The Social Life of Information

by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid

For those who may not be aware of his background, John Seely Brown is Chief Scientist at Xerox, and also Director of Xerox PARC; Mr. Duguid is a research specialist in Social and Cultural Studies at the University of California at Berkeley. Mr. Brown, as you may know, is the Chief Scientist at Xerox, and also director of Xerox PARC. As the book-jacket says, "For years, pundits have predicted that information technology [and the Internet in particular - EY] will obliterate the need for almost everything — from travel to supermarkets to business organizations to social life itself. Individual users, however, tend to be more skeptical. Beaten down by info-glut and exasperated by computer systems fraught with software crashes, viruses, and unintelligible error messages, they find it hard to get a fix on the true potential of the digital revolution."

The book contains some intriguing discussions about the differences and conflicts between "process" (which we are constantly trying to formalize and automate) and "practice", which they define as an innovative, collaborative activity between peers who are trying to solve "real world" problems that don't always fit into nice, straightforward process-descriptions. This pertains to knowledge workers of all kinds, especially the software developers and managers that I work with; among other things, it provides a cogent explanation of why business process reengineering was such a dismal flop in most companies, and why SEI-style process standardization sometimes fails to live up to expectations.