Modular Learning Objectives

Back in the early 1980’s, I worked for a group of industrial engineers, for whom the word “technology” meant something large with moving parts that dripped oil onto the floor.  It was a major concession for them to admit that something called a “personal computer”, that just sat on a desk and acted, well, personal, could also be considered a “technology”, something as worthy of business consideration as all that oil-dripping stuff downstairs.  They absolutely drew the line, however, at admitting that those “things that looked like typewriters” could ever have any meaningful effect on a company’s bottom line.  True story.

Before we consign those guys to the Bottomless Pit, however, let’s think a little bit about what we really mean when we toss around the term “technology” and why, for some, “information technology” is still on the edge of the Outer Limits.  The root idea is the tool -- something outside ourselves that we use to help us accomplish things that our bodies or minds can't (or can't as easily) accomplish unaided. People have been using tools of various sorts for several million years before we ever came up with the term "technology" toward the end of the 19^th century.  The term specifically refers to a class or category of tools, defined on the basis of similarities to help us generalize. [Here is a short disquisition on the idea of "technology" that further develops some of these ideas, if you're interested.]

But there is major ambiguity in the meanings of "technology", resulting from different ways to define "similarity". A tool has two separable qualities: its basic structure (a physical object, or a defined set of actions) and its function (the uses to which it is put). It's hard to think of one without also implicitly at least thinking of the other -- although not necessarily in unique ways. Most physical objects can be put to many uses, and most needs for tools can be met with a number of different objects. Of course, some tools work better for some purposes than others. While it is probably possible to open a can of soup with a hammer, a can opener is likely to work a great deal better; if you have a nail that needs pounding, either a can opener or a can of soup will have some effect, but a hammer will probably work better.

When we talk about technologies, we often neglect to specify whether we are classifying the tools in question by structure or by function. If pressed, we can distinguish between a structure-based category of technologies such as "metal hand tools" and a function-based category such as "pounding tools", but faced with a hammer, such fine distinctions often elude us. Dealing with hammers, this usually doesn't make a lot of difference. But thinking about “information technologies” often leads us into definitional swamps, where the tool/use distinction becomes increasingly foggier.

There’s actually a vocabulary for talking about how this fog comes into play and how it can be in turn cleared away.  This is the language of what’s called "socio-technical systems design". Dating back some fifty years but still remarkably fresh and useful, this approach suggests that every organization has its "technical system" consisting of tools, hardware, resources, and related tangible components, and its "social system", made up of roles, rules, informal behavior, and attitudes that both govern and are critically dependent upon the technical system.  The two systems tend to compete with each other for scarce organizational resources; money spent to buy computers, for example, is not available to hire more staff or raise salaries. 

Both systems are needed by the organization.  Organizations that do not take advantage of technological possibilities are inefficient and tend to fail; but no organization can run on technology alone.  Both systems need, consume, and generate information.  Effective management requires that neither system dominate the other; rather, the two systems must be balanced with respect to each other for effective socio-technical performance.  In this socio-technical framework, the system is never permanent; all systems are in states of transition and incompleteness characterizes all organizational information technology.  Using this vocabulary, it's easy to see that you can't change either the technical system or the social system in any meaningful way without at the same time, changing, either inadvertently or by design, the other system as well.  We will use this terminology of socio-technical systems at various times throughout this course, and throughout the curriculum here at TUI; it is one of the more useful and flexible vocabularies for describing how information technology affects and is affected by social and organizational environments.

In this module, we’ll begin by thinking how this idea of the socio-technical system can help us begin to make sense of the single most fundamental restructuring mechanism for data, information, knowledge, and perhaps even wisdom itself since at least the printing press and perhaps since the development of literacy itself – that is, the increasingly omnipresent network of networks that we term "the Internet" – and how perhaps even those well-differentiated categories of understanding resources are becoming increasingly blurred.  When we get done, we should have a good grasp of some basic principles that we will further develop in subsequent modules.