From: kling@ics.uci.edu (Rob Kling)
Subject: Computing for the Future
Newsgroups: comp.society.futures
Date: 8 Jan 93 22:31:45 GMT



               Computing for Our Future in a Social World

                               Rob Kling
              Department of Information & Computer Science
                  University of California at Irvine,
                         Irvine, CA 92717, USA
                    kling@ics.uci.edu (714-856-5955)

                       January 1, 1993[v.CACM-2]

Note: To appear in Communications of the ACM, February 1993, in a Forum
   which discusses Computing the Future: A Broader Agenda for Computer
   Science and Engineering. Hartmanis, Juris and Herbert Lin (Eds).
   National Academy Press, 1992. A much longer version of this article
   which develops many of the key ideas with more detailed examples will
   appear as  "Organizational Analysis in Computer Science." The
   Information Society, 9(2) (Mar-Jun, 1993).


Introduction

Computer Science is being pressed on two sides to demonstrate 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. It was justified by 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 40,000 BS and MS degrees annually. Many
of these graduates take computing jobs for which they are inadequately
educated, such as helping to develop high performance computing
applications to improve the performance of organizations.

The authors of "Computing the Future" (CTF) encourage Computer Scientists
to envision new technologies in the social contexts in which they will be
used. The numerous examples of computer applications that the authors
identify as having significant social value to people and organizations
rest on social analyses. Further, the report tacitly requires that the CS
community develop reliable knowledge, based in systematic research, to
support effective social analysis. And it requires an ability to teach such
skills to practitioners and students. Without a disciplined skill in social
analysis, 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 have sometimes conceived and promoted technologies
which were far less useful or far more costly than they claimed. Effective
CS practitioners who "compute for the future" in many organizations need
some skills in social analysis to help understand appropriate systems
requirements and the conditions which transform high performance computing
into high performance organizations. Since CTF does not spell out these
tacit implications, I'd like to explain them here.

Broadening Computer Science: From Computability to Usability

Since the usability of systems and software is a key theme in the history of
CS, we must expand beyond mathematics for our  conceptions of "theory" for
the discipline. Some applications, such as as supercomputing and
computational science are evolutionary extensions of traditional scientific
computation, even though they have taken a new direction with rich graphical
front ends for visualizing enormous mounds of data. But some other, newer
modes of computing, such as networking and microcomputing, changed 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 have made
digitally represented text and graphics accessible to tens of millions of
people.

Of the diverse trends in computing, the growing emphasis of usability is one
of the most dominant. The usability tradition has deep roots in CS, and
extends back into the design of programming languages, and operating
systems. But each of these topics also rested on mathematical analysis which
Computer Scientists could point to as "the foundations" of the respective
subdisciplines. However, the growth of non-numerical  applications for
diverse professionals, including text processing, electronic mail, graphics,
and multimedia has placed 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 are others. The theoretical
foundations about effective computer interfaces must rest on sound theories
of human behavior and their empirical manifestations (cf. Ehn, 1991, Grudin,
1989). Further, interfaces involve capabilities beyond the primary
information processing capabilities of a technology. They entail ways that
people can learn about the system 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, which 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 make many computer
systems truly useful must rest, in part, on theories of work and
organization.

Broadening Computer Science: From High Performance Computing to High
   Performance Organizations

The arguments of CTF go beyond interface design 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, for which critics can ask for systematic evidence. For example, one
can ask about the evidence 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 have
provided value to people and organizations. The tough question is whether
the overall productive value of these investments has been worth the overall
acquisition and operation costs. 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 it (Dunlop
and Kling, 1991a). But it there is no automatic link between computerization
and improved productivity. While it is easy to show that 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 technological
support to improve organizational performance. Some technologies require
extensive technical support which provides hidden costs (Kling, 1992). Some
technologies are superb for well-trained experts, but are difficult for less
experienced people or "casual users."

