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We theorize mobile knowledge workers’ uses of digital and material resources in support of their working practices. We do so to advance current conceptualizations of both “information infrastructures” and “digital assemblages” as elements of contemporary knowledge work. We focus on mobile knowledge workers as they are (increasingly) self-employed (e.g., as freelancers, entrepreneurs, temporary workers, and contractors), competing for work, and collaborating with others: one likely future of work that we can study empirically. To pursue their work, mobile knowledge workers draw together collections of commodity digital technologies or digital assemblages (e.g., laptops, phones, public WiFi, cloud storage, and apps), relying on a reservoir of knowledge about new and emergent means to navigate this professional terrain. We find that digital assemblages are created and repurposed by workers in their infrastructuring practices and in response to mobility demands and technological environments. In their constitution, they are generative to both collaborative and organizational goals. Building from this, we theorize that digital assemblages, as individuated forms of information infrastructure, sustain stability and internal cohesion even as they allow for openness and generativity.

PDIs are emerging as alternative sociotechnical infrastructures to enhance flexible work arrangments.

We report findings from an ongoing panel study of 68 U.S.-based online freelancers, focusing here on their experiences both pre- and in-pandemic. We see online freelancing as providing a window into one future of work: collaborative knowledge work that is paid by the project and mediated by a digital labor platform. The study’s purposive sampling provides for both empirical and conceptual insights into the occupational differences and career plans of freelance workers. The timing of the 2020 data collection provides insight into household changes as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Findings make clear these workers are facing diminished work flexibility and increased earning uncertainty. And, data show women are more likely than men to reduce working hours to help absorb the increased share of caregiving and other domestic responsibilities. This raises questions of online freelancing as a viable career path or sustainable source of work.

We advance the concept of platformic management, and the ways in which platforms help to structure project-based or “gig” work. We do so knowing that the popular press and a substantial number of the scholarly publications characterize the “rise of the gig economy” as advancing worker autonomy and flexibility, focusing attention to online digital labor platforms such as Uber and Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. Scholars have conceptualized the procedures of control exercised by these platforms as exerting “algorithmic management,” reflecting the use of extensive data collection to feed algorithms that structure work. In this paper, we broaden the attention to algorithmic management and gig-working control in two ways. First, we characterize the managerial functions of Upwork, an online platform that facilitates knowledge-intensive freelance labor - to advance discourse beyond ride-sharing and room-renting labor. Second, we advance the concept of platformic management as a means to convey a broader and sociotechnical premise of these platforms’ functions in structuring work. We draw on data collected from Upwork forum discussions, interviews with gig workers who use Upwork, and a walkthrough analysis of the Upwork platform to develop our analysis. Our findings lead us to articulate platformic management -- extending beyond algorithms -- and to present the platform as a “boundary resource” to illustrate the paradoxical affordances of Upwork and similar labor platforms. That is, the platform (1) enables the autonomy desired by gig workers, while (2) also serving as a means of control that helps maintain the viability of transactions and protects the platform from disintermediation.

Information systems (IS), since their introduction into organisations over five decades ago, have promised to streamline business processes, integrate disparate systems, increase innovation, and offer greater competitive advantage. Over the past decades, the evolution of Information Systems have mirrored many of the challenges experienced by our work organisations. For example, throughout the 1980s a primary concern for many organisations was the attainment of competitive advantage within their respective industries (Porter, 1980). The IS field responded by developing systems that sought to provide management with timely information to assist in making better strategic decisions, e.g. executive support and decision support systems. In the 1990s, organisations began to look inwards searching for key strategic resources that would yield unique core competencies (Barney, 1991). Similarly, the IS field responded by building highly integrative enterprise-wide systems (Davenport, 1998), which would unite every pillar of the organisation with a single transparent view of firm competencies and business processes, viz Enterprise Systems. The first decade of the 21st century continued in this vein, with organisations extending their global reach through new and innovative business models (Johnson et al, 2008). Similarly, IS have responded with the emergence of digital technologies and their continued growth as transformative organisational systems enabling boundary-less corporate structures, 24/7 real-time customer-centric communication, collaborative supply chain environments, and virtual IS infrastructures delivered via cloud computing.

