archive.Joe Lamantia.com

I first mentioned the ailing fortunes of the major U.S. auto makers as an example of the same pattern of decline common to old-style industrial organizations that’s starting in the enterprise software space. I chose American auto makers as an example of failing systemic health that offers insight because they are a visible cultural reference point, and not because I thought their demise was imminent.
But recent news from Ford and Daimler-Chrysler announcing dramatic job cuts and plant closures seems to point at exactly this in an eerie way. The article on Ford’s announcement even includes this quote from Gary N. Chaison, a professor of industrial relations at Clark University in Worcester, Mass, “This may not be the end, but it is certainly the beginning of the end of the automobile industry as we knew it”.
It seems the Iraq reconstruction effort is turning out to be another example of an enterprise infrastructure effort gone awry, in the real world. In the NY Times article Iraq Rebuilding Badly Hobbled, U.S. Report Finds James Glanz writes “…gross understaffing, a lack of technical expertise, bureaucratic infighting, secrecy and constantly increasing security costs” contributed to the ineffectiveness of the reconstruction effort.
That sounds like a classic enterprise software deployment to me
Glanz continues, “After years of shifting authority, agencies that have come into and out of existence and that experienced constant staff turnover, the rebuilding went through another permutation last month with almost no public notice.”
To close the circle and return to the realm of enterprise software, let’s compare the NY Times assessment of the reconstruction planning — “Mr. Bush said the early focus of the rebuilding program on huge public works projects – largely overseen by the office, the Project and Contracting Office – had been flawed.” — with James Roberts simple but very relevant question in Grand enterprise projects: why are we wasting our time?: “Instead of trying to eat the elephant whole, perhaps the better way is to take one bite at a time?”
Someone should have asked the same question in the early stages of planning the Iraq reconstruction effort, when the basic approach — bureaucratic, top-down, poorly structured — crystallized and was put into action.

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Peter Merholz observes that enterprise software is being eaten away from below, by applications such as Moveable Type, and innovators such as SocialText.
“These smaller point solutions, systems that actually address the challenges that people face (instead of simply creating more problems of their own, problems that require hiring service staff from the software developers), these solutions are going to spread throughout organizations and supplant enterprise software the same way that PCs supplanted mainframes.
I sure wouldn’t want to be working in enterprise software right now. Sure, it’s a massive industry, and it will take a long time to die, but the progression is clear, and, frankly, inevitable.”
Indeed it is. Though there’s considerable analyst hoopla about rising enterprise content management or ECM spending and IT investment (see also In Focus: Content Management Heats Up, Imaging Shifts Toward SMBs), we’re in the midst of a larger and longer term cycle of evolution in which cheaper, faster, more agile competitors to established market leaders are following the classic market entry strategy of attacking the bottom of the pyramid. (The pyramid is a hierarchical representation of a given market or set of products; at the top of the pyramid sit the more expensive and mature products which offer more features, capabilities, quality, or complexity; the lower levels of the pyramid include lower cost products which offer fewer features.)
What’s most interesting about the way this pattern is playing out in the arena of enterprise content management solutions is that the new competitors were not at first attacking from the bottom as a deliberate strategy, think of MoveableType, but they have quite quickly moved to this approach as with the recent release of Alfresco. The different origins of Sixapart and Alfresco may have some bearing on their different market entry approaches: Sixapart was a personal publishing platform that’s grown into a content management tool, whereas Alfresco’s intented audience was enterprise customers from day one. I’d wager the founders of Alfresco looked to RedHat as an example of a business model built on OpenSource software, and saw opportunity in the enterprise content management space, especially concerning user experience annd usability weaknesses in ECM platforms.
There’s an easy (if general) parallel in the automotive industry: from American dominance of the domestic U.S. market for automobiles in the post-WWII decades, successive waves of competitors moved into the U.S. automobile market from the bottom of the pyramid, offering less expensive or higher quality automobiles with the same or similar features. The major Japanese firms such as Honda, Toyota, and Nissan were first, followed by Korean firms such as Hyundai and Daewoo. It’s plain that some of the older companies sitting at the top of the pyramid are in fact dying, both literally and figuratively: GM is financially crippled and faces onerous financial burdens — to the point of bankruptcy – as it attempts to pay for the healthcare of it’s own aging (dying) workforce.
So what’s in the future?
For auto makers it’s possible that Chinese or South American manufacturers will be next to enter the domestic U.S. market, using similar attacks at the bottom of the pyramid.
For enterprise software, I think organizations will turn away from monolithic and expensive systems with terrible user experiences — and correspondingly low levels of satisfaction, quality, and efficacy — as the best means of meeting business needs, and shift to a mixed palette of semantically integrated capabilities or services delivered via the Internet. These capabilities will originate from diverse vendors or providers, and expose customized sets of functionality and information specific to the individual enterprise. Staff will access and encounter these capabilities via a multiplicity of channels and user experiences; dashboard or portal style aggregators, RIA rich internet applications, mobile devices, interfaces for RSS and other micro-content formats.
David Weinberger thinks it will be small pieces loosely joined together. A group of entrepreneurs thinks it might look something like what Thingamy claims to be.
Regardless, it’s surely no coincidence that I find a blog post on market pyramids and entry strategies put up by someone working at an enterprise software startup…

