connect with them, a way to recommend other users or display badges earned for completing certain professional goals. The app also is integrated with Monster.coms job listings.²⁴

The design of the work needed by an organization is a function of the skill mix required for the firm's work processes and of the flow of those processes themselves. Thus, a company that infuses technology effectively and employs a workforce with a high level of IT skills designs itself differently from another company that does not. The skill mix required by an IT-savvy firm reflects greater capacity for using the technology itself. It requires less of certain clerical and even managerial skills that are leveraged by technical capacity. It may also deploy skills according to different ratios in central and local units.

New IT also challenges employee skills. Employees who cannot keep pace are increasingly unemployable. As many lower-level service or clerical jobs become partially automated, only those workers able to learn new technologies and adapt to changing work practices can anticipate stability in their long-term employment. Firms institute extensive training programs to ensure their workers possess the skills to use IT effectively.

As workforce demographics shift, so do the IT needs and opportunities to change work. Digital natives, those employees who have grown up using computers, social networking sites, texting, and the Web as a normal, integrated part of their daily lives, are finding new and innovative ways to do their work. There are all sorts of impacts from the skills these employees bring to their work, including how to do their work in a new, and often more efficient, manner.

IT has drastically changed the landscape of work today. As a result of IT, many new jobs were created. In the next section, we examine how IT can change where work is done, when it is done, and who does it.

HOW INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY CHANGES WHERE AND WHEN WORK IS DONE AND WHO DOES IT

This section examines another important effect of IT on work: the ability of some workers to work anywhere, at any time. At the individual level, we focus on telecommuters and mobile workers. At the group level we focus on virtual teams.

Telecommuting and Mobile Work

The terms telecommuting and mobile worker are often used to describe flexible work arrangements. Telecommuting, sometimes called teleworking, refers to work arrangements with employers that allow employees to work from home, at a customer site, or from other convenient locations instead of coming into the corporate office. The term telecommuteis derived from combining “telecommunications” with “commuting,” hence these workers use telecommunications instead of commuting to the office. Mobile workers are those who work from wherever they are. They are outfitted with the technology necessary for access to coworkers, company computers, intranets, and other information sources. We use the term “remote workers” when we are referring to both telecommuters and mobile workers.

Factors Driving Use of Telecommuting

Telecommuting has been around since the 1970s, but since the late 1990s it has steadily been gaining popularity. In 2008, according to World at Work, more than 17.2 million Americans and 33.7 million people worldwide telecommuted. This number of American telecommuters is expected to increase by an additional 29 million telecommuters, or 43% or the workforce, in 2016 as more work is performed from remote locations.²⁵ One poll of 11,300 employees in 22 countries found that one out of six telecommute worldwide. Several factors that drive this trend are shown in Figure 4.4.

First, work is increasingly knowledge based. The United States and many other world economies continue to shift from manufacturing to service industries. Equipped with the right IT, employees can create, assimilate, and distribute knowledge as effectively at home as they can at an office. The shift to knowledge-based work thus tends to minimize the need for a particular locus of activity.

Second, telecommuters often time-shift their work to accommodate their lifestyles. For instance, parents modify their work schedules to allow time to take their children to school and extracurricular activities. Telecommuting provides an attractive alternative for parents who might otherwise decide to take leaves of absence from work for child rearing. Telecommuting also enables persons housebound by illness, disability, or the lack of access to transportation to join the workforce.

FIGURE 4.4 Driving factors of telecommuting and virtual teams.

Telecommuting also may provide employees with enormous geographic flexibility. The freedom to live where one wishes, even at a location remote from one's corporate office, can boost employee morale and job satisfaction. As a workplace policy, it may also lead to improved employee retention. For example, Best Buy workers use the ROWE program as part of its recruiting pitch. Further, productivity and employee satisfaction for those on the ROWE program are markedly higher, and voluntary turnover is down. Many employees can be more productive at home, and they actually work more hours than if they commuted to an office. Furthermore, such impediments to productivity as traffic delays, canceled flights, bad weather, and mild illnesses become less significant. Companies enjoy this benefit, too. Those who build in telecommuting as a standard work practice are able to hire workers from a much larger talent pool than those companies who require geographical presence.