This research study compares the internal and external interoperability of digital infrastructures across two cyberinfrastructure organizations. Internal interoperability refers to the work that goes into developing seamless relations to align people and resources for a CI provision whereas external interoperability refers to the linkages the CI provision makes to the larger institutional ecology of science. The case study is designed to look at the governance of digital infrastructures to understand policy decisions in relation to three institutional aspects of science: funding, publication norms, and training and professionalization. Initial findings suggest that internal interoperability is similar for both digital infrastructures whereas external interoperability differs and is shaped by the domain of science that is stewarding the development of the provision. The study concludes by suggesting that linking digital infrastructure development to the components of science practice may be a starting point to understand how they become embedded (or not) in scientific work.

Big data has been widely promoted across disciplines and sectors for its potential to enhance lives and promote knowledge discovery. However, challenges arise at all stages of the data lifecycle due to the complexity of interactions between data and the contexts within which they are collected and managed, which has implications for interpretations of this data and eventual use of information and the creation of knowledge products from these data. Starting from the perspective of social informatics, this panel will discuss: the reciprocal relationships between data and context; specific challenges in distinct stages of data generation, data repository implementation, data curation, data use, and data reproducibility; and the implications of these challenges and their potential solutions for both social informatics research and society in general.

Market intermediaries are usually thought of as bringing together buyers and sellers. However, intermediaries may also connect these principals with other professionals who can provide assistance with and support for the transaction. We address the question of which set of ties—to buyers and sellers or to other professionals—are more important to the success of market intermediaries, using data from the U.S. residential real estate industry. From a national survey of 525 real estate agents, we find that ties to other professionals are more important than ties to buyers and sellers as predictors of the market intermediary's income, counter to the general wisdom about real estate in particular and market intermediaries more generally. We suggest that the professional networks around market intermediaries may behave like “quasi-firms” helping buyers and sellers navigate complex market transactions.

We identify the effects of specific organizational norms, arrangements, and policies regarding uses of social technologies for informal knowledge sharing by consultants. For this study, the term social technologies refers to the fast-evolving suite of tools such as traditional applications like e-mail, phone, and instant messenger; emerging social networking platforms (often known as social media) such as blogs and wikis; public social networking sites (i.e., Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn); and enterprise social networking technologies that are specifically hosted within one organization's computing environment (i.e., Socialtext). Building from structuration theory, the analysis presented focuses on the knowledge practices of consultants related to their uses of social technologies and the ways in which organizational norms and policies influence these practices. A primary contribution of this research is a detailed contextualization of social technology uses by knowledge workers. As many organizations are allowing social media-enabled knowledge sharing to develop organically, most corporate policy toward these platforms remains defensive, not strategic, limiting opportunities. Implications for uses and expectations of social technologies arising from this research will help organizations craft relevant policies and rules to best support technology-enabled informal knowledge practices.

We present 14 design observations for public safety networks (PSNs) and describe how they may apply more broadly to a wider range of inter-organizational systems within the public sector. A PSN is an interagency collaboration focused on developing and using information systems in support of information sharing and functional interoperability among public safety organizations engaged in law enforcement, criminal justice, and emergency response. We base our design observations upon an analysis of an extensive survey of 80 PSNs plus 6 in-depth case studies. The design observations identify commonalities that can guide agencies participating in interagency collaborations in addressing the interlocking issues they face. Our goal in presenting this set of design observations is to: (1) encourage improved PSN systems design and (2) draw attention to the importance of jointly addressing governance and technological considerations when designing PSNs.

We develop the concept of digital assemblages in order to advance current theorising on the ways in which information and communication technologies (ICTs) are helping to reshape work. The empirical setting is the US residential real estate industry—a ‘living laboratory’ for studying information-intensive work and the adoption and uses of ICT. We find that real estate agents' uses of ICT are pervasive and suggest that agents now embed themselves more deeply into the transacting of real estate by actively supporting buyers and sellers, rather than acting primarily as information intermediaries. Building from this, we theorise that this ICT use can more coherently be understood as a ‘digital assemblage’ rather than a formal information system. Digital assemblages are characterised as distinct patterns of ICT collections that, in use, are functionally equivalent and structurally similar, relying on standardised and commodified ICT and are neither formally designed nor collectively governed.