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Katrina’s ill winds are bring­ing some good, in the form of increased aware­ness of and will­ing­ness to con­sider New Urban archi­tec­ture and urban plan­ning options for the rebuild­ing Gulf Coast towns.
I first encoun­tered New Urban­ism while read­ing William Kunstler’s The Geog­ra­phy of Nowhere. Kun­stler has writ­ten sev­eral addi­tional books explor­ing the cre­ation and evo­lu­tion of the mod­ern Amer­i­can sub­ur­ban­scape since The Geog­ra­phy of Nowhere, all of them mak­ing ref­er­ence to New Urban­ism. It’s recently popped up in two arti­cles the NY Times. The first, Out of the Muddy Rub­ble, a Vision for Gulf Coast Towns, by Brad­ford McKee, recounts the efforts of archi­tects and plan­ners from a vari­ety of per­spec­tives, includ­ing mem­bers of the Con­gress for the New Urban­ism, to put forth a viable plan for the healthy rede­vel­op­ment of dam­aged Gulf Coast towns.
If you’ve not heard yet, New Urban­ism advo­cates the cre­ation of walk­a­ble, human scale com­mu­ni­ties empha­siz­ing mixed use envion­ments with pat­terns and struc­ture that allow peo­ple to meet daily needs with­out reliance on auto­mo­biles. In short, New Urban­ism is an archi­tec­ture and plan­ning frame­work that actively opposes sprawl.
Sprawl ben­e­fits the short term at the expense of the long term. Crit­ics of New Urban­ism often choose to inter­peret it as a school that restricts the rights of indi­vid­ual prop­erty own­ers, rather than as a series of pos­i­tive guide­lines for how to design com­mu­ni­ties that are healthy in the long run. But of course that’s always been the short-term view of the long-term greater good…
The dra­mat­icly dif­fer­ing points of view in favor of and opposed to New Urban­ist approaches come through very clearly in this exchange:
»
The Miami archi­tect Andres Duany, a prin­ci­pal fig­ure in the New Urban­ism move­ment, urged the casino own­ers to inte­grate the casi­nos more seam­lessly among new clus­ters of retail stores and restau­rants rather than as iso­lated estab­lish­ments.
Describ­ing his vision, Mr. Duany said, “You step out onto a beau­ti­ful avenue, where you can get a chance to look at the water and the mar­velous sun­sets and the shops, and walk up and down to restau­rants and eas­ily find taxis to other places.“
But Mr. Duany’s design sharply clashed with the casino own­ers’ main pri­or­ity.
“A casino owner wants peo­ple to stay on the prop­erty,” said Bernie Burk­holder, pres­i­dent and chief exec­u­tive of the Trea­sure Bay Casino, in Biloxi.
“As running-dog cap­i­tal­ist casino own­ers, we need to under­stand that the com­mu­nity fits together,” he added, “but we need an eco­nomic unit that will hold the cus­tomer.“
»
The sec­ond: Gulf Plan­ning Roils Res­i­dents also by Brad­ford McKee, pub­lished a few days after the first on Decem­ber 8, 2005, cap­tures some of the reac­tions to the plans from Gulf Coast res­i­dents. Nat­u­rally, the reac­tions are mixed.
But it’s impor­tant to remem­ber that sprawl is a very tem­po­rary and sur­real sta­tus quo, one that cre­ated the utterly improb­a­bly eco­log­i­cal niche of the per­sonal rid­ing mower. If that’s not a hot-house flower, then what is?
Some links to resources about New Urban­ism:
Newurbanism.org
transitorienteddevelopment.org
Con­scious Choice
New Urban Time­lines
New Urban News
Con­gress For the New Urbanism

