Does computing technology offer the possibility for humanizing the workplace? Or have we yet learned that technology does not fulfill on its promise to improve quality of work life? North American information technology (IT) organizations typically promote the fulfillment of organizational needs with minimal social intervention. We avoid the investment in messy social engagement required to facilitate the systems associated with organizational change. This may be even more prevalent with firms that make the software shaping our future workplaces and home environments. We might expect these types of organizations to adopt the techno-mythology of IT as change agent. The flaws in the assumptions of technology may show up in many management problems, such as isolation of work communities, technology-based job design, organizational power differences. In today’s chaotic state of rapid technology change, many organizations seem willing to accept technology’s lead into the organization. Critiquing such assumptions led to this research on design values in organizations and processes. This research specifically focused on innovation management processes in large technology firms that develop software products, and use information technology in organizational strategy and process.

My research journey has brought together knowledge and practices from several disciplines to uncover the ways in which the values and organizational behaviors of “systems people” are engaged and confronted in today’s complex work practices. This research suggests the underpinning values of today’s organizations are reflected in their work processes and propagated to their products. Values are found in these action-oriented work environments by studying what they do and what they make. This research focused primarily on the values and organizational conflicts found within the work of innovation management in software organizations, the workplaces that bring new software products to market. Specifically, it evaluates how development processes and product design practices embed values and policies within their organizations.

By revealing the dynamics of embedded values in process, we can tease apart the meaning from tasks, opening up intellectual work for the contribution of creative practices in the workplace. In many large technology organizations, cultural history and embedded roles maintain values that reward control behaviors and prevent organizational learning. Organizational processes and work practices constitute much of what we experience as “the culture” of a workplace. Organizational processes become long-term commitments – they appear to lock-in the approaches, values, roles, and communication styles from organizational history, perpetuating these approaches and values over time, surviving multiple change programs and attempts to transform culture.

Poring through dozens of case studies and interviewing insightful participants, a story emerged of deep conflicts between individual and organizational values systems. Further inquiry indicated these conflicts become embedded into the organization by work processes for projects and management. These processes institutionalize not only the power but desired practices of a few over the activities of many. Although implicitly directing work tasks may seem status quo for business enterprises, our focus is not on rote work. These are advanced intellectual processes for product innovation design and management. While software engineers may resist being told specifically how to do their jobs, their organizational cultures can maintain power and the values of policy through the means of defining management processes. Without allowing organizational participation, these processes become unilateral power functions, continually confronting personal values and obviating positive espoused organizational values.

In discussing why our most advanced software products for improving organizations fail, Shoshana Zuboff (1996) explained, “the status quo eats up innovation and makes hierarchy reflected in its systems.” The organization subsumes technology into its own uses; even the most progressively designed groupware systems are shown by a decade of research to contribute little to changing or humanizing organizational behavior. As Zuboff (1996) also warns, “the rules of the game reward power over knowledge.”

My research locates the affordances, or opportunities, for power and participation in organizational innovation management. It shows how the hierarchy “eats up innovation” through the research stories about software projects and organizations, and through interpreting the collection of knowledge as a whole.

I started this journey looking at the values in technology, in software product design. Inductively following where the research pointed, I directly discovered Zuboff’s entreaty in the interviews and conversations with research participants. Following this path, analyzing and interpreting the processes used in software companies, led to the findings and initial theory presented in this work.

Finally, I also took inspiration from Argyris (1992), summarized in one specific statement:

“More time and effort should be spent on learning how to produce normative models of rare universes that are empirically disconfirmable. In producing such models, researchers will find it necessary to make explicit the values that are embedded in their models and to provide a rationale for those values. All of us will find ourselves dealing with generating theories of morality.”

The following work is a “theory of morality,” based on the empirical universe of high technology software organizations. In revealing the values of designers and managers in these organizations, and of those embedded in their models of work, I make my own values explicit. I provide a rationale for these values, and recommend a theory addressing these values embedded in today’s organizations.