We theorize on the heterogonous network of people, visions, concepts, technological artifacts, and organizations that come together to enable product innovation. Drawing on the conceptual framing and mechanisms of actor-network theory (ANT), we focus on the relationships among human and non-human actors and their roles to enact new products. We do this to contribute both evidence and theory regarding the concept of a sociotechnical assemblage that serves as the innovation network. Advancing a sociotechnical conceptualization of innovation focuses attention on the contributions of, and linkages among, different types of actors; individuals and organizations, visions and concepts, and technological artifacts and prototypes together create a means for innovation to occur. The empirical basis for this theorizing comes from a detailed study of the community of research scientists, faculty, and graduate students; institutions such as research labs, funding sources, and product companies who were (and mostly still are) involved in tabletop computing. Analysis highlights the centrality of visions, concepts and technological artifacts in the innovation network. We also find that formal organizations play important, but often unrealized, roles in supporting innovation.

This chapter gives an overview of the current status of the global wind industry now present in over 80 countries; 26 of which have more than 1 GW installed, and 8 with more than 10 GW. The global wind industry had another record-breaking year in 2015, annual installations topping 63 GW; and not only did renewables surpass all other power sector investments, for the first time capital investments in renewables surpassed all capital investments in fossil fuels. By the end of 2015, there were about 433 GW of wind power spinning around the globe, a 17% increase over the previous year; and wind power supplied more new power generation than any other technology. Looking ahead, Global Wind Energy Council (GWEC) sees wind power installations nearly doubling in the next 5 years. Wind power has become the least cost option when adding new capacity to the grid in an increasing number of markets, and prices continue to fall. Given the urgency to cut down CO2 emissions and continued reliance on imported fossil fuels, wind power’s pivotal role in the world’s future energy supply is assured. Footnote The Global Wind Energy Council (GWEC) is the global trade association representing the wind industry. GWEC works at the highest international political level to create a better policy environment for wind power. GWEC’s mission is to ensure that wind power establishes itself as the answer to today’s energy challenges, providing substantial environmental and economic benefits. For more information visit: www.gwec.net .

A decade after the passing of Rob Kling, social informatics scholars come together on this panel to discuss the past and current state of social informatics research. This panel will provide an overview of the trajectory of social informatics from its emergence in Norway in the early 1980s to its current status as a scientific and intellectual movement uniquely positioned to investigate computerization and society. From the late 1970s, Kling and his colleagues engaged in the study of the social aspects of computing (Dutton, 2005) that would become arguably the most significant version of social informatics when labeled as such in 1996. Social informatics was defined as "the interdisciplinary study of the design, uses and consequences of information technology that takes into account their interaction with institutional and cultural contexts" (Kling, 1999). At that time, the call to incorporate the social, political, and cultural dimensions of ICT design and use threw down the gauntlet, moving the study of computerization and society in a decidedly social direction. Early social informatics research was primarily ethnographic and site specific or based on limited discourse analysis involving smaller case studies. However, in the last decade, the rise and pervasiveness of social media, has intensified the need to understand the interaction between the social and the technical making social informatics more relevant than ever. Recently, some social informatics scholars have heeded the call and have become engaged more intensively in case studies and comparative analysis while others are conducting large-scale research, involving big data and quantitative techniques. Both types of research are driving social informatics into the next stage of its evolution.

This article focuses on the ways in which social technologies facilitate informal knowledge sharing in the workplace. Social technologies include both common technologies such as email, phone, and instant messenger and emerging social networking technologies, often known as social media or Web 2.0, such as blogs, wikis, public social networking sites (i.e., Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn), enterprise social networking technologies, etc. We know social technologies support informal interactions over digital systems and influence informal social connections among people within and across organizational boundaries. To understand the role of social technologies in informal knowledge practices, we pursue a field study of knowledge workers in consulting firms to investigate the role of social technologies in their informal knowledge sharing practices. Our theorizing from the data is guided by the conceptual premises of sociomateriality to better understand the ways social technologies are integrated with commo...

Municipal police departments are leveraging social media platforms to support their missions. In this paper, we understand what they post on Facebook daily, and people's engagement with these government agencies on the social media platform. First, we collected and manually annotated 6,825 posts sent by four agencies (i.e., NYPD, LAPD, Baltimore PD and Cleveland PD) in 2014. We developed a two-tier code scheme to identify the purpose of a post and its topic. We then analyzed user engagement (e.g., likes, shares, and comments) with different post types (i.e., photo, video, status, and link) and topics (e.g., crime, traffic etc.). We identified interesting patterns of user engagement, and further validated the major findings by classifying and examining 33,103 posts sent by 52 large municipal police departments in 2015. Our results provide practical insights for police administrators and community members who are working on community policing frameworks.