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At least accord­ing to the Boston Globe arti­cle titled Don’t under­es­ti­mate the value of social skills, in which Pene­lope Trunk quotes an HBS fac­ulty mem­ber as fol­lows:
’In fact, across the board, in a wide vari­ety of busi­nesses, peo­ple would rather work with some­one who is lik­able and incom­pe­tent than with some­one who is skilled and obnox­ious, said Tiziana Cas­ciaro, a pro­fes­sor at Har­vard Busi­ness School. “How we value com­pe­tence changes depend­ing on whether we like some­one or not,” she says.‘
I guess this explains how we ended up with George W. Bush as President…

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Apparently, if you wait long enough, all circles close themselves. Case in point: I’ve always thought Golding’s Lord of the Flies nicely captures several of the less appetizing aspects of the typical american junior high school experience.
And I’ve always thought that much of the reality television programming that was all the rage for a while and now seems to be passing like a Japanese fad, is simply a chance for people on all sides of the screen to revisit their own junior high school experiences once again — albeit with a full complement of adult secondary sexual characteristics. When I do channel surf past the latest incarnation of the primal vote-the-jerk-off-the-island epic, Golding’s book always comes to mind.
Then a friend recommended Koushun Takami’s Battle Royale as recreational reading. Battle Royale is, as Tom Waits says, ‘big in Japan’ – it being a Japanese treatment of some of the same themes that drive Lord of the Flies.
The editorial review from Amazon reads:
“As part of a ruthless program by the totalitarian government, ninth-grade students are taken to a small isolated island with a map, food, and various weapons. Forced to wear special collars that explode when they break a rule, they must fight each other for three days until only one “winner” remains. The elimination contest becomes the ultimate in must-see reality television.”
And so the circle closes…

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OCLC has caught the socially constructed metadata fever. A release on the OCLC site titled “User-contributed content pilot” discusses a pilot program to allow Open WorldCat users to add publicly visible metadata, in the form of reviews and descriptive details, to existing records.
This looks the latest step in the wave of exploration of methods and models for putting socially constructed metadata into practice that’s playing out in public. (Is this necessarily done in public? I’m curious to hear thoughts on how this might be done with closed or cloaked communities, like IBM’s intranet).
Broadly, it looks like a wide variety of entities are following the standard new product or service development cycle with regards to socially constructed metadata. A simplified version of this cycle is:
1.Conceptualization, technology development
2.Product development
3.Introduction to market
4.Market Acceptance and growth
5.Ongoing Market as conventional product
A quick review of known social bookmarking / tagging ventures distributed over a number of organizations supports the idea that each experiment is at one of these stages.
Some visualizations of development and prototype cycles are available here, and here.
Where’s it headed? I think we’ll see at least forms forms or applications of socially constructed metadata stabilize and become publicly recognized and accepted in the near future, with more on the way that will surprise everyone. Those four are:
1. Fee for services models, paying for access to premium quality pools of collectively managed information under professional (paid) editorial custody. OCLC could adopt this model.
2. Non-commercial community driven pools of social knowledge. This might be delicio.us.
3. Deployment as an enabler or attribute of other product / service models. Flickr is an example of this perhaps.
4. Publicly free but commercialized information mining operations, deriving salable value from formalizing the semantic relationships between people, groups, and information objects. TagCloud.com might fall into this group, or maybe Cloudalicious.
5. Something very innovative I will wish I’d thought of when it’s released.
Excerpts from the OCLC release:
“As of October 9, 2005, Open WorldCat users are able to add their own content to authoritative WorldCat information about library-held titles. Available under the Details and Reviews tabs, this functionality permits those who have located library items through Open WorldCat to return to the interface and add evaluative content.”
“User-contributed content will help extend the OCLC cataloging cooperative to include non-cataloging library professionals and – more importantly – patrons. Their shared participation in WorldCat content creation and management could foster a larger sense of library-centered community and generate more interest in library resources.”

