Information Work Tactics
For top management tasks, information technology so far has been a producer of data rather than a producer of information—let alone a producer of new and different questions and new and different strategies. …It can be argued that the computer and the data flow it made possible, including the new information concepts, actually have done more harm than good to business management.
— Peter Drucker (Forbes ASAP: the Next Information Revolution August 24, 1998)What is the major problem? It is fundamentally the confusion between effectiveness and efficiency that stands between doing the right things and doing things right. There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all.
— Peter Drucker
Information is an emergent property of a system: human behavior which resolves cognitive dissonance to reach group or organization objectives. To accomplish this, information must solve problems along multiple dimensions by acting on system leverage points. These dimensions, called contexts, determine what is interpreted as information. Information Technology, in accord with this definition, employs tools of affect and persuasion crucial to situation awareness to produce decisions fitting two or more contexts.
Try replacing the word information with another: Quality. Few would take on faith any and all technology spontaneously produces a competitive level of quality. Or without practical working definitions or processes, there’s a quality overload problem. How different when the discussion turns to information and technology designed to produce information. If there is any discussion at all.
When “You’ll Know Information When You See It” Isn’t Enough
Usability makes it easy to focus on the task at hand. Industrial design studies physical interaction. Cognitive ergonomics concern human–information interaction, including the larger business objectives for tasks. The design of information systems must shift user attention to task context — lest tasks and objectives suffer a disconnect.
While advising a major international bank, I decided to assess the relative importance of their information systems. So, I asked the staff to stop issuing all 1,200 different kinds of monthly reports they sent to their thousands of employees, and, instead, provide individual reports if and when asked. You can imagine everyone’s surprise when after a month, only six people had called for any of the reports.
—Michael Dertouzos; Why 2k?, March/April 1999 The People’s Computer column in MIT Technology Review.
Information tactics work on the leverage points of the system to change the system dynamic. In this case changing from data production productivity to demand pull based on desirability to the recipient; creating the begining of an information market. A market where attention can’t be demanded, it has to be earned and apportioned as the scarce resource it is. Abstract ideas, but exactly the kind of symbolic interaction purporting to place information work above data processing.
The question then becomes how to value abstract intangibles. Intangible valuation has challenged business for years. Technical discussions often focus more on how–to, when what is desirable to do can be more informative. Design in general has not concerned itself with these business problems. Desirability adds tools for dealing with affect and intagible valuation human information systems use, but IT lacks.
Context And Persuasion
A company runs on information, not data. In fact, information is the most important asset a company has. All actions and decisions are predicated on information. Organizations progress when the impact of good actions and decisions outweighs the impact of bad actions and decisions. Information gives us the means to make these actions and decisions.
Those who do not understand the differences between information and data are probably the same people who do not understand the differences between an information system and computer software.
—Tim Bryce, The Ten Common Myths of I.T.
Based on this definition, information must fit within its contextual environment to be recognized as actionable. Data is descriptive, information is prescriptive and so has a bias for action. Data processing technology moves bits in efficient patterns. To get the credit for information, technology had better move people to engage in the collaboration of effective business action. Captology takes responsibility for providing the tools and structures of persuasion required for changing human action and interaction.
Data processing runs in established patterns which enable existing behaviors and decisions, but constrain new ones. Information work establishes new interaction patterns which move the organization forward.
Computer workers too busy working within the business to work on the business already have a serviceable job title: data processor. Consequently business cultures that stifle worker decision making, especially on the system level, can’t then claim their data processing systems have reached the level of information technology.
System level change and decision awareness can be the substantive differentiation giving the term information worker meaning.
Information is a human concept, with properties of biological and social systems. We need a definition for information which technology must rise to, not one humans find themselves held down to by their technologies.
Resources
- Toffler’s Powershift is incomprehensible where anything and everything cascading from a computer is called information. When you understand the fusion of bits and atoms Fabs represent, you enter a world of information rich materials making Fabricators a technology acknowledging information is power.