The third driving factor of telecommuting is that the new technologies, which make work in remote locations viable, are becoming better and cheaper. For example, prices of personal computers continue to drop, and processing power roughly doubles every 18 months.²⁶ The drastic increase in capabilities of portable technologies makes mobile work more effective and productive. Telecommunication speeds are increasing exponentially at the same time that the costs for connectivity are plummeting. The Web offers an easy-to-use “front-end” to sophisticated “back-office” applications used by major corporations, such as those that run on mainframe computers.

A fourth driving factor is the increasing reliance on Web-based technologies by all generations, but especially the younger generations, such as Generation Y and the Millennials. The younger generations are at ease with Web-based social relationships and are adept at using social networking tools to grow these relationships. Web-based tools allow them to stay connected with their co-workers and customers. Further, as more and more organizations turn to flexible working hours such as the ROWE program implemented by Best Buy and as 24/7 becomes the norm in terms of service, the Web becomes the standard platform to allow workers to respond to customers' increasing demands.

A fifth factor is the mounting emphasis on conserving energy. As the cost of gasoline continues to skyrocket, employees are looking for ways to save money. Telecommuting is quite appealing in such a scenario, especially when public transportation is not readily available. Companies can also experience lower energy costs from telecommuting. SAP reduced its global greenhouse footprint by encouraging employees to shift their commuting behavior. As a result of SAP's ongoing efforts, emissions from employees' commutes dropped by 14% in 2010. In addition to telecommuting and encouraging the use of mass transit and carpooling, SAP also began providing employees with information on their carbon footprint from commuting through a new internal dashboard aimed at ensuring greater transparency and accountability.²⁷

Many workers no longer need to be tied to official desks. Thus, real estate needs of their employers are shrinking. Further, energy is no longer needed to heat or cool these office spaces. Companies are realizing that they can comply with the Clean Air Act and be praised for their “green computing” practices at the same time they are reaping considerable cost savings.

Disadvantages of Telecommuting

Telecommuting also has some disadvantages. Remote work challenges managers in addressing performance evaluation and compensation. Managers of telecommuters must evaluate employee performance in terms of results or deliverables. Virtual offices make it more difficult for managers to appreciate the skills of the people reporting to them, which in turn make performance evaluation more difficult. For the many telecommuting tasks that do not produce well-defined deliverables or results, or those where managerial controls typically prove inadequate, managers must rely heavily on the telecommuter's self-discipline. As a result, managers may feel they are losing control over their employees, and some telecommuting employees do, in fact, abuse their privileges. Managers accustomed to traditional work models in which they are able to exert control more easily may strongly resist telecommuting. In fact, managers are often the biggest impediment to implementing telecommuting programs. Of course, if they can also be one of the biggest drivers if they support the telecommuting programs.

Workers who go to an office or who must make appearances at customer locations have a structure that gets them up and out of their home. Telecommuters, on the other hand, must exert a high level of self-discipline to ensure they get the work done. Working from home, in particular, is full of distractions such as personal phone calls, visitors, and inconvenient family disruptions. A telecommuter must carefully set up a home-work environment and develop strategies to enable quality time for the work task.

Telecommuters often opt for the increased flexibility in work hours that remote work offers them. They are lured by the promise of being able to work around the schedules of their children or other family members. Paradoxically, because of their flexible work situation, it is often difficult for them to separate work from their home life. Consequently, they may work many more hours than the standard nine-to-five worker, or experience the stress of trying to separate work from play. As a matter of fact, one of the reasons higher-ups at Best Buy were not immediately informed about the ROWE experiment is because employees were concerned that overbearing bosses would expect them to always be working, and middle of the night phone calls would become routine.²⁸

Working remotely can disconnect employees from their company's culture and make them feel isolated. The casual, face-to-face encounters that take place in offices transmit extensive cultural, political, and other organizational information. These encounters are lost to an employee who seldom, if ever, works at the office. Consequently, telecommuters need to undertake special efforts to stay connected. They must engage in forms of conversation toreplace “watercooler” talk. This could take the form of instant messaging, telephone calls/conferences, e-mail, blogs, or even video conferencing or unified communications. They should also schedule regular visits to the office.