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User Research can be so relentlessly earnest and purposeful that it gets to be a bit stifling. After a few dozen well-crafted personas work their way purposefully through a set of mildly challenging but inevitably successful scenarios for the tenth time in one week, a diligent user researcher is likely to be hungering for something a bit more satisfying; something akin to the persona, but more fully-rounded; something that conveys the ambiguous complexity of human character with honesty; something not only insightful, but consistently forthright across a multiplicity of aspects. Perhaps even something that is genuinely malapert.
Food Court Druids, Cherohonkees, And Other Creatures Unique to the Republic is that something. Written by Robert Lanham, it’s a hilarious collection of idiotypes – stereotypes outside the design world, personas within – couched as the outcome of serious scientific inquiry whose method is called idiosyncrology.
I advise reading with humility close at hand, since it’s likely you’ll find yourself inside, and it’s only fair to laugh at everyone if you’re included…

Here’s the description:
Lanham, author of The Hipster Handbook and creator and editor of the Web site www.freewilliamsburg.com, extends his anthropological examination of Americans beyond trendy Brooklyn neighborhoods to the entire country, where Yanknecks (“rebel-flag-waving rednecks who live outside the South”), Sigmund Fruits (“people who insist on telling you about their dreams”) and others have existed thus far without being formally studied by “idiosyncrologists” like Lanham and his team. Presented with the authoritative tone of a serious anthropological study, complete with an Idio Rank Scale that assesses the weirdness of each type, many of Lanham’s profiles are hilariously accurate descriptions of co-workers, family members, friends and other acquaintances that almost every American has encountered at some point in their lives. There are the Cornered Rabid Office Workers (CROWs), who “claim to be poets or playwrights” when discussing their work with strangers, “even if they just spent the last nine hours doing data entry on the McFlannery acquisition,” and Hexpatriates, Americans who decry everything about America yet never actually leave the country (and who “refer to the Loews multiplex at the mall as ‘the cinema’ and the Motel Six by Hardees as ‘the pensione”). Illustrations by Jeff Bechtel, depicting the fashion sense of Holidorks (people who wear holiday-themed clothing) and Skants (women with shapely butts who always wear spandex pants), enhance Lanham’s characterizations.

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Several very unpleasant experiences I’ve had with the Lotus Notes webmail client during the past few weeks have brought up some questions about mental models; specifically how users respond to challenges to their mental models, and how resilience plays a part in how changes to mental models occur.
The IAWiki defines a mental model as, “a mental model is how the user thinks the product works.” This is a simplified definition, but it’s adequate for the moment. For a deeper exploration, try Martina Angela Sasse’s thesis
Eliciting and Describing Users’ Models of Computer Systems.
In this case, the model and the challenge are straightforward. My mental model of the Notes webmail client includes the understanding that it can send email messages. The challenge: the Lotus webmail client cannot send email messages – at least not as I experience it.
Here’s what happens my mental model and my reality don’t match:

1. I log in to my email client via Firefox – the only browser on the Mac that renders the Notes webmail client vaguely correctly – (I’m using webmail because the full Notes client requires VPN, meaning I’m unable to access anything on my local network, or the internet, which, incidentally, makes it difficult to seem like a credible internet consultant.) again, because it’s frozen and crashed my browser in the past ten minutes.
2. I realize I need to respond to an email
3. I do not remember that the Notes webmail client is incapable of sending out email messages
4. I open a new message window, and compose a chunk of semi-grammatical techno-corporate non-speak to communicate a few simple points in blame-retardant consultantese
5. I attempt to send this email
6. I am confronted with a cryptic error message via javascript prompt, saying something like “We’re really sorry, but Domino sucks, so you can’t send out any messages using your email client.”
7. Over the span of .376 seconds, I move through successive states of surprise, confusion, comprehension, frustration, anger, resentment, resignation, and malaise (actually, mailaise is more accurate.)
8. I swear: silently if clients are within earshot, out loud if not
9. I switch to gmail, create a new message, copy the text of my message from the Notes webmail window to Gmail, and send the message to some eagerly waiting recipient
10. I close the Notes webmail client, and return to business as usual.
11. I forget that the Notes webmail client cannot send email messages.

