The Hindu Business Line : Are you a user or a luser?

THE free online dictionary on computing, FOLDOC, defines a user as someone doing "real work" with the computer, using it as a means rather than an end. He is the one who asks silly questions without thinking for two seconds or looking in the documentation. One who reports bugs instead of just fixing them. "Users are looked down on by hackers because they don't understand the full ramifications of the system in all its glory." A `luser' is a user who is also a loser, a word coined around 1975 at MIT. And `User Brain Damage', abbreviated as UBD, is how they wrap up a trouble report obviously due to utter cluelessness on the user's part.

As with human rights, starvation deaths, child labour, gender discrimination and so on, there are champions of users' rights. For instance, Tony Cornford of the Department of Information Systems, London School of Economics and Political Science, writes in a January 2003 working paper, titled "Information Systems and New Technologies: Taking Shape in Use" - how it is "ironic that despite a long tradition of concern for users, understood as a homogeneous group of difficult people who need to be brought into IS development work, there is far less of a tradition of study or concern for the uses they find for the technology."

It could warm your heart with fellow feeling when Tony says nobody is interested in knowing "the uses that people and organisations find for technologies, and the way they understand and appropriate technology's potential (its `affordances') as they interact with technologies over time." And he sets about exploring this "as an expression, and a working through, of the newness (and at times strangeness, opaqueness, rigidity and malleability) of technology."

Techie's way out

A paper of R. Boland, titled `Accounting as a Representational Craft: Lessons for Research in Information Systems' - that Tony cites - has statements that could bulldoze the IT aura. That the IS field is unwilling to stand and reflect upon practice, because of its casual exploitation of the new (or newer still) as an easy get out. Unlike accounting developments that normally do not change the basic rules of the game, the techies, when faced with a problem, flee forward "in hopes that a new round of technology advances in processors, storage, transmission or display devices will eliminate the difficulty". The continual arrival of new and newer-still technologies has diverted the IS field from retaining a focus on, or even identifying, the equivalent timeless essentials. An "ephemeral distraction" from the primary significance of information systems as "creating representations (boundary objects) that serve some organisational ends".

Tony challenges Boland's account of the `distracting attention paid to the newness of new technologies', saying: "IS field has not paid too much attention to the new, but too little." You gasp, but he adds: "We need to understand where this `newness' is to be found." So, what's new? "The new is not then (just) defined or found in technology with different characteristics or performance figures, or in refined development (design) methodologies, but is found and manifested in the perception and working through of the mystery, hidden rationales or uncertain outcomes which come with a new technology. That is, the newness is in the experience of technology, not the thing itself." Take a test: If you need to read that a second time to grasp the meaning, the thing is already new to you.

For long, it has been held that "established ways of handling information and data, based on pre-computer procedures, were to be translated into a new technological manifestation of essentially the same processes, though often with a strong Tayloristic bias when envisioning the functional structure into which new information systems based on the technology would fit." Design is seen as necessary in order to "marshal the potential (the newness) of new technology within a focused development effort, to shape it to organisational and social ends, and to provide the entrée for the skilled cadre of professionals with the knowledge and, more importantly, the legitimacy to act to shape technology to serve within an information system." Thus, writes Tony, the area of design activity has been `carved out and colonised' as a means of controlling the new.

There are only `two activities that help to sustain a new system in use', and these are evaluation and maintenance. `Evaluation is usually described in terms of its omission in practice and maintenance is the least regarded professional task within information systems practice.' While it is agreed that systems should be evaluated, they are not, and perhaps for good reasons `Evaluation is undertaken, if it is undertaken, for the apportionment of blame; in the popular aphorism of the final stages of project management: `for the punishment of the innocent and the exoneration of the guilty'. As for maintenance, which is usually seen as a just-about necessary evil, it is not the central concern of those who work as part of a system (users), information systems managers, information systems professionals or, even, researchers. As Swanson and Dans suggest, "The effort to maintain systems in organisations may be more positively appreciated if it is not understood as aimed at extending the useful life of a given system (given at the time of design), but rather that useful lives give cause to extend the effort in maintenance." Not maintain to live, but live to maintain.

To wrap up, systems development is `uncontrollable'. And to study information systems through the IS professionals and what they do - through design - is at best to miss the main story. Because, "The story of information systems and the potential of new technologies, their newness, is far more in the hands of the community into which they are introduced and which will create its own meaning and role for technology. It is to them, and to technology itself once it enters the world of use, that we need to look to find the authentic account of the new. We must work at cultivating an alertness and responsiveness to where, how and through whom the new is manifested."

If you had started off as a user, you are blessed if you have not turned a luser.

hindubusinessline@hotmail.com

Send this article to Friends by E-Mail
Comment on this article to BLFeedback@thehindu.co.in

Stories in this Section
And miles to go...

Are you a user or a luser?

Roll over, blogger!

There's a Net message here

Manage e-mail lists

Putting dual booting in place

Error message

Don't stop with playing cop

Cyber Quest

They ate companies for breakfast and lunch

Carry info, not weight