The organization of organizations: issues for next-generation office IT

Abstract

The emerging new breed of IS (group decision support systems and decision simulation, multimedia, next-generation knowledge-based systems, deductive databases and DBMSs, and such like, together with the evolving networking capabilities) will have a more significant impact on the way people work than have ‘conventional’ IT products. This will have implications for what one might call the ‘cognitive style’ of the user interaction. This paper describes further a view of the organization of organizations that has already been sketched briefly elsewhere (Hutchison & Rosenberg, 1993; Hutchison, 1994), and proposes a strategy for the formal modelling of cooperative group work.