主题：宏观ICT的一点想法 -- 闻弦歌
With the rapid development of information and communication technologies, we could see the beginning of an information society: knowledge commoditization makes knowledge accessible to the public at very low expense; the information metabolisms of any person and any organization speed up dramatically; and knowledge-associated business activities have fundamental influences on the society.
Collaboration in information society
Philip E. Agre (1995) outlined that information activities in information society can be summarized as: possession, accumulation, surfeit (“overload”), distributional inequality (“haves and have-nots”), measurement, commoditization and so on (1995). These stories about information must have a location. He considered information as “a content divorced from any specific physical realization (speech, paper, computer chips, fiber optic cables)” (Agre, 1995).
Currently, with the rapid development of Information and Communication Technologies, we should understand that:
1.Information’s physical realization becomes easier since digital forms serves as the intermediate, which means multiple channels are accessible for quick information propagation and transformation. And in consequence that encourages organizations to flatten their structures for quick response and also exploit potential efficiencies to achieve better decision making, work coordination and job performance.
2.Knowledge artifacts constitute important assets of information society. Knowledge-intensive firms have segregated knowledge centralized activities (as Agre (1995) described) from classic businesses. Domains and boundaries of those activities become ambiguous and variable in regards to the closer collaboration in knowledge development and application in this knowledge-intensive working environment, which adversely increases the complexity of continually developing Information and Communication Technologies for providing further facilitation.
In the following sections I will discuss the general collaboration in knowledge development (focusing on research methodologies) and knowledge application (focusing on business processes). A series of topics that IT professionals most face are discussed accordingly.