Through this article we draw on concepts of time and space to help us theorize on the uses of information and communication technologies in work and for organizing. We do so because many of the contemporary discussions regarding work and organization are usually, and too often implicitly, drawing on rudimentary understandings of these concepts. Our focus here is to advance beyond simplistic articulations and to provide a more conceptually sound approach to address time, space and the uses of information and communication technologies in work. We do this focusing on temporal and spatial relations as a means to depict time and space at work. We characterize work as varying by two characteristics: the degree of interaction and the level of individual autonomy. We then develop a functional view of information and communication technologies relative to their uses for production, control, coordination, access and enjoyment. We conclude by integrating these concepts into an initial framework which allows us to theorize that new forms of work are moving towards four distinct forms of organizing. We further argue that each of these four forms has particular spatial and temporal characteristics that have distinct and different needs for information and communication technologies.

We report results from a longitudinal study of information systems development (ISD) teams. We use data drawn from 60 ISD teams at 22 sites of 15 Fortune 500 organizations to explore variations in performance relative to these teams' social interactions. To do this, we characterize ISD as a form of new product development and focus on team-level social interactions with external stakeholders. Drawing on cluster analysis, we identify five patterns of team-level social interactions and the relationships of these patterns to a suite of objective and subjective measures of ISD performance. Analysis leads us to report three findings. First, data indicate that no one of the five identified patterns maximizes all performance measures. Second, data make clear that the most common approach to ISD is the least effective relative to our suite of performance measures. Third, data from this study show that early indications of ISD project success do not predict actual outcomes. These findings suggest two issues for research and practice. First, these findings indicate that varying patterns of social interactions lead to differences in ISD team performance. Second, the findings illustrate that singular measures of ISD performance are an oversimplification and that multiple measures of ISD performance are unlikely to agree.

In this article we offer visual depictions and analysis of contextual factors relative to the presence of public safety networks (PSNs) in the United States (US). A PSN combines shared technological infrastructures for supporting information sharing, computing interoperability and interagency interactions involving policing, criminal justice, and emergency response. The broad research objective is to explain the formation of PSNs based upon factors derived from rational choice and institutional theories. To do so we develop maps to represent our data analysis. This analysis suggests that our approach is promising for generating insights about PSNs and, by extension, about other types of inter-organizational collaborations focusing on using information and communication technologies to enable information-sharing.

We theorize about the strategic alignment of computing with organizational mission, using the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania's efforts to pursue digital government initiatives as evidence. To do this we draw on a decade (1995–2004) of changes in Pennsylvania to characterize how a state government shifts from an organizational to an enterprise perspective regarding computing. We document and analyze the strategic and operational aspects of a series of information and communications technology (ICT) planning efforts to highlight the nature and roles of strategic alignment used to achieve this transition. Findings from this analysis mark the importance of combining several approaches to strategic planning regarding the adoption and application of ICT.

We focus here on the history, status, and future of social informatics. In doing this we build on the visionary work of the late Rob Kling. Social informatics research contributes insights and perspectives to the study of computing in our society that other approaches do not. We make the case that social informatics is on its way to becoming a scholarly institution: accepted as one of the several approaches to study computing, and in particular, the approach best suited to engage on computerization. In making this case, we highlight the value of social informatics, summarize its principles and common findings, point to current work and issues, illustrate the three perspectives through which to pursue this scholarship, and identify several current activities remaining for social informatics to institutionalize.

In this chapter, we argue that combining different qualitative research methods can facilitate the study of collective cognition in organizations, thus compensating the limitations of more traditional approaches. Using our own research experience in studying how designers develop new ideas, we explain how the combined use of ethnography, grounded theory and visual narrative analysis allowed us to gain a deep understanding of how material practices influence collective cognitive sensemaking in organizations. In particular, we show (1) how ethnography allowed us to map and unpack the material practices designers engage in when developing new ideas, (2) how interviews and grounded theory helped us articulate informants’ interpretations of these practices and reveal the underlying cognitive processes, and, finally, (3) how visual narrative analysis was useful to systematically track changes in the evolving collective interpretations, and by doing so to link together practices and processes in a longitudinal fashion.

