Photo:
Johan Gunséus
Born:
June 19, 1968.
Family:
Wife and three children.
Key
research interests: IT and organizational change, digital business.
Other
interests: Golf, football,
and music.
Address:
Department of Informatics, Umeå University, 901 87 Umeå, Sweden
090-786 9766
jonny.holmstrom@informatik.umu.se
Recommended readings:
Embracing new organizational models: Open Source, Federated Networks,
and more
Joe Trippi's book The revolution will not be televised is an interesting
reading in relation to my own work on the "bottom-up Net economy".
Trippi makes a good case for how bottom up organizations will replace
command and control in most (if not all) contexts - in business, in politics,
in government. Community will be the organizational structure and Open
Source will be the organizational model. The new is now inevitable and
Trippi poses a question to those in power: will you continue to defend
the indefensible or will you embrace the world to come? In a similar vein,
Zuboff and Maxim argue in their book The Support Economy that today's
corporations are far from such a bottom-up ideal and are in fact not meeting
the deep needs of their clients at all. Those who can figure out how to
do so using new technology in the context of what Zuboff and Maxim call
"federated networks" will succeed better in meeting these needs.
The point to be made here is that embracing "the world to come"
(to borrow a phrase from Trippi) has to do with not only embracing new
technology but also the bottom-up principles that are associated with
it.
What ANT is not
In A prologue in form of a
dialog between a Student and his (somewhat) Socratic Professor, Latour
seeks to clarify some misconceptions about what ANT is and is not. Latour
brings forth challenges for all of those who deal with ANT in some shape
of form. While Latour not really answers the question posited at the beginning
about what ANT can do for you, he outlines well what it is not. One of
the major issues people have with ANT is that there are no ready-made
steps on how to go about operationalizing the vocabulary. What we are
faced with then is a theory/methodology facing its own adaptations through
processes of translation and inscription. So while we have bits and pieces
of attempts to operationalize various ANT related concepts we lack a coherent
theoretical framework. One possible answer to why this is the case is
provided in ANT and after, in the chapter "On recalling ANT"
where Latour states that actor-network was only meant to be a way of doing
ethnomethodology and not a theory (Law & Hassard, ANT and after,
p. 15). Another answer is that we need to raise the bar when it comes
to theorizing in general and to theory adaptation in particular. Those
interested in a exploration into the second option may be interested in
the take Duane Truex, Mark Keil and myself have on the issue in our JAIS
resubmission Theorizing in information systems research. A confessional
tale of the adaptation of escalation theory to information systems research.
The wisdom of crowds
Is there such a thing as a wisdom in crowds? As Surowiecki would have
it in his book The Wisdom of Crowds: Yes, but only under the right
conditions. In order for a crowd to be smart, he says it needs to satisfy
four conditions: Diversity (a group with many different points of view
will make better decisions than one where everyone knows the same information),
independence (people's opinions should not ideally be determined by those
around them), decentralization (power should not reside in one central
location), and aggregation (you need some way of determining the group's
answer from the individual responses of its members). A somewhat idealistic
position but nevertheless interesting, in particular in relation to P2P
filesharing networks.
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