Abstract
Web services are frequently discussed as “the next big thing” in information technology architecture. The picture painted by pundits, practitioners, IT vendors, and academics is appealing technically: Web service applications “exposed” to one another through standard protocols, navigating through an open infrastructure to search out counterparts over the Internet, with “seamless” integration across business processes and enterprises, without human intervention. However, the vision of a computing architecture that takes “people out of the network” has troubling social implications. In this paper, we utilize deconstruction as an analytic approach to examine a paper that promotes Web services, entitled “Your Next IT Strategy” (Hagel and Brown 2001). Our analytic purpose is to generate interpretations of the text that surface assumptions about how this IT innovation may influence the social organization of IT-related work. Our interpretation suggests that the Web services architecture could contribute to reproduction and consolidation of control among already powerful socio-economic actors, while restructuring and automating the work of IT professionals and other knowledge workers. We conclude with a discussion of deconstruction as a research approach to investigate issues of social inclusion and IT innovation.
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© 2006 International Federation for Information Processing
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Davidson, E., Chiasson, M., Ruikar, S. (2006). Taking People out of the Network: A Deconstruction of “Your Next IT Strategy”. In: Trauth, E.M., Howcroft, D., Butler, T., Fitzgerald, B., DeGross, J.I. (eds) Social Inclusion: Societal and Organizational Implications for Information Systems. IFIP International Federation for Information Processing, vol 208. Springer, Boston, MA . https://doi.org/10.1007/0-387-34588-4_21
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/0-387-34588-4_21
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