Library

Today, NewWOW shared its draft white paper, WORK 2020: The Effect of Higher Oil Prices on the Future of Work, with its membership. Using scenario analysis to examine how work systems would evolve under different possible future settings, the authors — Jim Creighton, Joe Ouye, and June Langhoff—looked at the larger context in which we will work.

Mike Joroff sent us a new study to share with the NewWOW group. Mike was writing in response to an article we featured last week on urban office parks (See http://www.newwow.net/members/node/1459#comment-968). Mike and a team from MIT are studying "new century city projects." He says these projects are a very new type of 21st century development and his "MT research and consulting teams are advising half of these and we are doing research about all of them." The report, New Century City Developments: Creating Extraordinary Value, was produced for a workshop held in Seoul in November.

David Coleman has contributed his latest white paper, Enterprise Social Collaboration Research Study, to our library. David's research addresses these questions: Which business processes lend themselves to social networks? Which industries and functional areas are more likely to adopt these collaborative technologies? He looked at three categories of social collaboration based on who populates them and what they are used for: Inside, Outside and Both.

Our latest library acquisition is a paper by Joe Ouye, "The Wickedness of Work-Systems Problems," a chapter in the book, Architecture-Design Methods-Inca Structures, by Johanna and Hans Dehlinger. Joe's paper describes the lack of appreciation or understanding of the wicked nature of work-systems problems. Wicked problems behave badly.

The white paper for Symposium 7, Shifting from “Change Management” to Systems Sensemaking and Design, by Dr. Terri Griffith, is now available in our library. Dr. Griffith, Professor of Management, Leavey School of Business, Santa Clara University, will present her paper at next week’s symposium in Chicago.

“Organizational change programs continue to fail more than they succeed,” states Dr. Griffith.

The goal of her report is to push for greater sophistication on the part of those people bringing about change, equipping them to meet the demands being placed on them, and providing greater organizational support for their activities.

Sun's Open Work Services Group developed this white paper It is based on research by Glenn Dirks and Edel Kelville. The pair interviewed successful virtual managers at Sun, including people from MySQL, a company that merged with Sun earlier this year. MySQL's 400 employees are located in 30 countries and 70 percent of them work from home.

Edel Keville contributed a new white paper from Sun's Open Work Services Group. The paper lists ten common myths (Examples: #3 -Teams can't be productive if they don't sit together; #4 - Employees prefer traditional work arrangements; #8- If managers allow mobile work, they will lose control). It then provides research-based information to help organizations assess distributed work options. http://www.newwow.net/members/node/956

Joe Ouye has posted his paper, In Search of Measuring Workplace Productivity, to the library. Joe presented this paper at the ProWork Seminar in Helsinki, Finland this past May. His paper reviews the difficulties and approaches of measuring knowledge worker productivity and suggests a Workplace Performance Model, based on principles from Human Performance Technology (HPT) for understanding and designing multiple measuring approaches.

Summary:

Our latest library entry is the research paper, Intercultural Collaboration in Global Team by Professors Pamela Hinds and Catherine Cramton. The authors describe the challenges and opportunities in intercultural collaboration and the impact of culture on best practices for globally distributed work teams. Their goal is to provide a framework for thinking about cultural differences and intercultural collaboration in globally distributed teams. This is an understudied area with perhaps as many questions as answers.

This study reviews approaches that some firms are taking to provide new services and products that integrate place, ICT, and organizational behavior to create what the authors call “integrated workplaces.” Redefining workplaces and real estate projects as integrated spaces and projects where technology and place become interwoven with organizational and personal behavior will require a substantial mind shift, the authors maintain. Their paper explores the premise that this integration will transform the workplace and large-scale real estate projects and examines how this transformation will create new business opportunities. The report was prepared for Tekes, the Finnish Funding Agency for Technology and Innovation, and the findings will be used in the future Spaces and Places Tekes Program.