The organizational contexts of development and use

Most computers are used in organizational settings. However, the 1980s provided an interval in which human-computer interaction research and design could ignore social context and focus on perceptual and cognitive aspects of use. IBM PCs and Macintoshes were difficult to network. They were used in social and organizational contexts, but their use was individual. Results were typically shared as printed hardcopy. In this decade, software engineers, human factors engineers, graphic and industrial designers, and psychologists addressed the perceptual and cognitive challenges of presenting information and conducting human-computer dialogues. As PCs lost their “insularity,” social and organizational effects grew in design relevance. First came file sharing and file transfer, then email and the Internet. Client-server computing, groupware, and other technologies reflect these changes. As “PC islands” disappear, computing becomes inextricably interwoven with its group and organizational contexts. Over time, the proportion of computers used in engineering settings decreases. Developers of interactive systems must work harder to understand the contexts of use. As the field of human-computer interaction expands its focus to consider organizational context, we find that this is not wholly unexplored territory. Particularly in Europe, less influenced by personal computer software development, organizational analysis has been a continuous thread in human factors and ergonomics research and practice. In general, the information systems field (also called data processing or management information systems) has focused on the organizational effects of computing (see Friedman [1989] and Hirschheim et al. [1995] for historical surveys). This work focuses on organizations. Between the individual focus of much HCI work and the organizational level lie yet other levels of organization, such as groups and projects. Recent research into group dynamics, much of it by anthropologists or ethnographers who study technology use in modern organizations, is found in the computer-supported cooperative work conferences (North American and European conference proceedings available from ACM and Kluwer, respectively) and the Kluwer journal of the same name. Organizational context plays two roles in interactive systems development: