Report launch

The turnout for last night's iSociety report launch was perhaps a little thinner than usual: many were out on the anti-war march wending its way across London, while others no doubt faced difficulties just getting around town (no buses across central London, ranks of police blocking the way - The Work Foundation is just around the corner from Buck House, Downing Street and Trafalgar Square).

Responding to the report, Geraldine Fitzpatrick of Sussex University characterised the workplace as bounded chaos, where each and every situation is unique, and pointed to the Lorenz system (described originally in the context of meteorology - remember the butterfly effect?) as a good way of picturing the complexity we face on a daily basis. The way of dealing with this bounded chaos, she argued, is to design systems - in the widest sense - that permit adaptation to circumstance. And that doesn't mean 'personalisation'.

Bill Thompson, somewhat uncharacteristically, quoted Bill Gates. In his keynote speech at Comdex, Gates described IT at the brain of the organisation: "If you take your brain and outsource it then any adaptability you want (becomes) a contract negotiation." A common pattern in the research findings was the poor communication between users and ICT professionals, though this wasn't always the result of outsourcing.

I can think of a few people in MS who would have much to contribute to an ethnographically informed debate on ICTs in the workplace (Dennis Wixon and Anne Cohen Kiel, to name a couple), but it seems the UK is willing to supply only tablet-wielding sales and marketing bods. Not to worry: they are actually funding - along with PWC - the ongoing iSociety research programme, and that has to be a good thing.