Information Management for Organizational Effectiveness

Wednesday, 12 Nov 2025 | technology and organizational context

Today we will explore whether or not the expansion of organizational technologies ...

... have been an unquestioned benefit to our personal career prospects

Today's class will be led by your colleagues in the Data Golems. They will be doing the presenting, but you all will aid them by contributing to the discussion of the topics, as appropriate.

Is your job safe - collaboration, automation, annihilation?

The world of work will be radically different in the future. From hyper-surveillance of staff to digital nomadism to robots taking jobs—how, where and why we work is changing beyond all recognition.
This is the workforce of the future. Technology is transforming the world of work beyond all recognition creating groundbreaking opportunities. But it's also eroding the rights of workers. Some even fear a dystopian jobless future. But are these anxieties overblown? How we react to this brave new world of work today will shape societies for generations to come.
What are the forces shaping how people live and work and how power is wielded in the modern age? NOW AND NEXT reveals the pressures, the plans and the likely tipping points for enduring global change. Understand what is really transforming the world today - and discover what may lie in store tomorrow.

Read these articles to prepare yourself for some discussion

How is technology fitting in with your sense of self? pipe organ at Royal Festival Hall, from The Guardian

There is no secret that pulling together a collaborative and productive team could be a challenging mission. In fact ... it's becoming harder and harder to increase overall team performance. And as you can guess, low productivity negatively impacts companies in terms of revenue, employee engagement, work quality, and more. But the good news is that businesses can influence and revamp their productivity in many ways. For instance, they can do it with the help of technology.

5 Ways to Use Technology to Improve Workplace Productivity, Technology Advice, 17 December 2017

Metaphorically, it pays to reimagine and reshape our environments in ways that make healthy habits a downhill rather than an uphill climb. In the workplace, individual employees can play a role in cocreating xpositive technological environments. But, ultimately, leaders of organizations should play an active role in spearheading such design efforts and taking an evidence-based approach to learning what works, and continually improving on it.

Designing work environments for digital well-being, Deloitte, 16 Apr 2018

Interactive technologies will be central to engaging people at work and enhancing their creativity and productivity. AI will improve the level of work people do by automating more mundane, administrative tasks. But none of this works without providing the training for employees to acquire new digital skills.

Why Technology Is Key To Building A Destination Workplace , Forbes, 30 May 2018

You don't have to read these unless you wish to ...

... but they might come up in discussion

The impact of AI on the future of work should be framed in terms of tasks, not jobs, automated by AI. AI substitutes some tasks, complements others, and creates new tasks. How this complex interplay of substitution, complementarity, and creation rebundles tasks into existing or new jobs remains uncertain. For this, we must take account of social and professional norms over and above technological feasibility.

Sako, Mari. "Technology Strategy and Management: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Professional Work" Communications of the ACM | VOL. 63 | NO. 4. (April 2020): 25-27.

(Learning Analytics) and data-enabled surveillance can begin as tools for social good but slide into morally suspect territory, especially in immersive institutions with fiduciary responsibilities like (higher education institutions). Institutional interests and student interests are not identical, and we should not assume they align.

Alan Rubel and Kyle M.L. Jones. "Computing Ethics: The Temptation of Data-Enabled Surveillance" Communications of the ACM | VOL. 63 | NO. 4. (April 2020): 22-24.

Continuing a thought from the previous session

continuing the thought from the previous session, how does an increase in personal productivity translate to an increase in organizational productivity?
how have advances like social media tools altered the workplace?
what must be considered when introducing new technologies into an existing organizational environment?
what are the hazards of introducing new technologies to organization members who are resistant to them?

Something else

Sacred Steel

Robert Randolph and the Family Band

A virtuoso on the pedal steel guitar, Robert Randolph set the music world on fire in 2000 when he began playing his first club dates in New York City. Randolph started playing the instrument as a church-going teenager in Orange, New Jersey, a small city just outside of Newark. He regularly attended the House of God Church, an African-American Pentecostal denomination that had been implementing steel guitars (or “Sacred Steel”) in services since the '30s, with the pedal steel in particular being introduced during the '70s. Randolph learned to play by watching other steel players during church services; years later, he updated that sacred basis with a secular mix of funk and soul, giving a new multicultural facelift to an instrument that had often been associated with country music.