Research Overview

Purpose of Study

The purpose of this study was to uncover and describe the relationship of individual and organizational values to the design of software products. Further inquiry interpreted how embedded values in product management and development processes affected software projects, evaluating the influence of process on product values. A third phase of the research developed initial theory based on analysis of organizational activity systems in software product innovation.

I originally proposed that software developed by corporate project teams for customers and user groups would reflect management and organizational value systems. One path of the research distinguished values impacts from representations in the product. However, making a case for translating values constructs from attributes of the user interface remains complex. Although research participants (software product managers and designers) were able to distinguish designed-in values they associated with well-known software products, they were unable to identify similar values sets in the products they designed. Participants could readily critique a Microsoft user interface for its designed-in values constructs, but values inherent in their own products were invisible to them. My interpretation of this embeddedness, based on prior research (Herbsleb and Kuwana, 1993, Kumar and Bjorn-Andersen, 1990), holds that team members internalize both individual and organizational values as tacit knowledge, and do not associate their actions in the design context as relating to values choices stemming from this knowledge. Design choices seem to be driven by pressing project concerns, yet even project management can be considered a set of design values, which are not articulated as values (Norrgren and Schaller, 1999). The variability of values influences on actual product design seemed extremely high, requiring a different research design. After a certain point in the inductive phase of research, I chose not to pursue this path any further than the preliminary stage I had reached, considering it less productive than following the emerging path.

The findings further informed the research problem of how values diffuse into software products, especially from the perspective of organizational influence on the product development process. When asked about their projects, participants told stories about their organizational contexts, a closely related problem holding a similar interdisciplinary impact. A study specifically designed to address this problem might compare the values diffusion across 5-10 products, testing a range of participants sampled from across the full diversity of potential users.

Therefore, the study researched three interconnected phenomena, scoped by the domain of software product development, and situated within the context of ten projects and two organizations. First, it studied the individual and organizational values inherent in design practice for these projects. Second, it investigated the values conflicts within these projects arising in practice. Third, it studied organizational processes supporting the design practices for the projects.

Overall this work seeks to understand the relationships described among organizations, values problems, and system design processes. In the long term, I look forward to enabling designers to make conscious value judgments regarding the impact of their design decisions. I further plan to establish new design approaches for effectively integrating progressive values definition in software product design and social and work systems for enhancing people’s lives and work.

Social Meaning of the Research

Organizations - corporate, government, non-profit, third sector, and informal – have become the most fundamental institutions in the lives of contemporary citizens in the developed world. Our professional lives and much of our personal and family development happen within organized institutions. Whether in work or community institutions, many of us are leaders, or participate with leaders, of these organizations. For many of us, they define our lifeworlds.

Understanding how organizations work remains a central purpose for organizational social sciences, yet organizational life has become increasingly complex. The wholesale adoption of information technology through pervasive computing availability and the Internet has promoted rapid economic and business changes, social and demographic changes, and an extraordinary increase in information access. However, organizations are so fundamental they seem transparent; their social contributions difficult to identify, and we often pay primary attention to their economic contribution. However, organizations impact nearly all of society, and as responsible stewards we have the right to inspect, guide, and sanction organizations.

Many business and systems thinkers consider the public, society, as primary stakeholders of the business enterprise (Drucker, 1946). Ackoff (1994) identifies government and the public as stakeholders along with employees, suppliers, customers, investors, and debtors. As a society, we are given only indirect authority over the direction of organizations. However, Ackoff (1994) also notes the enterprise is not only responsible for wealth creation, it holds a social function of wealth distribution, through compensation, taxes, community contribution. The outcomes of wealth and economic success can be viewed as growth or development. Growth is reflected in the standard of living. Development, which at its root is self-development, shows up in quality of life (Ackoff, 1994). Enterprises have succeeded beyond measure in growth, in raising standards of living. However, quality of life in society remains the issue of our day. The context for this research essentially draws from the motivation to improve quality of working life.

