Subject: RISKS DIGEST 14.24 REPLY-TO: risks@csl.sri.com RISKS-LIST: RISKS-FORUM Digest Monday 11 January 1993 Volume 14 : Issue 24 FORUM ON RISKS TO THE PUBLIC IN COMPUTERS AND RELATED SYSTEMS ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy, Peter G. Neumann, moderator Contents: Organizational Analysis in Computer Science -- PART ONE (Rob Kling) [PART TWO is in RISKS-14.25.] The RISKS Forum is moderated. Contributions should be relevant, sound, in good taste, objective, coherent, concise, and nonrepetitious. Diversity is welcome. CONTRIBUTIONS to RISKS@CSL.SRI.COM, with relevant, substantive "Subject:" line. Others may be ignored! Contributions will not be ACKed. The load is too great. **PLEASE** INCLUDE YOUR NAME & INTERNET FROM: ADDRESS, especially .UUCP folks. REQUESTS please to RISKS-Request@CSL.SRI.COM. Vol i issue j, type "FTP CRVAX.SRI.COMlogin anonymousAnyNonNullPW CD RISKS:GET RISKS-i.j" (where i=1 to 14, j always TWO digits). Vol i summaries in j=00; "dir risks-*.*" gives directory; "bye" logs out. The COLON in "CD RISKS:" is essential. "CRVAX.SRI.COM" = "128.18.10.1". =CarriageReturn; FTPs may differ; UNIX prompts for username, password. For information regarding delivery of RISKS by FAX, phone 310-455-9300 (or send FAX to RISKS at 310-455-2364, or EMail to risks-fax@cv.vortex.com). ALL CONTRIBUTIONS CONSIDERED AS PERSONAL COMMENTS; USUAL DISCLAIMERS APPLY. Relevant contributions may appear in the RISKS section of regular issues of ACM SIGSOFT's SOFTWARE ENGINEERING NOTES, unless you state otherwise. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Organizational Analysis in Computer Science Rob Kling Department of Information & Computer Science University of California at Irvine, Irvine, CA 92717, USA kling@ics.uci.edu (714-856-5955) January 10, 1993 [Working Draft 11b] Note: To appear: The Information Society, 9(2) (Mar-Jun, 1993). A much shorter version of this paper will appear as "Computing for Our Future in a Social World" in Communications of the ACM, February 1993, in a Forum that discusses Computing the Future: A Broader Agenda for Computer Science and Engineering. Hartmanis, Juris and Herbert Lin (Eds). Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1992. ABSTRACT Computer Science is hard pressed in the US to show broad utility to help justify billion dollar research programs and the value of educating well over 40,000 Bachelor of Science and Master of Science specialists annually in the U.S. The Computer Science and Telecommunications Board of the U.S. National Research Council has recently issued a report, "Computing the Future (Hartmanis and Lin, 1992)" which sets a new agenda for Computer Science. The report recommends that Computer Scientists broaden their conceptions of the discipline to include computing applications and domains to help understand them. This short paper argues that many Computer Science graduates need some skills in analyzing human organizations to help develop appropriate systems requirements since they are trying to develop high performance computing applications that effectively support higher performance human organizations. It is time for academic Computer Science to embrace organizational analysis (the field of Organizational Informatics) as a key area of research and instruction. INTRODUCTION Computer Science is being pressed on two sides to show broad utility for substantial research and educational support. For example, the High Performance Computing Act will provide almost two billion dollars for research and advanced development. Its advocates justified it with arguments that specific technologies, such as parallel computing and wideband nets, are necessary for social and economic development. In the US, Computer Science academic programs award well over 30,000 Bachelor of Science (BS) and almost 10,000 Master of Science (MS) degrees annually. Some of these students enter PhD programs and many work on projects which emphasize mathematical Computer Science. But many of these graduates also take computing jobs for which they are inadequately educated, such as helping to develop high performance computing applications to improve the performance of human organizations. These dual pressures challenge leading Computer Scientists to broaden their conceptions of the discipline to include an understanding of key application domains, including computational science and commercial information systems. An important report that develops this line of analysis, "Computing the Future" (CTF) (Hartmanis and Lin, 1992), was recently issued by the National Computing and Telecommunications Board of the U.S. National Research Council. CTF is a welcome report that argues that academic Computer Scientists must acknowledge the driving forces behind the substantial Federal research support for the discipline. The explosive growth of computing and demand for CS in the last decade has been driven by a diverse array of applications and new modes of computing in diverse social settings. CTF takes a strong and useful position in encouraging all Computer Scientists to broaden our conceptions of the discipline and to examine computing in the context of interesting applications. CTF's authors encourage Computer Scientists to envision new technologies in the social contexts in which they will be used. They identify numerous examples of computer applications in earth science, computational biology, medical care, electronic libraries and commercial computing that can provide significant value to people and their organizations. These assessments rest on concise and tacit analyses of the likely design, implementation within organizations, and uses of these technologies. For example, CTF's stories of improved computational support for modelling are based on rational models of organizational behavior. They assume that professionals, scientists, and policy-makers use models to help improve their decisions. But what if organizations behave differently when they use models? For example suppose policy makers use models to help rationalize