Not all jobs are suitable for telecommuting. Some jobs may require the worker to be at the work location. Basically only those job aspects that can be performed independently at remote locations are the most suitable for telecommuting. Further, the employees selected to staff telecommuting jobs must be self-starters. They must be responsible for completing work tasks without being in the corporate office. New employees who need to be socialized into the organization's practices and culture are not good candidates for mobile or remote work.

Virtual work also raises the specter of offshoring, or foreign outsourcing of software development and computer services. Once a company establishes an infrastructure for remote work, the work often can be performed abroad as easily as domestically. U.S. immigration laws limit the number of foreigners who may work in the United States since the terrorist attacks in New York City and Washington, D.C., on September 11, 2001. However, no such limitations exist on work performed outside this country by workers who then transmit their work to the United States electronically. Because such work is not subject to minimum wage controls, companies may have a strong economic incentive to outsource work abroad. Companies find it particularly easy to outsource clerical work related to electronic production, such as data processing and computer programming. Benefits and potential problems associated with telecommuting are summarized in Figure 4.5.

FIGURE 4.5 Advantages and disadvantages of telecommuting.

Managerial Issues in Remote Work

Remote work requires managers to undertake special planning, staffing, and supervising activities. In terms of planning, business and support tasks must be redesigned to support remote workers. Everyday business tasks such as submitting employee expense reports in person (as is common when an original signature is needed on the form) and attending daily progress meetings are inappropriate if most of the workers are remote. Support tasks such as fixing computers by dispatching someone from the central IS department may not be feasible if the worker is in a hotel in a remote city. Basic business and support processes must be designed with both the remote worker and the worker remaining in the office in mind. Because remote workers may not be able to deal with issues requiring face-to-face contact, office (non-remote) workers may find that they are asked to assume additional tasks. Training should be offered to remote workers and office workers alike so that they can anticipate and understand the new work environment.

Managers must find new ways to evaluate and supervise those employees without seeing them every day in the office. Typically this means judging their work on the basis of targeted output, and not based on how remote workers do the work. They must also work to coordinate schedules, ensure adequate communication among all workers, establish policies about use of different technologies to support communications, and help their organizations adapt by building business processes to support remote workers.

Security is another issue for remote workers. Typically it is a “BYOD” (Bring Your Own Device) world where remote workers have their own computers in the location where they work that may or may not have been issued by their employers. Remote workers pose a threat to office workers because if they come into the office with an infected computer and plug into the network, perimeter security technology is unable protect all the other workers connected to the network. Further, as demonstrated by the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) employee whose laptop carrying unencrypted, sensitive personal information on more that 2.2 million active-duty military personnel was stolen from the employee's home, remote workers can be the source of security breaches.²⁹ It is impossible for organizations to make remote workers totally secure. However, managers need to get more involved in assessing the areas and severity of risk and take appropriate steps, via policies, education, and technology, to reduce the risks and make those remote workers as secure as possible.

The development, posting, and enforcement of remote worker policies are vital in a world where security breaches are commonplace. These policies should incorporate such simple rules as never store sensitive information on a laptop, encrypt all information once it leaves the office and only systems with virus detection software can be used on company networks. If an organization does not wish to adhere to these strict guidelines, then it at least needs to develop remote workers' policies that define what software is allowed on the home-based computer and what data can be stored on the computer. Further, employees must be made aware of the policies through a well-planned education program.³⁰

One approach to make sure that remote workers understand the security policy, and to make them accountable, is to have them sign an agreement with employers on exactly how their computers are to be used and maintained. In addition, antivirus and antispyware software should be deployed on computers used by remote workers and a desktop firewall and SSL (Security Socket Layer) for authentication should be added. Many government-issued computers are even equipped with Absolute Software's Computrace—“the LoJack of computer hardware” to trace the location of a missing or stolen computer.³¹ But IS leaders are aware that even with the best policies and tools available, breaches occur. The IS organizations typically has many levels of security to sense and respond to threats.