In late 1999, the MIT Initiative on Inventing the Organizations of the 21^st Century presented a manifesto for organizations in the new era. Their manifesto speaks to the core of this research, recognizing the social purposes of organizations have been overlooked in pursuit of purely economic benefits. While today’s organizations have become efficient engines of wealth, they “are operating far short of their potential to contribute broadly to societal well-being” (Ancona, et al, 1999, p. 1). As they stated:

“In short, today’s remarkably efficient organizations may be taking us, ever more rapidly, to a place where we don’t really want to go. The solution to these problems, therefore, is not a purely technical one. It is, at its root, a question of values. We cannot hope to create better organizations without a sense of what we mean by “better,” and we believe there is a strong need today for clear thinking about this question: What goals do we want our organizations to serve?” (Ancona, et al, 1999).

Straight to the point, Zuboff (1996) exclaimed, “progress toward paradise in mega-corporations is not great!” Pointing to a “howling vacuum of leadership,” she concludes, “Mommy and Daddy aren’t home.” Perhaps we are truly on our own.

The larger issues included but not addressed deal with leadership, strategic direction, and governance. What do we want our organizations to become when they grow up? Who has a say in how they will turn out? How can we surmount our history and stake a claim for humane organizational performance? This research is one more voice urging the same direction, yet shows where we might focus our attention, toward the “agency of process.”

This research focuses on innovation management and design processes, and not on organizational leadership. Why the focus on organizational processes within innovation, considered the creative (but perhaps invisible) sector in organizations? Innovation, planning and design processes hold unique positions within organizations. All businesses and institutions pursue improvement, new product and service innovation, and plan for their future operations. In product organizations, these processes represent the core purpose and mission – sales, accounting, service, even management strategy all support the purpose of serving customers toward a mutually desired outcome. Furthermore, organizational participation in these processes cuts across all organizational boundaries. Nearly everyone in the firm has an interest or some stake in product innovation, and project teams even in the most traditional hierarchies comprise membership from across boundaries and functions. The innovation project is a corporate microcosm, an observable “fractal” of the larger whole organization.

Further, design is important because, by creating systems and products offered to workers and customers, design and planning processes define an organization’s identity. Innovation processes originate the products leading to eventual success or ignominy. The visible expression of design and planning is constrained by an organizational context that enables or enfeebles the range of performance, expression, and creativity. Organizational constraints, ranging from constrictive and narrowing to broad and expansive, allow for either design excellence or mediocrity. These constraints are embodied by the official and informal organizational processes and design practices maintained by groups and individuals in the organization. However, the social considerations of product design and the process of design are not addressed, understood, or characterized by managers or teams in product organizations. The social values of design are therefore addressed by this research.

I raise the following questions of social context in this research:

How might we envision our design and planning processes to enhance creative ideation, social cooperation, shared vision, and alignment with shared or chosen values?

How might we align the outcomes of technical and product design with socially desirable goals?

How might we create and institutionalize our design and planning practices to minimize their bias toward unspecified special interests?

How might we allow for values diversity and values conflicts in teams, while supporting appropriate (chosen) organizational values?

Finally, we discover social meaning in organizational life itself. We spend most of our waking lives at work and participating with social institutions such as schools, clubs, and churches. And values conflicts abound in the plurality of contemporary society, and especially in organizational life.

Large organizations share traditional and historical-cultural characteristics with each other, and their “embeddedness” (Baum and Oliver, 1992) hides uniqueness and distinctions among their values and operational practices. In other words, many distinctions between in culture and process are invisible, embedded in the economic and management traditions of our cultures and industries. The rules of each organization’s game are hidden from the uncommitted. Organizational values in use are substantially embedded, and are not forthcoming by merely asking.

Surfacing the dynamics of embeddedness allows inspection of processes that embody values in use. The social meaning of this specific research problem focuses on understanding the impact of persistent processes that embed values systems of power and protected knowledge. By pulling apart these processes within their context of use, I attempt to show how such interactions originate, how they persist across organizational change, and how they interfere with the prospects for humanizing organizational life. By exposing the anatomy of organizational innovation processes in use, we can offer better strategies for management and organizational cooperation. We can better understand the impact of planned interventions within product organizations, and the effect on innovation and creative work. Finally, we might learn from these experiences to make recommendations for organizational development and strategy across organizations, toward improving quality of working life for all in businesses and institutions, both small and large.