5Through this article we theorize on the nature and effects of articulation work relative to the take-up and use of information and communications technologies (ICT). Articulation work is “work that enables other work”: that which links people, processes, and technologies within organizations. Articulation work in organizations is both common and too often invisible from a managerial or budgetary perspective. Drawing on data from a study of the introduction and implementation of mobile computing technologies into criminal justice organizations, we highlight two findings: (1) There exist ongoing but unmet articulation needs present in any organization or work system. (2) Articulation is cumulative. We find, that as work becomes more complex (such as adding new work tasks and using new technologies), there is more articulation needed. These findings raise issues with assessing the costs of articulation on individuals, and making arrangements to accommodate explicit and implicit articulation in organizational work, particularly around the take-up and ongoing use of ICT-based systems. 10 15 20

In this paper, we present findings from a survey of college graduates working in professional information technology jobs in the United States, focusing specifically on how career outcomes vary by gender. In doing so, we adopt an institutional standpoint and theorise that the organisation of the workplace, postgraduate training and education, and family characteristics largely shape the work-related outcomes of men and women in the information technology workforce. Drawing from interviews with 2823 graduates with information technology-related degrees, we report five major findings. First, women are nearly 2.5 times as likely as men to leave the professional information technology workforce. Second, men and women work similar hours and have similar commute times. Third, no significant differences exist between men's and women's types of formal postgraduate training and education. Fourth, women take more unpaid leave and for longer periods than men. Finally, women are paid significantly less than ...

We discuss three industry-level changes in the US residential real estate industry due, in part, to the take up and uses of information and communication technologies (ICT): (1) changes in the processes of transacting residential real estate, (2) changing roles for information, and (3) changing nature of intermediation, with the real estate transaction as more complex than the seller-agent-buyer simplification would suggest. We speculate that these changes are currently indeterminate due to ongoing confusion among the impacts of first and second-level effects, the roles of ICT in redefining access to data, and the importance of localized, social structures of real estate markets. To develop these findings, we take an institutional perspective and draw on multiple data collection methods. This provides us a means to highlight the value of an institutional perspective for studying industrial-level change.

In this article we discuss the sociotechnical nature of mobile computing as used by three policing agencies within the United States. Mobile devices, access, and service was provided via a third-generation wireless network to a focal application, Pennsylvania’s Justice NETwork (JNET), a secure Web-based portal connecting authorized users to a set of 23 federated criminal justice and law enforcement databases via a query-based interface. In this study we conceptualize mobility and policing as a sociotechnical ensemble that builds on the social-shaping of technology perspective and the tradition of sociotechnical theorizing, focusing on the co-design of work practices and technologies to support work. Drawing from the social informatics tradition, we turn a critical, empirical, and contextual lens on the practices of mobility and work. Our analysis of the data leads us to observing that the social and the technical are still considered separately in the context of mobile work. This simple view of social and technical as related, but distinct, often leads to problems with collecting and interpreting evidence of ICT-based systems’ design and use. We further note that this over-simplification of sociotechnical action is likely to continue unless more viable analytic approaches are developed and the assumptions of the current techno-determinist approaches are challenged more explicitly.

PurposeTo extend the work of Rob Kling, whose research interests, and advocacy were at the center of a movement in analytical inquiry and empirical research now known as “social informatics”.Design/methodology/approachReviews the work of those who engage in social informatics research to strengthen and further the conceptual perspective, analytical approaches, and intellectual contributions of social informatics.FindingsThe vibrant and growing international community of active social informatics scholars has assembled a social informatics resource kit that includes: perspective lenses through which research data can be viewed critically; techniques for building theory and developing models from socially rich empirical data; and a common body of knowledge regarding the uses and effects of ICTs.Originality/valueThe paper identifies opportunities to engage new scholars in social informatics discussions, and suggests new venues for promoting and extending the work of scholars already enrolled in the social informatics movement.

Considering three software development team archetypes and their implications.

Supporting secure wireless access to databases via public telecommunications infrastructure.

