Teams and Technology: : Fulfilling the Promise of the New Organization

Citation

Karake, Z.A. (1998), "Teams and Technology: : Fulfilling the Promise of the New Organization", Logistics Information Management, Vol. 11 No. 5, pp. 330-331. https://doi.org/10.1108/lim.1998.11.5.330.2

This book is the product of a collaborative effort of three people, two of whom (with technical/technological background) had worked together on several research projects at the RAND corporation in the early to mid‐1980s. Those projects dealt with the implementation of information systems in work environment dealing, particularly, with the role of the user in the development and implementation process. The third writer (Susan Cohen), from the Center for Effective Organizations at the University of Southern California, came to this interest from the side of being a researcher on team effectiveness and self‐management. The main motivator behind writing this book was the authors’ observations of how many organizations were struggling with teams and new information technology.

The structure of the book is straightforward. Section one, consisting of Chapters 1 and 2, provide the required background information of the mutual design and implementation (MDI) framework, a perspective the authors use to understand and address many of the issues facing organizations today. Much of this section is devoted to a description of the different team types and a preview of the design approach to team effectiveness. Section two of the book (Chapters 3, 4, 5 and 6) focuses on the nucleus of the framework ‐ the MDI team and its design, and portraying, in detail, an organization’s stakeholders and addressing their role as important members of the MDI team.

Section three (Chapters 7‐10) of the book describes the process by which the MDI team design and implements new technologies and identify the various users of those technologies. The three stages of this design and implementation process are well explained and documented in this section and section four is devoted to the numerous implications on the policies and practices of the whole organization, in general, and its human resource element, in particular. This is my favorite part of the book as it focuses on higher‐level issues of organizational change. In addition, the last chapter (12) presents a speculative look at the team‐based, technology‐enabled organization of the future. The authors successfully present a vision of work unbounded by such traditional constraints as time, place, authority, function and formal organizational boundaries. The main theme of the book is how organizations can change by integrating the design and implementation of teams and new technologies. True there are a number of excellent books on creating effective teams (most notably J.R. Hackman’s Groups That Work (and Those That Don’t) (1989), and a few books on implementing new information technologies in organizations (Walton’s Up and Running, 1989, for example), but there is no book that pulls these two significant, seasonable issues together. In addition, while the literature on groupware is growing by leaps and bounds, the focus is primarily on the hard‐side of the issue, technology. The soft‐side of the issue, that is the organizational change processes required to introduce the technology into team work settings has been largely overlooked.

The main audience of the book is those practitioners dealing with the details of team‐technology change, as well as to help them think more conceptually and strategically about its longer‐term implications. Specifically, the book is aimed at functional area managers in all types of organizations, large and small, public and private, not‐for‐profit, etc.

This is a major work; the book belongs in the collection of any serious student and practitioner of information and team management.