Further, a significant body of empirical research has shown that the social
processes by which computer systems are introduced and organized makes a
substantial difference in their value to people, groups and organizations
(Kraemer, et. al. 1985). Most seriously, some computer applications do not
fit a person or groups'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 which can sound useful, but which
often are useless because they impose burdensome record keeping demands
(Grudin, 1989). On the other hand, email is one of the most popular
applications in office support systems, even when other capabilities, like
group calendars, are ignored.

The social consequences 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 graduate 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 have been prone to recommend systems-based solutions whose structure
or implementation would be problematic.

Organizational Informatics

CTF places dual responsibilities on Computer Scientists. One responsibility
is to produce a significant body of applicable research. The other
responsibility is to educate a significant fraction of CS students to be
more effective in conceiving and implementing systems that will actually
enhance organizational performance. Today, most of the tens of thousands
people who obtain BS and MS degrees in CS have no opportunities for
systematic exposure to reliable knowledge about the value of computing in a
social world. Yet a substantial fraction of these students go on to work for
organizations attempting to produce or maintain systems which improve
organizational performance without a good conceptual basis for their work.
Consequently, many of them develop systems which underperform, and are
sometimes even counterproductive, in organizational terms.

Organizational Informatics includes studies of the usability of computerized
information systems and communication systems in organizations. It also
includes studies of their effective implementation, use, organizational
value, conditions that facilitate risks of failures, and their consequences
for people and an organization's clients. It is an intellectually rich and
also practical research area.

In the last 20 years a substantial body of scientific research in
Organizational Informatics has developed. The best of the research in North
America is conducted by faculty in the Information Systems departments in
Business schools and by scattered social scientists (cf. Boland and
Hirschheim, 1987; Galegher, Kraut and Egido, 1990; Cotterman and Senn,
1992). But Computer Scientists cannot effectively delegate the research and
teaching of Organizational Informatics to Business Schools or social science
departments.

Like CS, faculty in these other disciplines prefer to focus on their own
self-defined issues.  And they rarely ask questions with attention to fine
grained technological variations which are important for CS. For example,
the professional discussions of computer risks have been best developed by
ACM sponsored activities related to SIGSOFT. They are outside the purview of
Business School faculty and sociologists seem disinterested. Further,
faculty in these other disciplines are not organized to effectively teach
numerous CS students about systems development and use in organizations. In
North America there is currently no well developed institutional arrangement
for educating students who can effectively take leadership roles in
conceptualizing and developing complex organizational computing projects
(Lewis, 1989).

CTF is permeated with interesting claims about the social value of recent
and emerging computer-based technologies. While many of these observations
are of a kind that should rest on an empirically grounded scientific
footing, Computer Scientists have deprived themselves of access to such
research. For example, the discussion of systems risks in the ACM rests on a
large and varied collection of examples and anecdotes. But there is no
significant research program to help better understand the conditions under
which organizations are more likely to develop systems using the best
risk-reducing practices. There is an interesting body of professional lore,
but little scholarship to ground it.

More broadly, Computer Scientists have virtually no scholarship to draw upon
to understand when high performance networks, like NREN, will catalyze
social value proportional to their costs. Consequently, many of the
"obvious" claims about the value of various computing technologies that we
Computer Scientists make are more akin to the lore of home remedies for
curing illness. Some are valid, others are unfounded speculation. More
seriously, the theoretical bases for recommending home medical remedies and
new computer technologies are not advanced without having sound research
programs.

What is needed

CTF sets the stage for a broader appreciation of value of Organizational
Informatics within Computer Science. The CS community needs an
institutionalized research capability to produce a reliable body of
knowledge about the usability and value of computerized systems and the
conditions under which computer systems improve organizational performance.
In Western Europe there are some research projects about Organizational
informatics in a few Computer Science departments and some research funding
through the EEC's Espirit program (Bubenko, 1992; Kyng and Greenbaum,
1991). These new research and instructional programs in Western Europe give
Organizational Informatics a significantly more effective place in CS
education and research than it now has in North America.