The growth of broadband connectivity expands what can and might be transmitted across the World Wide Web and Internet. Coupled with the increasing levels of mobile Internet connectivity, broadband may allow for a new round of changed patterns in the ways computers are used. Direct effects models of the deployment, use, value and futures of broadband connectivity are unlikely to cope with the social and technological complexity of broadband. A socio-technical theoretical perspective, with its emphasis on the complex relations among social and technical aspects of a phenomenon, can provide useful insight into the potential societal impact, institutional effects and changes to individual work and life behaviours that may arise from the increasing level of bandwidth available. This paper provides a brief overview of broadband and mobile technologies from a socio-technical perspective, organizes and surveys relevant literature and focuses on emerging issues with broadband connectivity where research will help shape policy, strategy and the use of broadband networks.

Information and communications technologies (ICT) are becoming pervasive in the residential real-estate industry and their usage is affecting the work lives of real-estate agents. Drawing on data from a regional study of the residential real-estate industry in the United States, we focus on the disintermediation or, more accurately, the reintermediation of real-estate agents in the sales process. Using data collected from interviews, direct observation, and archival records, we examine how real-estate agents are (1) taking advantage of new ICT in their work, and (2) protecting themselves from others wishing to displace their position in the real-estate value chain. Our analysis of this activity draws on two contrasting theoretical perspectives to illuminate the roles of residential real-estate agents: transaction cost and social capital. The results of this study provide insights into the ways in which ICT are used to build and draw on the social relationships that underpin the actual transactions, to hel...

In this article we highlight temporal effects in information and communication technology-enabled organizational change. Examples of temporal effects are explored in the context of one organization's efforts to implement an enterprise-wide information system. Temporality is presented as having two aspects, with the first being the well-recognized, linear and measured clock time. The second aspect of time is that which is perceived--often as nonlinear--and socially defined. We find that temporal effects arise both in changes to the structure of work and in differences among groups in how time is perceived. Evidence suggests that both specific characteristics of the implementation and of the enterprise systems' technologies further exacerbate these temporal effects. We conclude with suggestions for how to incorporate a temporally reflective perspective into analysis of technology-enabled organizational change and how a temporal perspective provides insight into both the social and technical aspects of the s...

Computing Handbook, Third Edition: Information Systems and Information Technology demonstrates the richness and breadth of the IS and IT disciplines. The second volume of this popular handbook explores their close links to the practice of using, managing, and developing IT-based solutions to advance the goals of modern organizational environments. Established leading experts and influential young researchers present introductions to the current status and future directions of research and give in-depth perspectives on the contributions of academic research to the practice of IS and IT development, use, and management Like the first volume, this second volume describes what occurs in research laboratories, educational institutions, and public and private organizations to advance the effective development and use of computers and computing in todays world. Research-level survey articles provide deep insights into the computing discipline, enabling readers to understand the principles and practices that drive computing education, research, and development in the twenty-first century.

The focus of this panel is the pragmatics of data sharing as framed by the needs and pressures of scholarly work. Panelists represent a lively blend of quantitative, qualitative and mixed methods researchers with recent experiences in developing and sharing data. Panelists will present research and address questions related to data collection and management, human subjects protocols, data archival and data repositories and other emergent issues.

We ask the question: What document infrastructures do scientists build to support their virtual organizing and documenting practices? Cyberinfrastructure (CI) is seen by many as playing a critical role in the future of social, behavioral, and economic sciences (SBE) by enabling innovation and scientific discovery. However, little is known about SBE scientists' distributed collaboration, a vital practice that CI must support for the doing of science. To provide insight into this question we interviewed 12 scientists regarding their work practices as they pursue joint research projects with colleagues from other universities. We identify the most frequently used physical and digital tools for SBE science and collaboration and characterize commonplace scientific practices in this domain with a paradigmatic example.

Data from 40 packaged software development teams are used to test a path model that relates three antecedents, the presence of intragroup conflict and the level of conflict management to software development team performance. Findings indicate that a combination of the team's characteristics, team member characteristics and existing levels of intragroup conflict accounts for nearly one- half of the variance between the best and worst-performing teams. Furthermore, the level of conflict management moderates the relationship between existing levels of intragroup conflict and performance. These results highlight both the complexity of the social processes of packaged software development and the value of this perspective for gaining insight on software development performance.