Virtual Teams

Employees are not only working remotely on an independent basis, but also with remote members on virtual teams. Virtual teams are defined as two or more people who (1) work together interdependently with mutual accountability for achieving common goals, (2) do not work in either the same place and/or at the same time, and (3) must use electronic communication technology to communicate, coordinate their activities, and complete their team's tasks. Initially, virtual teams were seen as the opposite of conventional teams that meet face-to-face. However, it is now realized that it is simplistic to view teams as either meeting totally face-to-face or totally virtually. Rather, teams may reflect varying degrees of virtuality, depending on some combination of points 2 and 3. Thus, virtual team members may be in different locations, organizations, time zones, or time shifts. Further, virtual teams may have distinct, relatively permanent membership, or they may be relatively fluid as they evolve to respond to changing task requirements and as members leave and are replaced by new members.

Virtual teams are thought to have a life cycle.³² Their lifecycle, shown in Figure 4.6, is noteworthy because it highlights the cyclical nature of virtual teams and the importance of team development. Teams are formed, their work is completed, and the team is disbanded. But in this cycle, team members learn to work not only with specific individuals, but also how to work in virtual teams. So, the concept of disbanding and then forming new teams with the same people or new ones make the concept of team development very important.

FIGURE 4.6 Key activities in the life cycle of virtual teams.

Factors Driving Use of Virtual Teams

The same drivers that apply to telecommuting, listed in Figure 4.4, can also be applied to virtual teams. Virtual teams clearly offer advantages in terms of expanding the knowledge base through team membership. Thanks to new and ever-emerging communication and information technologies, managers can draw team members with needed skills or expertise from around the globe, without having to commit to huge travel expenses. That is, difficulties in getting relevant stakeholders together physically are relaxed. Further, virtual teams can benefit from following the sun. In an example of following the sun, London team members of a virtual team of software developers at Tandem Services Corporation initially code the project and transmit their code each evening to U.S. team members for testing. U.S. members forward the code they tested to Tokyo for debugging. London team members start their next day with the code debugged by their Japanese colleagues, and another cycle is initiated.³³ Increasingly, growing pressure for offshoring has resulted in systems development by global virtual teams whose members are located around the world.

Disadvantages and Challenges of Virtual Teams

There are some clear disadvantages to virtual teams. For example, different time zones, although helpful when following the sun, can work against virtual team members when they are forced to stay up late or work in the middle of the night to communicate with team members in other time zones. Further, security is harder to ensure with distributed workers. There also are a considerable number of challenges, that if not correctly managed could turn into disadvantages. A summary of these challenges in comparison with more traditional teams can be found in Figure 4.7.

Virtual teams face major communication challenges by because they primarily have to communicate electronically via e-mail, teleconferences, or messaging systems. Electronic media allow team members to transcend the limitations of space and even store messages for future reference. But electronic communications may not allow team members to convey the nuances that are possible with face-to-face conversations. Thus, conflict may be more likely to erupt in virtual environments, and trust may be slower to form. In addition, virtual teams differ from traditional teams in terms of technological and diversity challenges. For example, traditional teams, unlike virtual ones, may not have to deal with the hassles of learning new technologies or selecting the technology that is most appropriate for the task at hand. Perhaps the greatest challenges that virtual teams face in comparison to their more traditional counterparts arise from the diversity of the team members. Virtual teams enable members to come from many different cultures and nations. Even though this diversity allows managers to pick team members from a wider selection of experts, global virtual teams are more likely than more traditional teams to be stymied by team members who have different native languages and cultures.

FIGURE 4.7 Comparison of challenges facing virtual teams and traditional teams.

Managerial Issues in Virtual Teams

Managers cannot manage virtual teams in the same way that they manage more traditional teams. The differences in management control activities are particularly pronounced. Leaders of virtual teams cannot easily observe the behavior of virtual team members. Thus, monitoring of behavior is likely to be more limited than in traditional teams. As is the case with remote workers, performance is more likely to be evaluated in terms of output than on displays of behavior. Because the team members are dispersed, providing feedback is especially important—not just at the end of a team's project, but throughout the team's life. To encourage the accomplishment of the team's goal, compensation should be based heavily on the team's performance, rather than just on individual performance. Compensating team members for individual performance may result in “hot-rodding” or lack of cooperation among team members. Organizational reward systems must be aligned with the accomplishment of desired team goals. This alignment is especially difficult when virtual team members belong to different organizations, each with their own unique reward and compensation systems. Each compensation system may affect individual performance in a different way. Managers need to be aware of differences and discover ways to provide motivating rewards to all team members. Further, policies about the selection, evaluation, and compensation of virtual team members may need to be enacted.

