Friday, June 20, 2008

Disruptive Innovation and the Infomated Workplace

One author who set my thinking into "forest fire" mode was Dr. Shoshanna Zuboff: her book The Future of the Workplace was a validation of my thinking about the virtual community as a place where one could really "use" one's imagination. Dr. Zuboff coined the word "infomate" in the spirit of "automate", wherein, an automated workplace amplified the muscle and sinews of the worker; computers and the data stream would amplify the brain and nerve power of the worker in the future workplace.

"Exploiting the 'informated' environment means opening the information base of the organization to members at every level, assuring that each has the knowledge, skills and authority to engage with the information productively." Shoshana Zuboff

"Computerization brings about an essential change in the way the worker can know the world and, with it, a crisis of confidence in the possibility of certain knowledge."
Shoshana Zuboff

"The workplace of the future will bear little resemblance to today's centrally administered hierarchies. Work will be more ad hoc, on the fly and responsive. Successful employees won't be afraid of new situations without rules." Shoshana Zuboff

Later, I will try to make the sense that I made out of Dr. Zuboff's vision. For right this red-hot second, though, today, I was browsing the bookshelves and a provocative title called out: Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns by Clayton Christiensen, Michael Horn, and Curtis Johnson. This was a book that had something that made perfect sense on every random page. As a high school English teacher, I enjoy finding the patterns in diverse pieces of literature. I am going to try to make sense of Zuboff by reading Christiensen, et al.

No comments:

Post a Comment