Despite following this same path three times per day, five days each week, for the past five weeks, (for a total of ~75 clear examples), I am always surprised when I can’t send a message. I’m no expert on Learning theory but neither lack of attention nor stubbornness explain why seventy-five examples aren’t enough to change my model of how Notes works.
Disciplines including systems theory, biology, and sociology use a concept called resilience. In any stable system, “Resilience generally means the ability to recover from some shock, insult, or disturbance.” From an ecological perspective, resilience “is a measure of the amount of change or disruption that is required to transform a system.” The psychological view emphasizes “the ability of people to cope with stress and catastrophe.”
Apparently, the resilience of my model for email clients is high enough to withstand considerable stress, since – in addition to the initial catastrophe of using Notes itself – seventy-five consecutive examples of failure to work as expected do not equal enough shock, insult, and disturbance to my model to lead to a change my in understanding.
Notice that I’m using a work-around – switching to Gmail – to achieve my goal and send email. In
Resilience Management in Social-ecological Systems: a Working Hypothesis for a Participatory Approach , Brian Walker and several others refine the meaning of resilience to include, “The degree to which the system expresses capacity for learning and adaptation.” This accounts nicely for the Gmail work-around.
I also noticed that I’m relying on a series of assumptions – email clients can send messages; Notes is an email client; therefore, Notes can send messages – that make it logical to use a well established model for email clients in general to anticipate the workings of Notes webmail in particular. In new contexts, it’s easier to borrow an existing model than develop a new one. In short order, I expect I’ll change one of the assumptions, or build a model for Notes webmail.
Here’s a few questions that come to mind:

1. What factors determine the resilience of a mental model?
2. How to measure resiliency in mental models?
3. What’s the threshold of recovery for a mental model?
4. Put another way, what’s required to change a mental model?

Based on a quick review of the concept of resilience from several perspectives, I’m comfortable saying it’s a valuable way of looking at mental models, with practical implications for information architects.
Some of those implications are:

1. Understand the relevance of existing mental models when designing new systems
2. Anticipate and plan the ways that users will form a mental model of the system
3. Use design at multiple levels to further the formation of mental models
4. Understand thresholds and resilience factors when challenging existing mental models

From a broader view, I think it’s safe to say the application of systems theory to information architecture constitutes an important area for exploration, one containing challenges and opportunities for user experience practitioners in general, and information architects in particular.
Time to close this post before it gets too long.
Further reading:
Bio of Ludwig Bertalanffy, important contributor to General System Theory.
Doug Cocks Resilience Alliance
Garry Peterson’s blog Resilience Science

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Looks like Dave Sifry at Technorati has drunk the Clay Shirky Koolaid on tagging and social bookmarking. Here’s something from Dave’s posting State of the Blogosphere, August 2005, Part 3: Tags, that shows he’s clearly joined the academy of received ideas.
“Unlike rigid taxonomy schemes that many people dislike using, the ease of tagging for personal organization with social incentives leads to a rich and discoverable system, often called a folksonomy. Intelligence is provided by real people from the bottom-up to aid social discovery. And with the right tag search and navigation, folksonomy may outperform more structured approches to classification, as Clay Shirky points out…”

I’m disappointed to see this. The quality level of Shirky’s thinking and writing related to tagging is generally low; too often he’s so completely off the mark with much of what he’s said about tagging, social bookmarking, and categorization in general that his main contribution is in lending a certain amount of attention by virtue of name recognition to a subject that used to be arcane.

There’s little need to rehash the many, many individual weaknesses in Shirky’s writings, just one example of which is his establishment of a false dichotomy separating structured categorization systems and social tagging practices. Broadly, his approach and rhetoric show strong influence from anarchism, and utopian social theory.