Looking beyond these management control activities, we see that prescriptions for managing the communications and information technologies in virtual team environments are limited. The rest of this section is devoted to managing the challenges highlighted in Figure 4.7: communication, technology, and diversity.

Communication Challenges

Considerable research has focused on ways to overcome communication challenges. Because the distances are often great, managers clearly need to keep the channels of communication open to allow team members to get their work done. Some communication tasks lend themselves to certain technologies. This means that they must have the necessary technological support. For instance, if a team leader wants to have a meeting of team members but has neither the budget nor the lead time to plan for extensive travel to the meeting, video teleconferencing may be a viable alternative. SAP claimed a drop of 425kTons of greenhouse gas emission in the first quarter after asking their employees to consider alternatives to business flights.³⁴ E-mails and texts are excellent for short messages to one or all group members. Team leaders may decide to initiate a team's activity with a face-to-face meeting so that the seeds of trust can be planted and team members feel as if they know one another on a more personal basis.

Face-to face meetings also appear to be the heartbeat of successful global virtual teams.³⁵ An in-depth study of three global virtual teams, found that the two effective teams created a rhythm organized around regularly scheduled face-to-face meetings. Before each meeting there was a flurry of communication and activity as team members prepared for the meeting. After the meeting there were a considerable number of follow-up messages and tasks. The ineffective team did not demonstrate a similar pattern. Since not all teams can meet face-to-face, well-managed synchronous meetings using video teleconferencing, or possibly in a virtual world, can activate the heartbeat.

Because team leaders cannot always see what their team members are up to or if they are experiencing any problems, frequent communications are important. If team members are quiet, the team leader must reach out to them to encourage their participation and to ensure that they feel their contributions are appreciated. Further, team leaders can scrutinize the team's asynchronous communications and team's repository to evaluate and give feedback about each team member's contributions. Even though a majority of team members are in one location, the team leader should rotate meeting times to alternate the convenience among team members. Further, in the event that there is a larger group of team members in one or several places, the team leader should encourage these subgroups to have all their discussions online so remote members will not feel isolated.

Technology Challenges

Having the needed communication and information technologies available, mean that all team members have the same or compatible technologies at their locations. The support staff to maintain and update the systems must be in place. Managers must ensure that seamless telephone transfers to the home office, desktop support, network connectivity, and security support are provided to the remote workers. Team members (like telecommuters) must have access to the files and applications they need to do their work. The importance of security for remote work cannot be overstated.

Further, managers must also provide the framework for using the technology. Policies and norms, or unwritten rules, need to be established about how the team members should use the technology to work with one another.³⁶ These should include norms about telephone, e-mail, and videoconferencing etiquette (i.e., how often to check for messages, the maximum time to wait to return e-mails, warning team members about absences or national holidays), work to be performed, and so on. Such norms are especially important when team members are not in the same office and cannot see when team members are unavailable.

Diversity Challenges

Managers may also seek to provide technologies to support diverse team member characteristics. For example, team members from different parts of the globe may have different views of time.³⁷ Team members from Anglo-American cultures (i.e., United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand) may view time as a continuum from past, to present and future. For such team members, each unit of time is the same, and thus they can be interchanged with one another or used as a basis for pay. These team members are likely to be concerned with deadlines and often prefer to complete one task before starting another (i.e., monochronous). For team members who are conscious of deadlines, planning and scheduling software may be especially useful. In contrast, team members from India often have a cyclical view of time. They do not get excited about deadlines and there is no hurry to make a decision because it is likely to cycle back—at which time the team member may be in a better position to make the decision. Many people from India tend to be polychronous. Team members who are polychronous and prefer to do several activities at one time may want to have instant messaging or Skype (a voice-over-IP support system) available to them so that they can communicate with their teammates and still work on other tasks.

In addition to providing the appropriate technologies, managers with team members who have different views of time need to be aware of the differences and try to develop strategies to motivate those who are not concerned with deadlines to deliver their assigned tasks on time. Or the managers may wish to assign these team members to do tasks that are not sensitive to deadlines.