and legitimize decisions which are made without actual reference to the models? One cannot discriminate between these divergent roles of modelling in human organizations based upon the intentions of researchers and system designers. The report tacitly requires that the CS community develop reliable knowledge, based on systematic research, to support effective analysis of the likely designs and uses of computerized systems. CTF tacitly requires an ability to teach such skills to CS practitioners and students. Without a disciplined skill in analyzing human organizations, Computer Scientists' claims about the usability and social value of specific technologies is mere opinion, and bears a significant risk of being misleading. Further, Computer Scientists who do not have refined social analytical skills sometimes conceive and promote technologies that are far less useful or more costly than they claim. Effective CS practitioners who "compute for the future" in organizations need some refined skills in organizational analysis to understand appropriate systems requirements and the conditions that transform high performance computing into high performance human organizations. Since CTF does not spell out these tacit implications, I'd like to explain them here. BROADENING COMPUTER SCIENCE: FROM COMPUTABILITY TO USABILITY The usability of systems and software is a key theme in the history of CS. We must develop theoretical foundations for the discipline that give the deepest insights in to what makes systems usable for various people, groups and organizations. Traditional computer scientists commonly refer to mathematics as the theoretical foundations of CS. However, mathematical formulations give us limited insights into understanding why and when some computer systems are more usable than others. Certain applications, such as supercomputing and computational science are evolutionary extensions of traditional scientific computation, despite their new direction with rich graphical front ends for visualizing enormous mounds of data. But other, newer modes of computing, such as networking and microcomputing, change the distribution of applications. While they support traditional numerical computation, albeit in newer formats such as spreadsheets, they have also expanded the diversity of non-numerical computations. They make digitally represented text and graphics accessible to tens of millions of people. These technological advances are not inconsistent with mathematical foundations in CS, such as Turing machine formulations. But the value of these formats for computation is not well conceptualized by the foundational mathematical models of computation. For example, text editing could be conceptualized as a mathematical function that transforms an initial text and a vector of incremental alterations into a revised text. Text formatting can be conceptualized as a complex function mapping text strings into spatial arrays. These kinds of formulations don't help us grasp why many people find "what you see is what you get" editors as much more intuitively appealing than a system that links line editors, command-driven formatting languages, and text compilers in series. Nor do our foundational mathematical models provide useful ways of conceptualizing some key advances in even more traditional elements of computer systems such as operating systems and database systems. For example, certain mathematical models underlie the major families of database systems. But one can't rely on mathematics alone to assess how well networks, relations, or object-entities serve as representations for the data stored in an airline reservation system. While mathematical analysis can help optimize the efficiency of disk space in storing the data, they can't do much to help airlines understand the kinds of services that will make such systems most useful for reservationists, travel agents and even individual travellers. An airline reservation system in use is not simply a closed technical system. It is an open socio-technical system (Hewitt, 1986; Kling, 1992). Mathematical analysis can play a central role in some areas of CS, and an important role in many areas. But we cannot understand important aspects of usability if we limit ourselves to mathematical theories. The growing emphasis of usability is one of the most dominant of the diverse trends in computing. The usability tradition has deep roots in CS, and has influenced the design of programming languages and operating systems for over 25 years. Specific topics in each of these areas also rest on mathematical analysis which Computer Scientists could point to as "the foundations" of the respective subdisciplines. But Computer Scientists envision many key advances as design conceptions rather than as mathematical theories. For example, integrated programming environments ease software development. But their conception and popularity is not been based on deeper formal foundations for programming languages. However, the growth of non-numerical applications for diverse professionals, including text processing, electronic mail, graphics, and multimedia should place a premium on making computer systems relatively simple to use. Human Computer Interaction (HCI) is now considered a core subdiscipline of CS. The integration of HCI into the core of CS requires us to expand our conception of the theoretical foundations of the discipline. While every computational interface is reducible to a Turing computation, the foundational mathematical models of CS do not (and could not) provide a sound theoretical basis for understanding why some interfaces are more effective for some groups of people than others. The theoretical foundations of effective computer interfaces must rest on sound theories of human behavior and their empirical manifestations (cf. Ehn, 1991, Grudin, 1989). Interfaces also involve capabilities beyond the primary information processing features of a technology. They entail ways in which people learn about systems and ways to manage the