From Shirky:
“There is no fixed set of categories or officially approved choices. You can use words, acronyms, numbers, whatever makes sense to you, without regard for anyone else’s needs, interests, or requirements.”
Further, “…with tagging, anyone is free to use the words he or she thinks are appropriate, without having to agree with anyone else about how something “should” be tagged.”

Building back on the criticique of computerization, it’s clear that Shirky uses rhetorical strategies and positions from both technological utopianism and anti-utopianism.

Here’s Professor Rob Kling on technological utopianism:
“Utopian images are common in many books and articles about computerization in society written by technologists and journalists. I am particularly interested in what can be learned, and how we can be misled, by a particular brand of utopian thought — technological utopianism. This line of analysis places the use of some specific technology, such as computers, nuclear energy, or low-energy low-impact technologies, as key enabling elements of a utopian vision. Sometimes people will casually refer to exotic technologies — like pocket computers which understand spoken language — as “utopian gadgets.”

Technological utopianism does not refer to these technologies with amazing capabilities. It refers to analyses in which the use of specific technologies plays a key role in shaping a benign social vision. In contrast, technological anti-utopianism examines how certain broad families of technology are key enablers of a harsher and more destructive social order.”

That Shirky would take speak from this standpoint is not a surprise; he’s identified as a “Decentralization Writer/Consultant” in the description of his session “Ontology is Overrated: Links, Tags, and Post-hoc Metadata” at etech, and it’s clear that he’s both technologist and a journalist, as Kilng identifies.

Regardless of Shirky’s bias, there is a bigger picture worth examining. Tagging or social bookmarking is one potential way for the community of social metadata system users to confront problems of individual and group information overload, via a collective and nominally unhierarchical approach to the emergent problem of information management across common resources (URIs).

