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The world of business and organizations is now entering a period of dramatic changes -- changes that many
people believe will be as significant as those that characterized the Industrial Revolution. There is no
shortage of speculations, anecdotes, and opinions about what these changes are and how they will develop
in the future. There is, however, a great shortage of systematic empirical data about how organizations are
actually changing. The goal of this project is to collect and analyze a comprehensive set of systematic and
grounded empirical data about what is really happening as organizations and economies reshape themselves with
information technology over time.
The SeeIT (Social and Economic Explorations of Information Technology)
Project at MIT Sloan School of Management which began in September 2000
is a multi-year multidisciplinary, longitudinal study of the effects of
information technology on organizational and work practices. To ensure
consistent and systematic data over time, we intend to focus our research
investigations of this sample of organizations in two primary areas --
transformations in the nature of commerce and transformations in the nature
of work. These two areas were among those identified in the 1999 PITAC report published by the U.S. Government (PITAC, 1999) as arenas
where the advances in information technology are creating tremendous opportunities
for profound socioeconomic changes.
Current Projects
We will examine these questions over time in a sample of organizations that are migrating to and operating on the
Internet. We propose to focus these questions on three specific issues:
This research is funded by the National
Science Foundation grant number IIS-0085725. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recomendations expressed in this
material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation
(NSF).
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