diverse data sets that routinely arise in using many computerized systems (Kling, 1992). Understanding the diversity and character of these interfaces, that are required to make many systems usable, rests in an understanding the way that people and groups organize their work and expertise with computing. Appropriate theories of the diverse interfaces that render many computer systems truly useful must rest, in part, on theories of work and organization. There is a growing realization, as networks tie users together at a rapidly rising rate, that usability cannot generally be determined without our considering how computer systems are shaped by and also alter interdependencies in groups and organizations. The newly-formed subdiscipline of Computer Supported Cooperative Work and newly-coined term "groupware" are responses to this realization (Greif, 1988; Galegher, Kraut and Egido, 1990). BROADENING COMPUTER SCIENCE: FROM HIGH PERFORMANCE COMPUTING TO HIGH PERFORMANCE ORGANIZATIONS The arguments of CTF go beyond a focus on usable interface designs to claims that computerized systems will improve the performance of organizations. The report argues that the US should invest close to a billion dollars a year in CS research because of the resulting economic and social gains. These are important claims, to which critics can seek systematic evidence. For example, one can investigate the claim that 20 years of major computing R&D and corporate investment in the US has helped provide proportionate economic and social value. CTF is filled with numerous examples where computer-based systems provided value to people and organizations. The tough question is whether the overall productive value of these investments is worth the overall acquisition and operation costs. While it is conventional wisdom that computerization must improve productivity, a few researchers began to see systemic possibilities of counter-productive computerization in the early 1980s (King and Kraemer, 1981). In the last few years economists have found it hard to give unambiguously affirmative answers to this question. The issue has been termed "The Productivity Paradox," based on a comment attributed to Nobel laureate Robert Solow who remarked that "computers are showing up everywhere except in the [productivity] statistics (Dunlop and Kling, 1991a)." Economists are still studying the conditions under which computerization contributes to organizational productivity, and how to measure iteasy. But there is no automatic link between computerization and improved productivity. While many computer systems have been usable and useful, productivity gains require that their value exceed all of their costs. There are numerous potential slips in translating high performance computing into cost-effective improvements in organizational performance. Some technologies are superb for well-trained experts, but are difficult for less experienced people or "casual users." Many technologies, such as networks and mail systems, often require extensive technical support, thus adding hidden costs (Kling, 1992). Further, a significant body of empirical research shows that the social processes by which computer systems are introduced and organized makes a substantial difference in their value to people, groups and organizations (Lucas, 1981; Kraemer, et. al. 1985; Orlikowski, 1992). Most seriously, not all presumably appropriate computer applications fit a person or group's work practices. While they may make sense in a simplified world, they can actually complicate or misdirect real work. Group calendars are but one example of systems that can sound useful, but are often useless because they impose burdensome record keeping demands (Grudin, 1989). In contrast, electronic mail is one of the most popular applications in office support systems, even when other capabilities, like group calendars, are ignored (Bullen and Bennett, 1991). However, senders are most likely to share information with others when the system helps provide social feedback about the value of their efforts or they have special incentives (Sproull and Kiesler, 1991; Orlikowski, 1992). Careful attention to the social arrangements or work can help Computer Scientists improve some systems designs, or also appreciate which applications may not be effective unless work arrangements are changed when the system is introduced. The uses and social value of most computerized systems can not be effectively ascertained from precise statements of their basic design principles and social purposes. They must be analyzed within the social contexts in which they will be used. Effective social analyses go beyond accounting for formal tasks and purposes to include informal social behavior, available resources, and the interdependencies between key groups (Cotterman and Senn, 1992). Many of the BS and MS graduates of CS departments find employment on projects where improved computing should enhance the performance of specific organizations or industries. Unfortunately, few of these CS graduates have developed an adequate conceptual basis for understanding when information systems will actually improve organizational performance. Consequently, many of them are prone to recommend systems-based solutions whose structure or implementation within organizations would be problematic. ORGANIZATIONAL INFORMATICS Organizational Informatics denotes a field which studies the development and use of computerized information systems and communication systems in organizations. It includes studies of their conception, design, effective implementation within organizations, maintenance, use, organizational value, conditions that foster risks of failures, and their effects for people and an organization's clients. It is an intellectually rich and practical research area. Organizational Informatics is a relatively new label. In Europe, the term Informatics is the name of many academic departments which combine both CS and Information Systems. In North America, Business Schools are the primary institutional