The End of Information Systems

Peter writes:

The End of Information Systems or How A Technology Became So Successful That It Defied All Boundaries.


An act in a zillion parts.

The worlwide academic Information Systems community was established, so the story goes, by a relatively few far-sighted individuals. They sensed a transformation in the making. They were right. But no-one foresaw the worldwide reverberation, the shift, that followed.

In my opinion, Information Systems (IS) has struggled for purchase in the "real world" of Information Technology, application and organizational development. I always thought that odd. That said, I'd quickly concede that the picture is uneven and that great purchase was made by a few, especially Americans. I'd also concede that my view is personal and partial. Others exercised their academic right to not care. Theirs was to critique and reflect, not affect.

Nonetheless, on numerous occasions I felt frustrated to stand in the offices of CIOs, IT specialists, Directors, CEOs and managers, and see not even a single IS book, not a single paper, on the shelf. But mine is a delicate position. An argument of irrelevance does not necessarily follow from what I am saying. It is an argument of proximity, connection, aspiration and, most of all, method.

And anyway, maybe now is different. Maybe now, the petrol has leaked from the cannister. The socio-technical context that gave birth to IS is much changed. For the base technology is so successful, so consequential, that to study it further we'd need to rethink Information Systems as Social Systems. It would become a study of society itself.

Here are some big ideas:-

1. Social Media .... its about information, right? Wrong. It is just people, about you.

2. Athena's Camp: Information Warfare .... e.g. The Estonia Question

3. Open source: to labour for love. Although widely understood and researched, the mainstream media has still not seen this for what it is.

4. Strategy ...the Entertainment and Media Industries (and all industries dependent upon digital exchange).

5. The Blessed Unrest.... The Long Now.

6. Bureaucracy .... unassailable? We will see. We will see soon. For the bureau, the pen, and the form were the technologies of bureaucracy. With the mobile, the network and the application at our disposal, isn't it time for a rethink? Why write a report when you can put 5 minutes to camera? Why sit next to your grumpy old colleagues when you could be at home, or in Starbucks, or on the beach? Get ready for an age of microcasting (using the skills of media production within corporations and small social networks). Get ready for Media Intensive Enterprise ... as good as Enterprise 2.0 is, it doesn't go far enough.

7. New orders of order ...

8. Possessed and expressed identity... media and the self.

9. And then the Cinderella of the academic world, Media Studies, finds itself in a new gravity ... Once described by Chris Woodhead as "a one way ticket to the dole queue", understanding media is suddenly consequential. It is consequential to the new media industries. It is consequential to new citizenship. It is consequential to corporate life. It meshes with IS.

10. "Midwives to the emerging world" ... rethinking government ... rethinking human cognition.

11. Globalisation ... mega-corporations ... a new globally mobile super-middle class (e.g. you, MBA studenci). Nationality itself might be rethought ... is it a system for excluding people from things, a landmass (dear old Blighty), or a value system .. a reverberation (e.g. celtic values, Irishness). Meanwhile, corporate brands become symbols of our contested space.

12. Anna Eagin.

13. Shift happens.

Once, IT was the strange technology in the cellar. Once, IS was centred on the niche study of this strange technology in context. Now, the strange technology is just about in everything. So, the end of Information Systems will be because cross-pollination with other schools of thought, other groups, is more exciting than going it alone. It cannot contain, it cannot patrol its own boundaries. The end of Information Systems is its development as a portal, a view cast across social change, an access point to heterogeneous theory. The end of Information Systems is the beginning of much else. It becomes, perversely, the most exciting chapter in its short history.

I think, hope, expect, we'll see some exciting innovations in MBS IS. Onwards.

(The photo is by Paul Carruthers and is reproduced, quite appropriately, without permission).

Anticipating Poppy's World

Peter writes...

These are musings on two bold initiatives that seek to place Manchester at the forefront of the digital world.

Media City:UK. Tomorrow's media will belong to the people. This will not be naive and silly, quality will still be quality, but access and know-how will be shared much more widely. With wider access and know-how, more people will be able to say more things well. These things will be said to audiences large and small: that's the point, the new technology will not reconstruct a mass media model. Some of it will be big or bigger, but much of it will be smaller. The term 'campfire media' is very eloquent, I suggest. In essence, it is describing 'The Long Tail' effect for media.

Innovation theory tells us that successful new technologies tend to be socially inclusive (the alphabet, the printing press, the Model T, the wide-bodied jet). You can see this hallmark in the campfire concept. So, what's the next step for Media City? Well, whilst the developers get on with their side of things perhaps the city's educators should set out to see that every child is media savvy: understanding of the technology, art and psychology of media creation. Perhaps 'computer literacy' as a major educational concern was only ever a stepping-stone to 'media literacy.' Discuss.

ONE Manchester: Whilst celebrating Media City:UK, we can also cheer the ONE Manchester bid and hope that it wins the country's Digital Challenge. Have a look at the video featuring Poppy (pictured) and listen to the council folk and citizens expressing their wishes for a digital future. It is, as Poppy says, her future that is at stake. So my best advice is that we get the highest speed access to as many people as possible. The rest will follow. For the truth is that electronic media profoundly affect the economics of organisation. This is what is so often missing from the analyses of a digital future. Proponents and sceptics alike too often fail to see the link between technology and organisation. This is why people struggle to make it 'real'.

