A new civil digital culture has taken hold, in which so-called ‘social’ and/or ‘conversational’ technologies are providing unprecedented opportunities for everyday civil user activities. The attraction of these social technologies is their low cost, intuitive functionality, and connectivity. Social technologies provide computer-mediated environments that use applications such as Weblogs (blogs), Wikis, chatrooms, and various Web-based groupware systems. They support new forms of informal, network-centric interaction and activity between people, allowing and enhancing informal access to create and distribute information. These technologies empower ordinary people to have a global presence for business, political and social purposes. The new social technologies are tools of a rising digital democracy that provide users with a new flexibility and independence to support collective actions, knowledge sharing and decision making by self-directed groups. Social technologies, which support cooperative socio-technical systems, are being appropriated by enlightened enterprises which are transforming from traditional hierarchical structures to more network-centric configurations.
Published in Chapter:
Complex Organizations and Information Systems
Leoni Warne (Department of Defence, Australia), Helen Hasan (University of Wollongong, Australia), and Henry Linger (Monash University, Australia)
Copyright: © 2009
|Pages: 9
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60566-026-4.ch102
Abstract
In modern organizations, information, and particularly knowledge, is known to be the most strategically important resource. The defining characteristics of modern organizational forms are purported to be flatter hierarchies, decentralized decision making, greater capacity for tolerance of ambiguity, permeable boundaries, capacity for renewal, self-organizing units, continual change, and an increasingly complex environment (Daft & Lewin, 1993; Warne, Ali, Bopping, Hart, & Pascoe, 2004). Yet, many systems that are developed to support organizational activities continue to fail at an alarming rate (Hart & Warne, 2005; Warne, 2002). Many explanations have been offered for such failures (e.g., DeLone & McLean, 1992; Fortune & Peters, 2005; Lyytinen & Hirschheim, 1987; Sauer, 1993; Warne, 2002), but contradictions and stresses continue to confound organizations and their use of information and communications technology (ICT). The challenge for information systems (IS) research and practice is to articulate an organizational paradigm, including its structures, forms, and systems, that will enable the organization to be agile, innovative, and have the capacity to learn. This article discusses some of the parameters for a new contemporary model for organizations.