Of course, views of time are only one dimension of diversity. Other dimensions of diversity are discussed in Chapter 3. Although diversity has been demonstrated to lead to more creative solutions, it also makes it harder for team members to learn to trust one another, to communicate, and to form a group identity. Through open communications, managers may be able to uncover and deal with other areas of diversity that negatively affect the team. Managers may establish an expertise directory at the start of the team's life or encourage other ways of getting team members to know more about one another.

GAINING ACCEPTANCE FOR IT-INDUCED CHANGE

The changes described in this chapter no doubt alter the frames of reference of organizational employees and may be a major source of concern for them. Employees may resist the changes if they view the changes as negatively affecting them. In the case of a new information system that they do not fully understand or are not prepared to operate, they may resist in several ways:

• They may deny that the system is up and running.
• They may sabotage the system by distorting or otherwise altering inputs.
• They may try to convince themselves, and others, that the new system really will not change the status quo.
• They may refuse to use the new system where its usage is voluntary.

Managing Change

To help avoid these resistance behaviors, John Kotter³⁸ builds upon Lewin's change model of unfreezing, changing, and refreezing. Kotter recommends eight specific steps in bringing about change. Kotter's steps are related to Lewin's changes and listed in Figure 4.8.

Managers should keep in mind these eight steps as they introduce change into their workplaces. Very importantly they need to make clear why the change is being made prior to the actual change and they must follow the change with reinforcement behaviors such as rewarding those employees who have successfully adopted new desired behaviors.

Technology Acceptance Model and Its Variants

To avoid the negative consequences of resistance to change, those implementing change must actively manage the change process and gain acceptance for new IS. To help explain how to gain acceptance for a new technology, Professor Fred Davis and his colleagues developed the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM). Many variations of TAM exist, but its most basic form is displayed on the right-hand side in Figure 4.9. TAM suggests that managers cannot get employees to use a system until they want to use it. To convince employees to want to use the system, managers may need to employ unfreezing tactics to change employee attitudes about the system. Employee attitudes may change if employees believe that the system will allow them to do more or better work for the same amount of effort (perceived usefulness), and that it is easy to use. Training, documentation, and user support consultants are external variables that may help explain the usefulness of the system and make it easier to use.

FIGURE 4.8 Stages and steps in change management.

TAM has many variants. For example, one variant considers subjective norms,³⁹ whereas another adds attitudes toward behaviors.⁴⁰ The Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology makes a valiant effort to integrate the many fragmented findings about TAM.⁴¹ Another attempt to integrate the many findings is TAM3.⁴² A simplified version of TAM3 is shown in Figure 4.9. The left-hand side of Figure 4.9 provides the four categories of determinants of perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use. Specifically, they are individual differences (e.g., gender, age), system characteristics (such things as output quality and job relevance that help individuals develop favorable or unfavorable views about the system), social influence (e.g., subjective norms), and facilitating conditions (e.g., top management support). The interrelationships described in UTAUT and TAM3 are very complex. For example, although social influences are important, they are likely to be important only for older works and women, and then only when they start using the system. The more complex models (UTAUT and TAM3) are useful for experts who are trying to take into account the nuances when trying to figure out the best way to implement systems. However, the parsimonious TAM model is clearly easier for practitioners trying to grasp the major issues involved in user acceptance.

FIGURE 4.9 Simplified technology acceptance model 3 (TAM3).

Source: Viswanath Venkatest and Hillol Bala, “Technology Acceptance Model 3 and a Research Agenda on Interventions,” Decision Sciences (2008), 39(2), 276.

TAM and all of these variants assume that system use is under the control of the individuals. When employees are mandated to use the system, they may use it in the short run, but over the long run the negative consequences of resistance may surface. Thus, gaining acceptance of the system is important, even in those situations where it is mandated.

