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Collaborative Systems as Cultural Constructions |
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By barton on
9/7/2008
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Many companies are unaware how their culture creates material effects within the organization. Social conflict and the deployment of new technologies can produce positive changes within an organization by altering social dynamics and promoting new cultural models.
Culture, those patterns of human activity and symbolic structures that give such activities significance and importance, is not generally included as part of the design and deployment process when a company goes forward with a new technology. Many significant deployment failures are attributable to cultural issues (references to come).
While we do not normally think of computer systems as part of our culture, the manner, dress, language, belief systems, and norms of behavior found within an organization clearly extend beyond the boundary of a computational system, especially one that is collaborative. People define the essential meaning and structure of these systems. This is why we say that they are cu ...
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Patterns of thought in software adoption |
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By barton on
4/16/2008
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We've been doing a lot recently supporting teams in deploying and / or
upgrading to Team
Foundation Server 2008. It's been a very interesting and
enlightening period of our work at Luminous because it is field testing
and reinforcing some of the fundamental ideas we have held
about the underlying patterns of thought people experience when
adopting software.
Software adoption is a complex cultural process that is often relegated
to a functional discipline that is ill-equipped to address the
organizational and cultural requirements that support
successful adoption. Adoption is not simply putting someone
new in front of someone. Optimally it addresses the notion of enhancing
the capability of the individual, which inherently is about changing
the way people think about the world and their relationship to it.
Software adoption always occurs as some substep to a larger p ...
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Levelling The Playing Field |
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By barton on
8/29/2007
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While I am not an expert on the subject, in my tenure as a founder of the Bay Area .NET Users Group (Bay.NET), I am very much aware of cultural differences between programmers who work with the Visual Basic and C# languages. An excellent overview written by Nigel Shaw on these cultural differences can be found here.
Having lived in many places throughout the world I would consider myself as one who is most interested in culture and cultural differences. In my experiences, I have discovered in myself an inclination to find things I appreciate about other cultures (and people).
I think we all tend to look at differences, be they cultural, as in those who prefer Apple Computers to Windows or Linux and make some value judgments based on what camp we live in and what camp
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The illusion of the perfect computer |
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By barton on
7/15/2007
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I recently got a new computer preloaded with Windows Vista. I must say that when I got the machine I was extremely surprised at how well it worked and how easy it was for me to transfer my data to the new machine (Lenovo T60p). With all of the comments I had been hearing which indicated that many people felt that the Vista operating system was problematic, I was rather surprised at how smooth my transition was.
Alas, this was not to last, and what is rather ironic is that I have been subject to a number of issues in the past month that have been rather disruptive and taken some time to remedy and yet are not related specifically to any flaw in the operating system.
The first sign of trouble was when I shut the computer down after doing some work and found it would not start the next morning. I believe a file was (or files were) corrupted somehow on shutdown (although I do not know for sure) and were only able to get back to an operable state by restoring ...
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The Activity of Building |
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By barton on
5/21/2007
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“The activity we call building creates the physical order of the world, constantly, unendingly, day after day.”
So begins Christopher Alexander’s The Nature of Order. While coming from a very different perspective, I have identified in the work a connection to Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach as well as Stephan Wolfram’s A New Kind of Science. All three are concerned to some degree with the recursive nature of the universe and the nature of existence.
I am partial to Alexander’s approach to the material as he identifies himself as an architect, despite his being trained as a scientist in mathematics at Trinity College in Cambridge ...
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Google@Work? Well, not quite yet anyway... |
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By barton on
5/15/2007
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I attended an event this morning at the Westin St. Francis from the Google Enterprise team, who are trying to sell Google's existing technology to companies. See http://www.google.com/enterprise/ for details on the products.
The speaker was Michael Lock, director of North American sales. He mentioned during the talk that he worked at Oracle for 8 years.
He shared some "Observations" with the audience - I thought the points themselves were good but my overall impression was that for most of the points he made that current MS products do the same things - but of course, they would never tell you that.
Consumer Technology Is Leading Innovation:
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Sometimes it's the little things |
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By barton on
4/4/2007
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This morning as I was preparing to leave my home, getting ready to pull my car out of the garage, I heard a woman's voice say "excuse me?". I turned out of my garage to see a woman in her pajamas. "I've locked myself out of my apartment. Street cleaning is at 8AM and I had to move my car, but I've locked myself out. Do you have a phone and a phone book I can use to call a locksmith?"
I have a phone but I do not have a phone book, and the only ways I could imagine locating a locksmith for her was to either pull out my laptop or use my mobile phone to call the cellular directory service.
I have avoided for a quite some time now the move toward a phone device that is also connected to the internet and also my email. Seeing people on their phones in their cars and at all sorts of public places is sad enough, but add to this the rise of the "blackberry prayer" (as my brother-in-law calls it), that prolonged gesture by real-time email-ena ...
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