home of Information Systems research and teaching. But this location is a mixed blessing. It brings IS research closer to organizational studies. But the institutional imperatives of business schools lead IS researchers to emphasize the development and use of systems in a narrow range of organizations -- businesses generally, and often service industry firms. It excludes information systems in important social sectors such as health care, military operations, air-traffic control, libraries, home uses, and so on. And Information Systems research tries to avoid messy issues which many practicing Computer Scientists encounter: developing requirements for effective systems and mitigating the major risks to people and organizations who depend upon them. The emerging field of Organizational Informatics builds upon research conducted under rubrics like Information Systems and Information Engineering. But it is more wide ranging than either of these fields are in practice. Organizational Informatics Research In the last 20 years a loosely organized community of some dozens of researchers have produced a notable body of systematic scientific research in Organizational Informatics. These studies examine a variety of topics, including: * how system designers translate people's preferences into requirements; * the functioning of software development teams in practice; * the conditions that foster and impede the implementation of computerized systems within organizations; * how people and organizations use systems in practice; * the roles of computerized systems in altering work, group communication, power relationships, and organizational practices. Researchers have extensively studied some of these topics, such as computerization and changing work, appear in synoptic review articles (Kling and Dunlop, in press). In contrast, researchers have recently begun to examine other topics, such software design (Winograd and Flores, 1986; Kyng and Greenbaum, 1991), and have recently begun to use careful empirical methods (e.g. Suchman, 1983; Bentley, et. al, 1992; Fish, et. al., 1993). I cannot summarize the key theories and rich findings of these diverse topics in a few paragraphs. But I would like to comment upon a few key aspects of this body of research. Computer Systems Use in Social Worlds Many studies contrast actual patterns of systems design, implementation, use or impacts with predictions made by Computer Scientists and professional commentators. A remarkable fraction of these accounts are infused with a hyper-rational and under-socialized view of people, computer systems, organizations and social life in general. Computer Scientists found that rule driven conceptions to be powerful ways to abstract domains like compilers. But many Computer Scientists extend them to be a tacit organizing frame for understanding whole computer systems, their developers, their users and others who live and work with them. Organizations are portrayed as generally cooperative systems with relatively simple and clear goals. Computer systems are portrayed as generally coherent and adequate for the tasks for which people use them. People are portrayed as generally obedient and cooperative participants in a highly structured system with numerous tacit rules to be obeyed, such as doing their jobs as they are formally described. Using data that is contained in computer systems, and treating it as information or knowledge, is a key element of these accounts. Further, computer systems are portrayed as powerful, and often central, agents of organizational change. This Systems Rationalist perspective infuses many accounts of computer systems design, development, and use in diverse application domains, including CASE tools, instructional computing, models in support of public policy assessments, expert systems, groupware, supercomputing, and network communications (Kling, 1980; Kling, Scherson and Allen, 1992). All conceptual perspectives are limited and distort "reality." When Organizational Informatics researchers systematically examine the design practices in particular organizations, how specific groups develop computer systems, or how various people and groups use computerized systems, they find an enormous range of fascinating and important human behavior which lies outside the predictive frame of Systems Rationalism. Sometimes these behaviors are relatively minor in overall importance. But in many cases they are so significant as to lead Organizational Informatics researchers to radically reconceptualize the processes which shape and are shaped by computerization. There are several alternative frames for reconceptualizing computerization as alternatives to Systems Rationalism. The alternatives reflect, in part, the paradigmatic diversity of the social sciences. But all of these reconceptions situate computer systems and organizations in richer social contexts and with more complex and multivalent social relations than does systems rationalism. Two different kinds of observations help anchor these abstractions. Those who wish to understand the dynamics of model usage in public agencies must appreciate the institutional relationships which influence the organization's behavior. For example, to understand economic forecasting by the US Congress and the Executive branch's Office of Management and Budget, one must appreciate the institutional relations between Congress and the Executive branch. They are not well described by Systems Rationalist conceptions because they were designed to continually differ with each other in their perspectives and preferred policies. That is one meaning of "checks and balances" in the fundamental design of the US Federal Government. My colleagues, Ken Kraemer and John King, titled their book about Federal economic modelling, DataWars (Kraemer, et. al., 1985). Even this title doesn't make much sense within a Systems Rationalist framework. Modelling can be a form of intellectual exploration. It can also be a medium of communication, negotiation, and persuasion. The social