SUMMARY

• The nature of work is changing, and IT supports, if not propels, these changes.
• Communication and collaboration are becoming increasingly important in today's work. Technology to support communication includes e-mail, intranets, instant messaging (IM), Video conferences, Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), unified communications, RSS (Web feeds), virtual private networks (VPN), and file transfers. Technology to support collaboration includes social networking sites, Web logs (blogs), virtual worlds, wikis, and groupware.
• IT affects work by creating new work, creating new working arrangements, and presenting new managerial challenges in employee supervision, evaluation, compensation, and hiring.
• Newer approaches to management reflect greater use of computer and information technology in hiring and supervising employees, a greater focus on output (compared to behavior), and a greater team orientation.
• The shift to knowledge-based work, changing demographics and lifestyle preferences, new technologies, growing reliance on the Web, and energy concerns all contribute to the growth in remote work.
• Companies find that building telecommuting capabilities can be an important tool for attracting and retaining employees, increasing worker productivity, providing flexibility to otherwise overworked individuals, reducing office space and associated costs, responding to environmental concerns about energy consumption, and complying with the Clean Air Act. Telecommuting also promises employees potential benefits: schedule flexibility, higher personal productivity, less commuting time and fewer expenses, and greater geographic flexibility.
• Disadvantages of telecommuting include difficulties in evaluating performance, greater feelings of isolation among employees, easier displacement by offshoring, and limitations of jobs and workers in its application.
• Virtual teams are defined as “two or more people who (1) work together interdependently with mutual accountability for achieving common goals, (2) do not work in either the same place and/or at the same time, and (3) must use electronic communication technology to communicate, coordinate their activities and complete their team's tasks.” They are increasingly common organizational phenomenon and must be managed differently than more traditional teams.
• Managers of virtual teams must focus on overcoming the challenges of communication, technology, and diversity of team members.
• To gain acceptance of a new technology, potential users must exhibit a favorable attitude toward the technology. In the case of information systems, the users' beliefs about its perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use color their attitudes about the system. Kotter provides some suggested steps for change management that are related to Lewin's three stages of change: unfreezing, change, and refreezing.

KEY TERMS

e-mail (p. 105)

file transfer (p. 106)

groupware (p. 106)

instant messaging (IM) (p. 105)

intranet (p. 105)

mobile workers (p. 116)

offshoring (p. 120)

RSS (Web feed) (p. 106)

social networking site (p. 106)

telecommuting (p. 116)

unified communications (p. 105)

video teleconference (p. 105)

virtual private network (VPN) (p. 105)

virtual teams (p. 122)

virtual world (p. 106)

Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) (p. 105)

Web logs (blogs) (p. 106)

wiki (p. 106)

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1. Why might a worker resist the implementation of a new technology? What are some of the possible consequences of asking a worker to use a computer or similar device in his or her job?
2. How can IT alter an individual's work? How can a manager ensure that the impact is positive rather than negative?
3. What current technologies do you predict will show the most impact on the way work is done? Why?
4. Given the growth in telecommuting and other mobile work arrangements, how might offices physically change in the coming years? Will offices as we think of them today exist by 2020? Why or why not?
5. How is working at an online retailer different from working at a brick-and-mortar retailer? What types of jobs are necessary at each? What skills are important?
6. Paul Saffo, director of the Institute for the Future, noted, “Telecommuting is a reality for many today, and will continue to be more so in the future. But beware, this doesn't mean we will travel less. In fact, the more one uses electronics, the more they are likely to travel.”⁴³ Do you agree with this statement? Why or why not?
7. The explosion of information-driven self-serve options in the consumer world is evident in the gas station, where customers pay, pump gas, and purchase a car wash without ever seeing an employee; in the retail store such as Walmart, Home Depot, and the local grocery, where self-service checkout stands mean customers can purchase a basket of items without ever speaking to a sales agent; at the airport, where customers make reservations and pay for and print tickets without the help of an agent; and at the bank, where ATMs have long replaced tellers for most transactions. But a backlash is coming, experts predict. Some say that people are more isolated than they used to be in the days of face-to-face service, and they question how much time people are really saving if they have to continually learn new processes, operate new machines, and overcome new glitches. Labor saving technologies were supposed to liberate people from mundane tasks, but it appears that these technologies are actually shifting the boring tasks to the customer. On the other hand, many people like the convenience of using these self-service systems, especially because it means customers can visit a bank for cash or order books or gifts from an online retailer 24 hours a day. Does this mean the end of “doing business the old-fashioned way?” Will this put a burden on the elderly or the poor when corporations begin charging for face-to-face services?⁴⁴

CASE STUDY 4-1
TRASH AND WASTE PICKUP SERVICES, INC.