- The Input Bias: How Managers Misuse Information When Making Decisions Maurice Schweitzer and colleague Karen R. Chinander tested human decision making, with some implications for technology designed to support decisions.
- Optimize Magazine Why Tech Falls Short Of Expectations lists decision making, visibility (situation awareness), communication, and execution (action) as problems. These can be passed off as irrelevant to technology, but are problems of human–information interaction not simply technology construction or task interaction design.
- In The Knowing–Doing Gap, focus is on closing the gap between what’s buried in reports and daily activity. Information isn’t power when action is assumed, not tracked. To qualify as information systems, technology must reflect decision making styles and allocate the authority to act on information to users. Bruce A. Stewart makes one good point, “If we’re to fulfill our information destiny and not just our technology destiny, we’re going to have to start thinking about the questioner, not just the tools to generate an answer.”
- Cognitive ergonomics deals with human interaction design in decision making. Fortune magazine dedicated an entire issue to making decisions; in others words without such cognitive ergonomics, technology simply gets in the way.
- Information design considerations for improving situation awareness in complex problem–solving “Although individual tasks can be defined, task–analysis normally results in the tasks being divorced from context. However, to support complex problem–solving, the design must place the information within the situation context and allow users to develop and maintain situation awareness.”
- “By understanding how an architectural setting impacts the cognitive ability of children, for example, architects could design enriched learning environments. By understanding how some people are able to find their way more easily than others, architects could create more easily used navigation systems in complex buildings.” Just some of the information design possibilities when the contexts of neuroscience and architecture create information which couldn’t exist within each silo alone.
- Why 2k?, March/April 1999 The People’s Computer column in MIT Technology Review; by Michael Dertouzos
- Information Ecologies: Chapter Four First Monday. “We define an information ecology to be a system of people, practices, values, and technologies in a particular local environment. In information ecologies, the spotlight is not on technology, but on human activities that are served by technology.”
- The Ten Common Myths of I.T. One myth is data and information are synonymous.
- BETWEEN ‘PARALYSIS BY ANALYSIS’ AND ‘EXTINCTION BY INSTINCT’ Langley talks about specific situations leading to under or overanalysis, the structural causes fostering these behaviors (captology, system dynamics), then provides a third alternative using the strengths of instinct (affective usability or desirability) with formal logic for superior business decisions.
- Designing for Situation Awareness: An Approach to User–Centered Design by: Mica R. Endsley, Betty Bolte, Debra G. Jones Contextual inquiry techniques for use centered situation awareness.
- The Open–Source Kepler Project seeks more promising interaction than task completion within a single context. Creating The Medici Effect explains new innovations aren’t coming from within a single context, but where cultural contexts interact. By bridging corporate and cultural silos, the information exchange necessary to drive innovation takes place.
- Prediction and decision markets harness group intelligence to make tough decisions with better accuracy. One kind of computing structure which fosters information behaviors from users.
- While data and its processing have been available to baseball for decades, it did little to explain how decisions get made. What this article does is to apply behavioral economics to decision making. First outlined in Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments, behavioral economics is the oft missing companion of Wealth of Nations.
- Success in previous eras stressed command, control, and reductionism. Internet era success depends on understanding desirability, influence and perhaps more important, emergence. Innovation in Systems through the deliberate creation of Emergent Properties begins to refute reductionist arguments. An introduction to online social software methodology talks about the flaws of older models and supporting emergent networked behavior. The PDF Information Architecture and the Emergent Properties of Cyberspace talks about the seeming paradox when viewing information design from the context of reductionism.
- From Computing Machinery to Interaction Design explains the move from machine construction to interaction design. Implicit is interaction as emergent behavior only existing where tool design influences human–computer interaction patterns (captology and system dynamics).
- The Politics of Information Management: Policy Guidelines; by Paul A. Strassmann Provides a detailed model for moving from technology to information management. Vital, when you understand the interaction pattern called politics trumps pure logic, and is one major reason so many IT projects don’t follow their chief assumption: all will go well.