The CS community has had many years of experience in institutionalizing
research programs, especially through DARPA and NSF. There are many
approaches, including national centers and individual investigator research
grants. All such programs aim to develop and sustain research fields with a
combination of direct research funds, the education of future researchers,
and the development of research infrastructure. They are all multimillion
dollar efforts. Today, NSF devotes about $500K annually to Organizational
Informatics as part of the Information Technology in Organizations program.
This start is far short of the level of funding required to develop this
field within CS.

The North American CS curricula must also include opportunities for
students to learn the most reliable knowledge about the social dimensions
of systems development and use (Denning, 1992). The study of Organizational
Informatics builds upon both the traditional technological foundations of
CS and the social sciences. But social science faculty at most universities
will not develop it as an effective foundational topic for CS. On specific
campuses, CS faculty may be able to develop good instructional programs
along with colleagues in social sciences or schools of management. But
relying upon any specific discipline doesn't provide a national scale
solution for CS. Other disciplines will not do our important work for us.
Mathematics departments may be willing to teach graph theory for CS
students, but the analysis of algorithms would be a much weaker field if it
could only be carried out within Mathematics Departments. For similar
reasons, it is time for academic Computer Science to embrace Organizational
Informatics as a key area of research and instruction.

References:

    Boland, Richard and Rudy Hirschhiem (Ed). 1987.  Critical Issues in
       Information Systems, New York: John-Wiley.
    Bubenko, Janis. 1992. "On the Evolution of Information Systems
       Modeling: A Scandinavian Perspective."  Lyytinen, Kalle and Seppo
       Puuronen (Ed.) 1992. Computing in the Past, Present and Future
       Jyvaskyla Finland, Dept. of CS and IS, University of Jyvaskyla
    Cotterman, William and James Senn (Eds). 1992. Challenges and
       Strategies for Research in Systems Development. New York: John
       Wiley.
    Denning, Peter. 1992. "Educating a New Engineer" Communications of the
       ACM. (December) 35(12):83-97
    Dunlop, Charles  and and Rob Kling, 1991a. "Introduction to the
       Economic and Organizational Dimensions of Computerization." in
       Dunlop and Kling, 1991b.
    Dunlop, Charles and and Rob Kling (Ed). 1991b. Computerization and
       Controversy: Value Conflicts and Social Choices. Boston: Academic
       Press.
    Ehn, Pelle. 1991. "The Art and Science of Designing Computer
       Artifacts." in Dunlop and Kling, 1991.
    Galegher, Jolene, Robert Kraut, and Carmen Egido (Ed.) 1990.
       Intellectual Teamwork: Social and Intellectual Foundations of
       Cooperative Work.  Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
    Grudin, Jonathan. 1989. "Why Groupware Applications Fail: Problems in
       Design and Evaluation." Office: Technology and People.
       4(3):245-264.
    Kling, Rob. 1992. "Behind the Terminal: The Critical Role of Computing
       Infrastructure In Effective Information Systems' Development and
       Use." Chapter 10 in Challenges and Strategies for Research in
       Systems Development. edited by William Cotterman and James Senn.
       Pp. 153-201. New York: John Wiley.
    Kraemer, Kenneth .L., Dickhoven, Siegfried, Fallows-Tierney, Susan, and
       King, John L. 1985.  Datawars: The Politics of Modeling in
       Federal Policymaking.  New York:  Columbia University Press.
    Kyng, Morton and Joan Greenbaum. 1991. Design at Work: Cooperative Work
       of Computer Systems. Hillsdale, NJ.: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Acknowledgements:

I appreciate efforts by several colleagues to strengthen this paper through
their critical assistance: Jonathan P. Allen, Lisa Covi, Sy Goodman, Beki
Grinter, Jonathan Grudin, John King, Heinz Klein, Kenneth Kraemer, Sharyn
Ladner, Larry Rosenberg, Tim Standish, John Tillquist, and Carson Woo.