relationships between modelers, people who use them and diverse actors in Federal policymaking made these socially mediated roles of models sometimes most important. In these situations, an alternative view of organizations as coalitions of interest groups was a more appropriate conceptualization. And within this coalitional view of organizations, a conception of econometric models as persuasion support systems rather than as decision support systems sometimes is most appropriate. Organizational Informatics researchers found that political views of organizations and systems developments within them apply to many private organizations as well as to explicitly political public agencies. Another major idea to emerge from the broad body of Organizational Informatics research is that the social patterns which characterize the design, development, uses and consequences of computerized systems are dependent on the particular ecology of social relationships between participants. This idea may be summarized by saying that the processes and consequences of computerization are "context dependent." In practice, this means that the analyst must be careful in generalizing from one organizational setting to another. While data wars might characterize econometric modelling on Capitol Hill, we do not conclude that all computer modelling should be interpreted as persuasion support systems. In some settings, models are used to explore the effects of policy alternatives without immediate regard for their support as media for communication, negotiation or persuasion. At other times, the same model might be used (or abused with cooked data) as a medium of persuasion. The brief accounts of models for global warming in CTF fit a Systems Rationalist account. Their uses might appear much less "scientific" if they were studied within the actual policy processes within which they are typically used. Repercussions for Systems Design Even when computerized systems are used as media of intellectual exploration, Organizational Informatics researchers find that social relationships influence the ways that people use computerized systems. Christine Bullen and John Bennett (1991) studied 25 organizations that used groupware with diverse modules such as databases, group calendars, text annotating facilities and electronic mail. They found that the electronic mail modules were almost universally valued, while other system facilities were often unused. In a recent study, Sharyn Ladner and Hope Tillman examined the use of the Internet by university and corporate librarians. While many of them found data access through databases and file transfer to be important services, they also reported that electronic mail was perhaps the most critical Internet feature for them. The participants in our study tell us something that we may have forgotten in our infatuation with the new forms of information made available through the Internet. And that is their need for community. To be sure, our respondents use the Internet to obtain information not available in any other format, to access databases ... that provide new efficiencies in their work, new ways of working. But their primary use is for communication. Special librarians tend to be isolated in the workplace -- the only one in their subject specialty (in the case of academe), or the only librarian in their organization (in the case of a corporate library). Time and time again our respondents expressed this need to talk to someone -- to learn what is going on in their profession, to bounce ideas off others, to obtain information from people, not machines. There are tremendous implications from the Internet technology in community formation -- the Internet may indeed provide a way to increase community among scholars, including librarians. The danger we face at this juncture in time, as we attach library resources to the Internet, is to focus all of our energies on the machine-based resources at the expense of our human- based resources, i.e., ourselves (Ladner and Tillman, 1992). In these studies, Organizational Informatics researchers have developed a socially rich view of work with and around computing, of computing within a social world. These studies have strong repercussions for the design of software. A good designer cannot assume that the majority of effort should go into the "computational centerpiece" of a system, while devoting minor efforts to supporting communication facilities. One of my colleagues designed a modelling system for managers in a major telephone company, after completing an extensive requirements analysis. However, as an afterthought, he added a simple mail system in a few days work. He was surprised to find that the people who used these systems regularly used his crude electronic mail system, while they often ignored interesting modelling capabilities. Such balances of attention also have significant repercussions. Many people need good mail systems, not just crude ones: systems which include facile editors, ease in exporting and importing files, and effective mail management (Kling and Covi, 1993). Assessing people's preferences for systems' designs is an exercise in social inquiry. While rapid prototyping may help improve designs for some systems, it is less readily applicable to systems which are used by diverse groups at numerous locations. Computer scientists are beginning to develop more reliable methods of social inquiry to better understand which systems designs will be most useful (Bentley, et. al. 1992; Kyng and Greenbaum, 1991). Root and his colleagues (1993) recently reported the way that the explicit use of social theory helped them design more effective group meeting systems. Unfortunately, these newer methods are rarely taught to CS students. When computer specialists build an imbalanced system, it should not be a surprise when the resulting organizational value of their efforts is very suboptimal. [CONTINUED in RISKS-14.25.] ------------------------------ End of RISKS-FORUM Digest 14.24 ************************