This paper contributes to the literature on software development in two ways. First, by discussing the packaged software domain relative to the more commonly studied custom information systems (IS) domain. Second, this paper presents our speculations on the implications of these differences between packaged and custom IS development. Regarding the first issue, while the two domains share many commonalities, the differences are also important to understand. To make this clear we discuss the differences at four levels: industry forces, approaches to software development, work culture and development team efforts. At each level, data from three case studies are used to illustrate the differences between the two domains. To develop our speculations, we contend that the differences between packaged software and the traditional, custom, approach to information systems development will be profound for five stakeholder groups: software development organizations, software development teams, software developers, software consumers and for researchers interested in software development.

Introduction The last half of the 1900s has been characterized by the increasing importance of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in social and organizational life. Computers, both on the desktop and embedded in automobiles, appliances, cellular phones, and satellite dishes have become part of the fabric of our work and social lives. In three decades, the Internet has grown from a network connecting four American universities and research labs to a global communications network. The evolving roles and increasing importance of the World Wide Web (WWW), electronic commerce, digital libraries, and computer-mediated distance education are all examples of phenomena that both rely on computing and are becoming commonplace. How are ICTs changing the ways in which we work and play? What are the effects of the increasing routinization of ICTs in modern societies? What are the practical and conceptual issues and implications of widespread and pervasive computerization? In this paper, we provide an overview of the intellectual geography of the research and theorizing in social informatics, focusing on issues applicable to the information sciences. We use the term intellectual geography to mean the physical location of those who conduct social informatics (SI) research. We use the term information sciences to mean the combination of traditional information science domains and related information systems and user behavior literatures. This overview unfolds in three parts. In the first part, we define and discuss concepts central to social informatics. In part two, we highlight the emerging intellectual geography of social informatics in the information sciences. In part three, we outline some conceptual and applied contributions that arise from this work. What is Social Informatics? Social informatics (SI) is a multi-disciplinary perspective. Social informatics researchers focus on the social consequences of the design, implementation, and use of ICTs over a wide range of social and organizational settings. Of particular interest are the roles of ICTs in social and organizational change. Researchers have studied social aspects of computerization for over 25 years, using terms such as the "social analysis of computing," the "social impacts of computing," "information policy," "computers and society," and, more recently, "computer-mediated communication" (Kling, 1999; p. 1; Bishop & Star, 1996: p. 309). Because the research findings and insights are found in many different literatures, they are difficult for scholars and teachers to access (Kling, Rosenbaum, Sawyer, Weisband, & Crawford, forthcoming, p. 12). Organizational informatics (OI) refers to those social informatics analyses bounded within organizations--where the primary participants are located within identifiable organizations. Many contemporary studies of the roles of computerization in shaping work and organizational structures fit within organizational informatics. For convenience, in the rest of this paper social informatics is used to denote both social and organizational informatics. Thus, both organizational and social informatics research respond directly to Bates' (1999, p. 1042) second "big question" that defines information science: "How do people relate to, seek, and use information?" What is novel about the recent interest in social informatics is that it reflects an underlying move to consolidate these disparate streams of research into a more unified and accessible domain. Then what is social informatics? According to Kling (1999), A serviceable working conception of 'social informatics' is that it identifies a body of research that examines the social aspects of computerization. A more formal definition is 'the interdisciplinary study of the design, uses and consequences of information technologies that takes into account their interaction with institutional and cultural contexts. …

This paper reports on a case study of the IT skills and needs at one site. The data is organized by assessing the members of BigCo's Corporate IT group regarding their present IT skill levels and the perception of skill needs both now and three years in the future. This work relies on a categorization drawn from both academic and professional literature regarding skill needs for IT professionals. In doing this work we draw on surveys, interviews, focus groups and archival documents to build a rich and detailed perspective on skill needs for the IT professionals at BigCo's Corporate IT group. Findings show that there is an implicit set of conceptual IT skills that IT professionals are expected to have. Further, the non-IT skill needs are presently very important and are expected to become even more important. Finally, there are important department-level, experience, and gender variations in the responses suggesting that IT roles are growing both more numerous and more specialized.

