Groupware as a global infrastructure: from control to drift

Abstract

The increasing diffusion of groupware, its becoming a mundane and domesticated technology, its mingling with Internet, make these once exotic applications a true citizen of large, multiIayered corporate infrastructures. To understand and predict of groupware in large organizations one has to study the unfolding dynamics of the corporate information infrastructures. The reslults of such study are fairly puzzling: strategy is "missing in action"; bricolage prevails and large infrastructures tend to drift. Are the managerial and specialist language and models adequate to grasp what is going on? Do we need a new set of coneepts to cope wilh the complexity and unpredietabilily of groupware/infrastucture deployment?