Taking People out of the Network: A Deconstruction of “Your Next IT Strategy”

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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