Xerox's aim is to change the culture of paper technology in the
workplace. Liam White talks to the social scientist who is studying
how it should be done
Part of the problem with the technology industry is that it's full
of technologists. And if the lack of commercial nous among techie
types explains why excellent products fail, the involvement of
marketeers certainly accounts for the success of so much rubbish.
If technology and marketing professionals are broadly
responsible for the current state of the technology industry,
perhaps another perspective would be a good idea.
Xerox certainly thinks so, and has put a social scientist - Dr
Graham Button - in charge of its European research laboratory in
Cambridge.
The only problem, it would seem, is that of qualification. In
which area exactly does Button have expertise? He is an
ethnomethodologist, a field of sociology that borrows a lot of
techniques from anthropology. According to Button, this gives a
different view of things to that of classical sociology.
"We're more interested in recognising things, not from the
outside, but by accounting for the experiences people have each
day. It's about explaining how we organise our lives, as opposed to
putting them in external categories," he says.
"I'm interested in how work gets done and put together by those
who do it - I'm not interested in the different groups at work, but
more how domains of work are organised or develop."
Once again, Button distinguishes his particular field from
traditional sociology by citing the way in which data is gathered.
"We do a lot of field work. The ways we collect material are not
through surveys, we go and work with people - even try and do their
jobs."
For his PhD, Button observed situations as varied as Papworth
Hospital - to see how the work of medical care was organised - and
an artist's commune dealing with an audit by the Inland
Revenue.
"Now, I'm not going to try and do a heart surgeon's job, but I
can see how the work is organised. It's a technique borrowed from
anthropology. But if you look at the problem-solving or
decision-making process, you can see similarities and also
differences in the ways with which certain types of problems are
handled."
However, the most chaotic, fascinating maelstroms of activity
that Button has ever seen, and those which today account for his
position at Xerox, are software projects.
"Software engineering is a whole technical discipline of
problem-solving, but with practical matters - these people, these
resources, whatever. Now you may learn about resources and methods,
but the problems themselves change, so here we see problem-solving
executed as it's experienced in the real world - as opposed to how
it's done normally in the theoretical space."
Human interest
Button became interested in software engineering in an
organisational context, not in programming, but complexity issues.
Or, as he puts it, "in what it takes to concert the notions of
people separated by space, organisational divisions and other
barriers with no idea of what the final solution will be or whether
it will work; in how you co-ordinate so many people in such
expansive and long-term projects; and how you make sure you produce
something people actually want and fulfills the original
specifications".
It seems Button has observed quite a few of these things. But
while it may have been his favourite situation to observe as an
ethnomethodologist, broader situations of organisational change and
the general realignment of business processes are another
speciality.
"Recently I've been particularly interested in projects
including studying the work of printers. Because digital technology
allows networking and remote printing, I'm concerned to understand
this," says Button.
Last time new technology allowed the publishing industry to shed
some workers, it encountered considerable problems as a result. The
job of printing had been outsourced, the link between the editorial
and production processes was severed, and expertise in the latter
was lost. Heads of IT arriving at a firm where various strategic
parts of the IT function have been outsourced badly will be able to
imagine the kinds of problem this could cause.
This kind of study is particularly pertinent to Xerox, because
it intends to make a significant part of the publishing industry
obsolete. The document company's machines in every town will be
able to print, bind and finish any book or publication to order,
removing the need for any warehouses or distribution systems at a
stroke - because the only place any work will permanently reside
will be on the owner's network.
Nice idea, but as Button well knows, there is often a chasm
between concept and execution. People, particularly managers, get
excited about unproven ideas and make rash decisions. While the
Xerox lab may be doing well at producing entertaining gizmos,
Button will certainly have his work cut out if his bosses' grand
plans aren't to go the way of the paperless office.
Designing machines as if people mattered
The philosophy of Xerox's European Research Centre in Cambridge
is to develop understanding of the ways people work, and to use
technology to think creatively about the ways people use it. The
lab has three groups:
- Context multimedia systems deals mainly with camera and video
scanning, Its one product due for imminent release, CamWorks, uses
a fixed camera over the desk to provide continuous real-time video
and text recognition scanning of whatever's on the desk, so the
user can move documents seamlessly between the computer and paper
desktop environments
- Mobile document systems aim to provide real-time mobile data
sharing from a very large number of devices. Agreements concerning
which devices the software will be released on are currently under
negotiation
- Studies of work aims to achieve a better alignment of
technology with the ways in which users work by making attention to
the workaday world an integral dimension of technology and work
systems design