Art Invest - Mastering IT - Vision - - -

Mastering Web-Technology Transfer

COLLABORATION AND BUSINESS PROCESSES

Business-processes are the substantial accompaniment of human collaboration. Collaboration is the cause; business-processses are the effect. You can automate
certain human activities, but never the resulting physical processes.
Focusing primarily on human collaboration is the only means to influence secondary 'business processes'. → close.

COLLABORATION AND AUTOMATION

The problem is that you cannot automate collaboration as such. All you can automate, is (1) a small part of leadership activity and a large part of communication (2a) between leaders and subordinates, and (2b) among subordinates themselves. → close.

TECHNOLOGY TRANSFER

The lore leads back to Marx' basic statement: New productive forces ('Produktiv-Kräfte') trigger innovative production means ('Produktions-Mittel'), which in turn inevitably enforce changes of human relationships in production ('Produktions-Verhältnissse'), i.e., changes in the organization of collaboration (management). → close.

SOCIAL VERSUS TECHNICAL AUTOMATION

Adopting technology is automation. Adopting technology to collaboration is automation in the realm of sociality. Such automation has two faces: (a) technical (referring to means), (b) social (referring to ends). Social automation of collaboration gives rise to a primordial (barter-free) market, occuring without any possibility for human intervention. Technical automation of collaboration resides on top of this market, supporting its communication in terms of message-transmission automats. → close.

CORPORATE SUBWEB

Alternative denotation are Computer-Aided/Assisted Collaboration-Market', also Web-Based Collaboration-Market, or else Computer-Aided/Assisted Collaboration-Management', also Web-Based Collaboration-Management → close.

DANGEROUS NARROW-MINDEDNESS

In fact, IT-people (with IT-vendors at the forefront), are fiercely propagating the unbeatably-naive concept of purely process-based collaboration management. Which would be desastreous, of course, since, interchaning cause and effect, it would systematically demotivate employees by treating them as 'human devices'. → close.

BLINDNESS OF IT - ALIGNING BUSINESS TO IT, WHILE SURMISING THE REVERSE

IT is modelling what is going on in a company in terms of purely technical processes. That's a completely valid abstraction. Now, IT modifies these processes to improve, in a sense, some of their properties. That's valid, too. But then IT tries to reverse the abstraction, starting from the modified processes. Since reversal of abstraction, in any case, is creative reification, any reversal would be an alignment of what is going on in the company to (the technical reasoning of) IT. Resulting in a technocratic turn, in line with the principle of central planning. → close.