With digital technology we can organise in different ways. For example, more people can find their entrepreneurial niche because more niches can be sustained (Long Tail, again). Large corporate bodies and public institutions can divest themselves of functionality and pursue network relationships (lots of references but I like Unleashing the Killer App.) So, we get more and more organisations working with more and more organisations. The networked economy is born, new business takes advantage, builds position, and defends position as first-mover advantage is somehow made to apply. But business is still business, the winners still win and become a new sort of giant; a networked giant. The winners become intersections.

Discuss.

Gates, Hurley and Zennstroem in Davos

Peter writes...

Bill Gates, Chad Hurley and others have been talking about Web 2.0 at the World Economic Forum in Davos. Tim Weber, the Business Editor for the BBC News website is there to listen and report. Here is his blog on the conversations. Meanwhile, we mentioned earlier the Google idea that "innovation not litigation" would sort out copyright problems. The said innovation is already happening.

Back again in Davos, Niklas Zennstroem still "striking fear into the hearts of telecom firms around the world", is also talking about the end of "big, bulky networks" in television.

NTT Docomo 2010

Peter writes...

It is, of course, in the interests of tech companies to portray the future as comforting, human and warm.

Let's hope they are right. See NTT Docomo's vision here.

Welcome to the Age of Light

Peter writes...

Maybe it is intrinsic to us that we should fear the future. And maybe, it might seem, that there are particularly good reasons for disquiet over a technological future. For indeed, it may be that one day we have to share our planet with replicants, and that we sacrifice our last vestiges of privacy, to a suite of technologies more intrusive than ever imagined in Orwell's dystopian 1984 . Haven't we already given up some of our most prized manual and intellectual tasks to machines? Indeed, maybe the point is that it is our very rationality that seeds the pessimism. We are looking at ourselves and saying 'help.' After all, aren't we driven by email, overwhelmed by information, chided and nagged by popular media to the degree where we cannot separate our thoughts from theirs, our dreams from theirs. We cannot, actually, even tell what is real anymore, who is real, and why we are being told about this stuff. Its our very rationality that makes us gloomy. We have seen enough.

But then again, let's start again. Let's start again under a different light. It has never been easy. No-one ever said it would be. 'Survival of the fittest' isn't ever going to be adopted as a slogan for a holiday camp. And yet here we are, marooned on Planet Earth and, yes, it's true that it is a beautiful place. But its not an easy place. Ask any chelonioidea if a 1% survival rate is kind. Ask any dinosaur.

Putting it frankly, homo sapiens, has prospered ahead of all other species because of technology. As all children know, we describe human progress through history through the technology that humankind had and could use; stone age, bronze age, iron age etc. Major technological advance always signals the dawn of a new age, like the advent of the printing press or industrialisation. And so it has come to be that for many nations, the 21st century brings us benefits that our ancestors could not have imagined. We have lower mortality rates, greater life expectancy, health care, sanitation, less poverty, and much more wealth. We have education, knowledge, and rights. Emperors and kings would have swapped their lot for that of the most middling in today's leading societies. For the privileges of flight, heating, and mobility, surely even the most determined would have resigned her throne.

So, the serious point is that maybe the information age will be a great place. It will be a great time to be alive.

Can we make this case? Is it possible to be realistic and optimistic?

Of course there are winners and losers at the start of this new epoch. One hundred years ago, Fordism was not in the vocabulary. Now, the company that gave the name is fighting for its life. Like Fordism, many ideas that were once dominant are suddenly contested. New company names like America Movil, Apple, Microsoft, and Google now occupy the stellar positions in business life. With these, through these and before these, new ideas are springing to life bringing new models of networked business, .coms, e-democracy and social computing. The monoliths, the incumbents, even the elected representatives are looking to their foundations. The question is always the same: "By what right are we here?"

For we will see new business models in the new age. And we will see new skills and new interests. We are seeing new ways of communicating and new ways of doing things. We are seeing new things that can be done. And when we look across the whole panorama, we might just be able to call it all a significant advance in civilization. After all, today, we can all speak out. We can all cooperate. Many of the horrors that continue to haunt us are even more brutally exposed. Today, for example, we don't even need a journalist to tell us about the stupidity of war; the perpetrators expose themselves. Yes, the perpetrators expose themselves.

In an age of light things are revealed for what they are.

Can we make this argument?

Can we be upbeat?

This is a very big canvas for one little course! Let's reign it all in and be more modest. Let's just admit that something important is happening. Something unfamiliar is happening. For every link in this blog entry points to Wikipedia. Each one of the links was created by persons unknown, none of whom was paid for the entries therein. Only a few of the linked pages are controlled; in most cases the management of the page is entirely communal. And of course, it is all free to use.

Free-to-use, communally managed and unpaid labour. Now that really is a revolution.