This paper presents data that describe the effects on software development performance due to both the production methods of software development and the social processes of how software developers work together. Data from 40 software development teams at one site that produces commercial software are used to assess the effects of production methods and social processes on both software product quality and team performance. Findings indicate that production methods, such as the use of software methodologies and automated development tools, provide no explanation for the variance in either software product quality or team performance. Social processes, such as the level of informal coordination and communication, the ability to resolve intragroup conflicts, and the degree of supportiveness among the team members, can account for 25 percent of the variations in software product quality. These findings suggest two paradoxes for practice: (1) that teams of software developers are brought together to create variability and production methods are used to reduce variability, and (2) that team-level social processes may be a better predictor of software development team performance than are production methods. These findings also suggest that factors such as other social actions or individual-level differences must account for the large and unexplained variations in team performance.

One key to improving team‐based software development is to support the developers’ ability to work together. Sets out one site’s response to this challenge. Developers at this site have a facility, which we will call the “team room”, allowing team members to work together. This is a computer‐supported meeting room that arose from the voluntary, and reflective, efforts of software developers to make it easier for them to work together. The team room’s popularity shows up in its extensive use for meetings and its acceptance as an integral part of software development at this site. When people use the team room, they work on a shared screen, making it easier to work together. Because they can work together, meetings become a time of work, not a pause between work sessions. Explains how these positive work outcomes have had some unexpected effects. For example, developers at this site now rely on room use to help deal with intra‐group conflict, so that the team room has become a buffer to social interaction, serving as a conduit for action.

(2003). Editorial: Broadband Internet and Electronic Commerce. Journal of Information Technology: Vol. 18, No. 4, pp. 227-229.

This paper contains analysis and some initial insights into the patterns of information technology (IT) architecture found in United States' public safety networks (PSNs). A PSN is understood to be an inter-organizational collaboration enabled by IT in support of the information sharing and interoperability needs of police and associated public safety organizations. We know the information systems designed and used by PSNs are often complex, expensive, and must support multiple public safety agencies. Improving our understanding of PSN IT architecture patterns could lead to improved designs and possibly improved performance of PSNs themselves. Data collected on 61 PSNs are analyzed using fuzzy set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA). The fsQCA method is explained in detail for those unfamiliar with this technique. Results illuminate (1) functionally similar configuration patterns of IT architecture among PSNs and (2) multiple architectural patterns associated with PSN performance.

Contemporary cyberinfrastructure (CI) seem poorly developed to meet the distributed work practices of social scientists. We draw from the literatures of science studies and e-science practices to advance a document-centered articulation of social scientists' distributed work practices. We report on a pilot study to provide some insights into CI needs for these scholars. This study relied on a mixed-methodological approach involving the mapping of digital and physical documents, automated tracking of desktop and online repositories, participant-generated images of physical documents and desktop, behavioral queries, along with interviews and participant observation. Findings suggest a document perspective provides insight into the distributed work practices and CI uses of social scientists.

We focus on how the uses of social networking technologies (SNT) are bound up in knowledge sharing practices. For us SNT include weblogs, wikis, corporate social networking platforms, and social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Our focus is to the uses of SNT relative to people's informal networks within and across organizations. We conceive these as multidimensional networks, treating technology and humans symmetrically and as members of the same sociotechnical ecology. To date, evidence indicates that SNTs have multiple roles regarding knowledge sharing in organizational contexts, and it appears that uses of SNT advance collaborative practices in ways not fully congruent with contemporary organizational practices.

Through this paper we advance an initial set of 12 observations that will form the basis for developing design principles for public safety networks (PSN), and more broadly for inter-organizational systems within the public sector. A public safety network is an interagency collaboration focused on the development and use of information and communication technologies to support the information sharing and functional interoperability needs of public safety organizations engaged in law enforcement, criminal justice, and emergency response. Our goal in presenting this initial set of PSN design observations is to: (1) encourage improved PSN systems design through the development of design principles and (2) increase the attention paid, when designing and developing these forms of information systems, to the co-design of structures of governance and operation that PSN entail.

INTRODUCTION Through this chapter I make two contributions. First, I provide both conceptual guidance and practical advice for information systems (IS) scholars who are involved in multi-method research, with a particular focus on conducting multi-method analysis. Second, and as a means to achieve the first contribution, I detail some of the principal components of multi-method research. Multi-method research is based on the premise that analysis of separate and dissimilar data sets drawn on the same phenomena will provide a richer picture of the events and/ or issues than will any single method. While valued by many IS scholars, multi-method-based research to study the roles of information and communication technologies (ICT) in social organization is underexplored as a set of coherent techniques. In response I put forth a set of observations that arise from my own multi-method research experi