Internet Technology and the Workplace

Internet Technology and the Workplace

The exponential growth and adoption of Internet technologies in organizations continues to revolutionize how workgroups, teams, departments and divisions work with each other. The speed and agility of communicating however has also been problematic in terms of defining ethical guidelines (Trembly, 34, especially in managing the emerging set of social networking technologies, collectively known of as Web 2.0 (Klein, et.al.). This collection of Web 2.0 technologies include blogs (Patten, Moss, 24), Wikis (Condon, 54) and micro-blogging, a form of Instant Messaging (Sostek, et.al.) which is responsible for the use of Twitter in many organizations. At the center of the problems of which technologies to use in an organization, and once selected, setting their use guidelines, is the need for defining policies for their use (Arnesen, Weis, 53-65). In completing this analysis, search engines Google and ProQuest, an academic database, were used.

Harnessing the Rapid Change in Technology

Instant messaging, e-mail and electronic meetings are becoming transformed by the trends toward a more interactive Web-based set of applications known as of Web 2.0. Employers are managing the challenge of the rapid escalation of technologies by first putting them into the context of how they can assist customers. As Klein (et.al.) states:

Established companies should concentrate on using Web 2.0 to tap into their client bases and draw on what's called "the power of the crowd." For instance, I've written about the Fluevog shoe company, which has 10 stores in the U.S. And Canada. it's not a mainstream product, but customers are passionate about their shoes. The founder went to trade shows where people were constantly giving him notes and ideas for new designs. So he decided to create an area on his Web site where he asked his customers tell him what they'd like to see in shoe designs.

He got about 700 replies and made a shoe based on one of the suggestions. That's harnessing crowd power to help a business succeed. The company has also asked customers where Fluevog should advertise, and it has had customers send in pictures of themselves wearing the shoes at landmarks like the Eiffel Tower and the Coliseum in Rome. If an entrepreneurial company has a passionate following for its product or service, then Web 2.0 can't be beat as a way to tap into that.

Foremost in the minds of employers is how to use these technologies to gain a greater competitive advantage over time in serving their customers yet also retain the productivity levels of their workers. The fear of these technologies is that they will drain productivity at the least and lead to abuses at the worst. This double-edged sword of new technology is being increasingly being relied on for capturing knowledge in the organization, serving as a vital catalyst for higher levels of collaboration Condon, 55):

According to Jorge Lopez, industry research chief at Gartner, the focus of it has been to cut costs by automating tasks that can be broken down into discrete processes. But it has achieved all it can in that respect and any further improvements would be marginal. The next frontier for it is the non-routine work that lends itself less readily to automation - and here the talk is of 'augmentation': helping people come to decisions more quickly, and helping support any consequent action.

With knowledge workers, such as managers, who deal with non-routine kinds of work, the idea of productivity is different. As (management guru Peter) Drucker pointed out, you don't pay them by the hour but by results,' says Lopez. 'The question is: how do you help that class of worker become productive?'

Restrictive Polices vs. Capturing Productivity