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- Westelius, Alf
(författare)
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The Connected Enterprise - who is in charge? : The Swedish Sports example
- 2011
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Ingår i: PTC'11, Connecting Life 24/7. - Honolulu : Pacific Telecommunications Council. ; , s. 1587-1597
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- A general view is that today's workforce is distributed, mobile, and always connected.Organisations are expected to grow ever more reliant on collaboration between widelydispersed workers, and customers expect to have instant access to information and eenabledservices. The individual on the move who is temporarily deprived of broadbandaccess becomes handicapped, cut off from the recently adopted always-connectedlifestyle. And socially, both at work and with family and friends, social networking toolshelp us keep connected with a host of people, ranging from friends and close associatesto casual acquaintances.How are organizations coping with this recently emerging communication environment?In this article, we present and analyse the Swedish Sports example. Swedish Sports is afederation of close to 70 sports associations, who in turn count 20,000 local clubs asmembers. In these local clubs, close to a third of the Swedish population are members.Based on a study performed in the winter and spring of 2009-2010, and comparing witha study performed in 2003, we chart the changing communication patterns from a cluband association perspective. We note similarities and differences in the communicationfrom club to members, from members to clubs and between members.In general, broadband-enabled and mobile telephony-based communication is gainingground and has come to dominate the scene, while a number of classical forms ofcommunication are still not discontinued. However, in contrast to the current “generalknowledge” view, social networking tools still play a very minor role in the clubs. Forexample, Facebook use typically neither challenges, nor supports, organizationalcommunication in sports clubs. In the cases where it is used, it mostly appears to bebased on grassroots initiatives, rather than club-directed ones. There are also very fewexamples of social networking tools as an alternative way of organizing sports activities.But on the sports association and federation level, alternatives based on Facebook keepappearing. However, the important, influential ones need functionality that require wellsystematiseddatabases tailored to the specific needs of the sport. And although theinitial growth rate of some Facebook groups is impressive, it takes time to build afollowing that makes a site important.Our conclusions are that the communication landscape is changing, in favour ofbroadband and mobile telephony-enabled forms. However, the established sports clubsare still in charge of organising sports activities. The challenges arise in the fan andinterest group areas, where virtual alternatives are created and developed by interestedand enthusiastic individuals, rather than by established organisations. The example explored is in the Swedish Sports sphere, but the results are likely to be of importancealso to other organisations with a large customer base or potential interest groupexposure.
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| 4. |
- Westelius, Alf
(författare)
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ICT and the changing civil society
- 2010
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Ingår i: Embracing the cloud. - Honolulu : Pacific Telecommunications Council. - 9781615678358 ; , s. 534-544
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Communication possibilities challenge traditional civil society organisations. Formal organisations require a degree of formality – meetings, agendas, minutes, statutes, etc. There is also a strong emphasis on “the corporate voice” – Amnesty, the Red Cross, the Nature preservation organisation, etc, try to protect their brands by filtering what poses as organisational communication and official positions. Facebook, etc, provides easy non-bureaucratic organising – just sign in as a member (even using an alias), and you participate in an organisational conversation where enthusiasm counts, and formal rank does not. Besides, the “organization” needs bear no costs, and thus financing does not become a limiting factor. ATTAC and The Pirate Party are examples of organisations that grew, or came into existence even, through non-hierarchical, ICT-supported communication. At the same time, they share some characteristics with social movements of previous eras, such as the French or the Russian revolution or the 68 movement. Some of the differences between then and now are captured by the concept virtual volunteering, soliciting and harnessing the, possibly small, efforts people are willing to direct at a worthwhile cause, facilitated by modern ICT. An example at the meta level is the Volunteer Bureau, serving as a broker for virtual (and physical) volunteering.Have we learned to understand these social-movement-like new ways of organising? Have existing civil organisations “learned”? To what extent does society shape the new organisations, and the institutionalisation and formalisation of them? What roles do ICT providers play? Have we yet seen the end? This article draws on a number of examples in striving to explore these questions to further our understanding of the interaction between possibilities offered by modern ICT and changes in civil society.
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| 5. |
- Westelius, Alf
(författare)
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Management control – increasingly a case of e-learning?
- 2011
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Traditionally, management control has been a question of reporting and analysis of (monetary) data. Management has been a realm for visioning, boundary-setting and dialogue. The increasing use of computers in organizational administration – and actual performance of organizational tasks – has lead to an increased availability of (nonmonetary) data, that could be used to support “fact-based” management - and perhaps help controllers become more business relevant, when viewed from line management and grassroots perspectives. It is not obvious that this has led to an actual change in what constitutes management, or even how management control is actually enacted and experienced. Partly as a response to this, partly as an attempt to turn the e-learning hype into something useful, some organizations are now attempting to use the power of digitization and the pervasiveness of computers in contemporary life as ingredients in a novel way for management control purposes. E-learning is designed to instil awareness of, and knowledge in, top-management-approved corporate values and practices and combined with e-quizzes. Thus, management directives asking employees to study and accept particular values and practices can now be realized to a greater degree, and the actual employee attention and retention of such messages can be easily monitored. How much of the novel – and successful – image of this addition to the management control repertoire remains after closer scrutiny? In this article, I present my attempts to investigate such systematic attempts to employ e-learning and e-based monitoring of e-learning for management control purposes.
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| 6. |
- Westelius, Alf
(författare)
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Open and closed technology and collaboration
- 2011
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Intranets have become a prevalent part of organisational structure and, to varying degree, an aspect of organising and collaboration. While many organisations are currently grappling with how to realise the promises of Sharepoint, (and how to keep a reasonable budget while doing so) others look skywards, and see the cloud as an ever more viable alternative. Some use traditional email, calendars and document processing, but Google style – as a service – to meet the needs previously believed to call for intranets. Others, reportedly, even use combinations of facebook and Google docs, as their user-administered “intranet”. In this article, I present some cases of such traditional and novel approaches to IT-supported collaboration, and analyse the organisational consequences of the chosen solutions.
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| 7. |
- Gullberg, Cecilia, et al.
(författare)
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Systems, Roles and Relationships in the Governance Ecology
- 2011
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Ingår i: The Future of Work and Organisations. - 9781877040863
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- The purpose of this paper is to explore how individuals perceive a management information and control milieu and how these perceptions influence the control practices. The paper is based on a case study of a public sector organisation. By applying the concept of role, we intend to contribute to the management control literature. Contrary to the formalised, top-down-inspired practices often found in the management control literature, we find that bottom-up forces play an important role in the management landscape and that signals can be faint yet still govern behaviour. We introduce the term “governance ecology” to illustrate the interplay among managers, other actors and structures, and to inspire further research into how structural and individual aspects of management control interact.
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