Director's Letter

In the previous issue of the CRITO Review, we explored how computers, the Internet and communication technologies are affecting our lives in the home. In this issue we focus on how these technologies are affecting how we work.

Data collected by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics indicates that about 16% of Americans work from home at least once a week, and this number is expected to increase. This has given rise to such terms as “telework,” “telecommuting,” “the virtual workplace,” “e-commuting,” “WFH (Working from Home),” and “homesourcing” to name a few. Previously, employees were tied to the mainframe and the office, but advances in telecommunications, the personal computer and the Internet have loosened the ties considerably, allowing companies to shift work from the office to the home. And whether at work or at home, people are using computers and related technologies (e-mail, instant messaging and word processing) for more work tasks than ever before. While it is frequently assumed that such pervasive use of computing is beneficial, several articles in this CRITO Review show that the technology can be a double-edged sword. It can bring greater personal and organizational productivity, but can also contribute to greater interruption of work, greater fragmentation of tasks and privacy concerns.

In the first article in this issue of the CRITO Review, Jim Danziger and Kelly Garrett provide us with some interesting trends from their work on computers in the workplace. The data is from their recent surveys from Project POINT (People, Organizations, and Information Technology) - a national, five-year study supported by the National Science Foundation. This project is analyzing how IT, especially the Internet, transforms people’s lives in such areas as the home, work, civic life, and school. Their article describes changes in use of computers and other information technologies in the workplace.

Our next article features work done by Gloria Mark and Victor Gonzalez, which examines how people try to manage their already fragmented work using a variety of technologies. They find that the presence of new multiple technologies among software professionals is further fragmenting their work rather than integrating it, thus leading to more disruptions. The results provide insights into user requirements for better technologies in the workplace characterized by multitasking, work fragmentation and interruptions. They address the problem of how technology is not organized in terms of larger themes, and how people are left to integrate their information into cohesive task structures.

The third article addresses work place concerns about privacy when using Instant Messaging. As noted in the article by Danziger and Garrett, nearly one-third of all computer-using workers use the relatively new communication technologies such as Instant Messaging. While some companies are encouraging Instant Messaging as a means to increase productivity and profits, some employees are reluctant to fully embrace Instant Messaging due to concerns about privacy in the work place. Alfred Kobsa and Sameer Patil reveal how workers try to protect their privacy in “Underutilization of Instant Messaging Due to Privacy Concerns.”

Our final article revolves around the question: “How does Information Technology, and Email and the Internet in particular, reinforce or change an organization’s structure?” While most work in this area focuses on how organizations are being “transformed” by information technology, Christine Beckman and Taryn Stanko argue that IT may actually “reinforce” rather than transform the existing form of the organization.

With information technology playing a greater role in the daily operations of organizations today, workplaces are undergoing historic changes. Workplaces are technologically connected via the Internet without regard to geographic boundaries. Employees are thus able to interact and work with one another in a collaborative environment, regardless of where they are in the world. Finding ways to manage these new borderless organizations is a major challenge.

Sincerely,