Martin Andersen is responsible for 143 of Trash and Waste Pickup Services, Inc.'s (TWPS's) garbage trucks. Trash and Waste Pickup Services is a commercial and household trash hauler. When a caller recently complained to Andersen that a brown and green Trash and Waste Pickup Services truck was speeding down Farm Route 2244, Andersen turned to the company's information system. He learned that the driver of a company front-loader had been on that very road at 7:22 a.m., doing 51 miles per hour (mph) in a 35 mph zone. The driver of that truck was in trouble!

The TWPS information system uses a global positioning system (GPS) not only to smooth its operations, but also to keep closer track of its workers, who may not always be doing what they are supposed to be doing during work hours. Andersen pointed out, “If you're not out there babysitting them, you don't know how long it takes to do the route. The guy could be driving around the world, he could be at his girlfriend's house.”

Before TWPS installed the GPS system, the drivers of his 37 front-loaders clocked in approximately 250 hours a week of overtime at one and a half times pay. Once TWPS started monitoring the time they spent in the yard before and after completing their routes and the time and location of stops that they made, the number of overtime hours plummeted to 70 per week. This translated to substantial savings for a company whose drivers earn about $20 an hour.

TWPS also installed GPS receivers, which are the size and shape of cans of tuna, in salesmen's cars. Andersen was not surprised to learn that some of the company's salespeople frequented, The Zone, a local bar around 4 p.m. when they were supposed to be calling on customers. Andersen decided to set digital boundaries around the bar.

Understandably, the drivers and salespeople aren't entirely happy with the new GPS-based system. Ron Simon, a TWPS driver, admits: “It's kind of like Big Brother is watching a little bit. But it's where we're heading in this society. . . I get testy in the deli when I'm waiting in line for coffee, because it's like, hey, they're (managers) watching. I've got to go.”

Andersen counters that employers have a right to know what their employees are up to: “If you come to work here, and I pay you and you're driving one of my vehicles, I should have the right to know what you're doing.”

Discussion Questions

1. What are the positive and negative aspects of Andersen's use of the GPS-based system to monitor his drivers and salespeople?
2. What advice do you have for Andersen about the use of the system for supervising, evaluating, and compensating his drivers and salespeople?
3. As more and more companies turn to IS to help them monitor their employees, what do you anticipate the impact will be on employee privacy? Can anything be done to ensure employee privacy?

Source: This is a fictitious case. Any resemblance to an actual company is purely coincidental.

CASE STUDY 4-2
SOCIAL NETWORKING: HOW DOES IBM DO IT?

IBM's award-winning developerWorks site was established in 2000 as a technical resource for the company's global development community. Designed to share knowledge and skills related to IBM products and other key technologies, it has been a solid success. The site attracts about 4 million unique visitors a month—including students, professionals, and developers from almost all the world's countries-- who search its library of 30,000 articles, demos, podcasts and tutorials. DeveloperWorks is available in 8 languages, including Russian, Chinese, and Spanish, and about 70% of visitors come from outside IBM.

My developerWorks, a social networking function built on the IBM Connections platform, was added in 2009 to allow developers to connect, communicate and collaborate on projects. Soon the network had added more than 600,000 user profiles, as well as numerous blogs and forums. In addition to allowing established business, start-ups and partners to collaborate, it has also helped users find answers to support questions that would otherwise go to IBM's call centers and help desks, thus saving the company an estimated $100 million.

Alice Chou, Director of IBM developerWorks, carefully monitored the number of My developerWorks profiles and the volume of traffic to the site. She looked at unique visitors, developer demographics, time spent on the site, and patterns of page views. She created a reward and recognition framework so that when users contributed a highly regarded article or blogpost to the site, “they got the kudos they deserve.”

Discussion Questions

1. How does My developerWorks leverage changes in the way people work?
2. Why do you think Alice Chou carefully monitors the My developerWorks site? What would be an example of an insight she would gain from the data she's collecting?
3. Why do you think Alice Chou thinks a rewards program is necessary for My developerWorks given that so many profiles have already been developed. Do you agree that a reward would be necessary?

Sources: IBM Web site, www.ibm.com/developerworks (accessed on April 17, 2012); and Ellen Traudt and Richard Vancil, “Becoming a Social Business: The IBM Story,” IDC White Paper #226706, January 2011, 1–14 (quote on p. 6).