Found via via, orig­i­nat­ing in an arti­cle titled Social Infor­mat­ics: Overview, Prin­ci­ples and Oppor­tu­ni­ties from the ASIST Bul­letin spe­cial issue on Social Infor­mat­ics, which, inci­den­tally is one of those very inter­est­ing dis­ci­plines I don’t have enough time to keep up with, but that has much to offer prac­tic­ing infor­ma­tion archi­tects.
On com­put­er­i­za­tion, Sawyer says, “Com­put­er­i­za­tion, to para­phrase soci­ol­o­gist Bev­erly Bur­riss, is the imple­men­ta­tion of com­put­er­ized tech­nol­ogy and advanced infor­ma­tion sys­tems, in con­junc­tion with related socioe­co­nomic changes, lead­ing to a fun­da­men­tal restruc­tur­ing of many social orga­ni­za­tions and insti­tu­tions.“
Add in a client man­age­ment clause, and this is essen­tially my job descrip­tion as an archi­tect / designer / cre­ator of infor­ma­tion envi­ron­ments that solve busi­ness prob­lems. I don’t know Bur­riss’ work — does any­one else?
Directly address­ing the role of a con­structed prob­lem Sawyer says, “…social infor­mat­ics is problem-oriented. This work is defined by its inter­est in par­tic­u­lar issues and prob­lems with com­put­er­i­za­tion and not by its adher­ence to cer­tain the­o­ries or par­tic­u­lar meth­ods (as is oper­a­tions research).“
In what looks like a neatly phrased snap­shot of user research, Sawyer says, “The strong empir­i­cal basis of social infor­mat­ics work, how­ever, is com­bined with both method­olog­i­cal and the­o­ret­i­cal plu­ral­ity. Social infor­mat­ics work typ­i­cally includes an array of data col­lec­tion approaches, sophis­ti­cated large-scale analy­ses and com­plex con­cep­tu­al­iza­tions.“
Here’s a longer excerpt:
The Com­mon Find­ings of Social infor­mat­ics
More than 30 years of care­ful empir­i­cal research exists in the social infor­mat­ics tra­di­tion. As noted, this work is found in a range of aca­d­e­mic dis­ci­plines, reflects a mix of the­o­ries and meth­ods, and focuses on dif­fer­ent issues and prob­lems with com­put­er­i­za­tion. Here I high­light five obser­va­tions that are so often (re)discovered that they take on the notion of com­mon find­ings rel­a­tive to com­put­er­i­za­tion.
1. Uses of ICT lead to mul­ti­ple and some­times para­dox­i­cal effects. Any one ICT effect is rarely iso­lat­able to a desired task. Instead, effects of using an ICT spread out to a much larger num­ber of peo­ple through the socio-technical links that com­prise con­text. An exam­i­na­tion of this larger con­text often reveals mul­ti­ple effects, rather than one all-encompassing out­come, and unex­pected as well as planned events. For exam­ple, peer-to-peer file shar­ing may help some musi­cians and hurt oth­ers.
2. Uses of ICT shape thought and action in ways that ben­e­fit some groups more than oth­ers. Peo­ple live and work together in pow­ered rela­tion­ships. Thus, the polit­i­cal, eco­nomic and tech­ni­cal struc­tures they con­struct include large-scale social struc­tures of cap­i­tal exchange, as well as the microstruc­tures that shape human inter­ac­tion. An exam­i­na­tion of power often shows that a system’s imple­men­ta­tions can both rein­force the sta­tus quo and moti­vate resis­tance. That is, the design, devel­op­ment and uses of ICTs help reshape access in unequal and often ill-considered ways. Thus, course man­age­ment sys­tems may pro­vide added ben­e­fits to some stu­dents, put added pres­sure on some fac­ulty and allow some admin­is­tra­tors to use the sys­tem to col­lect addi­tional evi­dence regard­ing the per­for­mances of both stu­dents and fac­ulty.
3. The dif­fer­en­tial effects of the design, imple­men­ta­tion and uses of ICTs often have moral and eth­i­cal con­se­quences. This find­ing is so often (re)discovered in stud­ies across the entire spec­trum of ICTs and across var­i­ous lev­els of analy­sis that igno­rance of this point bor­ders on pro­fes­sional naïveté. Social infor­mat­ics research, in its ori­en­ta­tion towards crit­i­cal schol­ar­ship, helps to raise the vis­i­bil­ity of all par­tic­i­pants and a wider range of effects than do other approaches to study­ing com­put­er­i­za­tion. For exam­ple, char­ac­ter­iz­ing errors in diag­nos­ing ill­nesses as a human lim­i­ta­tion may lead to the belief that imple­ment­ing sophis­ti­cated computer-based diag­nos­tic sys­tems is a bet­ter path. When these sys­tems err, the ten­dency may be to refo­cus efforts to improve the com­put­er­ized sys­tem rather than on bet­ter under­stand­ing the processes of triage and diag­no­sis.
4. The design, imple­men­ta­tion and uses of ICTs have rec­i­p­ro­cal rela­tion­ships with the larger social con­text. The larger con­text shapes both the ICTs and their uses. More­over, these arti­facts and their uses shape the emer­gent con­texts. This can be seen in the micro-scale adap­ta­tions that char­ac­ter­ize how peo­ple use their per­sonal com­put­ers and in the macro-scale adap­ta­tions evi­dent in both the evolv­ing set of norms and the chang­ing designs of library automa­tion sys­tems. Library automa­tion is not sim­ply about recent devel­op­ments of appli­ca­tions with sophis­ti­cated librar­i­an­ship func­tion­al­ity; it is also about patrons’ dif­fer­en­tial abil­i­ties to use com­put­ers, library bud­get pres­sures, Inter­net access to libraries and the increas­ing vis­i­bil­ity of the Inter­net and search­ing.
5. The phe­nom­e­non of inter­est will vary by the level of analy­sis. Because net­works of influ­ence oper­ate across many dif­fer­ent lev­els of analy­sis, rel­e­vant data on com­put­er­i­za­tion typ­i­cally span for­mal and infor­mal work groups; for­mal orga­ni­za­tions; for­mal and infor­mal social units like com­mu­ni­ties or pro­fes­sional occupation/associations; groups of orga­ni­za­tions and/or indus­tries; nations, cul­tural groups and whole soci­eties. This com­mon find­ing is exem­pli­fied by the tremen­dous pos­i­tive response by younger users to peer-to-peer file shar­ing, the absolute oppo­site response by music indus­try lead­ers and the many approaches taken by orga­ni­za­tional and civic lead­ers regard­ing the legal­i­ties and responses to use.

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