[2635] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
COLLABERATION
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bruce Brown)
Tue Mar 24 18:56:47 1992
From: bbrown@pepvax.pepperdine.edu (Bruce Brown)
To: bbrown@pepvax.pepperdine.edu (bruce brown)
Date: Tue, 24 Mar 92 15:21:19 PST
Cc: tbrown@cerf.net (bruce)
The Graphic Communications Association Presents
COLLABORATION '92:
Learning to Team, Teaming to Learn
June 1-3, 1992
San Francisco
Ritz Carlton Hotel
Conference Chair: Christopher Locke, CIMLINC, Inc.
"Business is finally recognizing that division of labor is
increasingly ineffective as the basis for an organization in an
environment of constant rather than occasional change....
Management control is replaced by management coordination of the
work of others who may know more than the manager, and decision
making occurs in the team rather than in the hierarchy."
Peter G.W. Keen, Shaping the Future: Business Design Through
Information Technology, Harvard Business School Press, 1991.
"The growing emphasis on high-technology production means greater
demands on the competence of each individual employee. And so
the element of comprehensive, life long learning for all members
of the enterprise will probably turn out to be the most
characteristic feature of work in the 21st century."
Robert B. McKersie and Richard E. Walton, "Organizational
Change," in The Corporation of the 1990s, Oxford University
Press, 1991.
"Genuine knowledge resides and proliferates where people live and
work, not in some abstract formal realm. Good tools should
support and augment that knowledge as it is rather than
attempting to 'engineer' it to fit some model-theoretic framework
entirely divorced from the work itself. We desperately need more
and better software tools whose design reflects this fundamental
insight, and that will therefore aid our best people in
articulating, modifying and improving their understanding of the
work environments they inhabit. Most crucially, we need tools
that will substantially assist knowledge workers -- and today
this category should include nearly all workers -- in sharing
their understanding across the currently rigid boundaries of
functional specialization."
Christopher Locke and John West, "Concurrent Engineering in
Context," Concurrent Engineering, November-December, 1991.
OVERVIEW
Battered by the new realities of global competition and the
demonstrated failure of many high technologies that were heralded
as saviors in the 1980s, American business is in the throes of a
critical sea change. Symptoms and partial solutions are reported
from every quarter -- the mass media, academic think tanks and
Fortune 500 companies. However, the business community has not
yet reached any meaningful consensus on the full implications of
this genuine paradigm shift.
COLLABORATION '92 will bring together a broad and eclectic
spectrum of business leaders, management consultants, academic
researchers, editorial observers, technology analysts and
commercial developers to address the scope and significance of
the radical changes taking place in organizations today.
The fundamental premise of COLLABORATION '92 is that these
sweeping challenges and changes are being driven neither by
technological developments alone, nor by strictly economic
considerations. Instead, the pivotal factor determining the
competitive viability of today's businesses is their ability or
inability to effectively develop and deploy their human capital.
A considerable constellation of buzzwords and hot buttons has
recently evolved, each of which points to this shift to this new
focus on human understanding in contemporary business
organizations:
concurrent engineering, organizational redesign,
total quality, lean production, flexible specialization,
the learning organization, the "boundaryless" organization,
the "informated" organization, employee involvement,
participatory management, self-directed work teams,
collaboration technologies, workgroup computing.
While none captures the essence of the transformation currently
underway, each suggests the emergence of a coherent and powerful
new vision of human work and a more humanized workplace. Taken
as a whole, these terms also converge toward an implicit
agreement that the real barriers to this vision are primarily
cultural rather than technological. The necessary but difficult
cultural changes taking place in business organizations can be
either nurtured or obstructed depending on the computer and
communications systems adopted today. This intersection of
corporate culture and information technology constitutes the
primary theme of COLLABORATION '92.
KEYNOTE SPEAKERS
Keynote talks will be delivered by Michael Schrage, columnist for
the Los Angeles Times and author of Shared Minds: The New
Technologies of Collaboration, and Charles Garfield, author of
Second to None: How Our Smartest Companies Put People First. A
complimentary copy of both these author's widely acclaimed books
will be sent to all registered participants in advance of the
conference to provide an initial reference point for further
discussion.
CONFERENCE OUTLINE
Each of the three days of COLLABORATION '92 will focus on a
single broad aspect of the overall theme: Principles, Practices
and Programs.
DAY 1: PRINCIPLES. Speakers will focus on the external factors
influencing this global shift in perspective and priorities, and
the fundamental principles which must be grasped and adopted to
realize such a vision. Speakers will put current organizational
change into historical perspective by examining why previous
corporate structures and styles of management are inadequate to
present demands. They will also describe the advantages of newly
emergent organizations based on human initiative, local autonomy
and group learning, and the resulting potential for continuous
improvement. Confirmed speakers include:
Jill Janov Founder, Jill Janov Associates
Jack Orsburn Co-author of Self-Directed Work Teams: The
New American Challenge
Thomas Stewart Associate Editor, Fortune
Jon Van Technology Writer, Chicago Tribune, author of
"Recrafting America" series
RESEARCH PANEL:
John Seely Brown Director, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center
Etienne Wenger Institute for Research on Learning, co-author
of Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral
Participation
Terry Winograd Professor of Computer Science, Stanford
University, co-author Understanding Computers
and Cognition
DAY 2: PRACTICES. Speakers will focus on initiatives and methods
which can be adopted to support necessary cultural change and
operational practices within new high-performance business
organizations. Confirmed speakers include:
John Hillkirk USA Today, co-author (with Donald E.
Petersen, ex-Chairman & CEO, Ford) of A
Better Idea: Redefining the Way Americans
Work
Gerald Michalski New Science Associates (Intelligent Document
Management and Continuous Information
Environments services)
Kenneth Paterson Publisher, Motorola University Press
George Robson GE Aircraft Engines, author of Continuous
Process Improvement: Simplifying Work Flow
and Systems
Richard F. Hilbert Manager, Business Process Improvement,
GE Corporate Business Development
Charles Savage Digital Equipment Corporation, author of
Fifth Generation Management: Integrating
Enterprises through Human Networking
MEDIA PANEL: John Markoff New York Times (moderator)
John Hillkirk USA Today
Michael Schrage Los Angeles Times
Thomas Stewart Fortune
Jon Van Chicago Tribune
These noted media analysts will voice their own concerns relating
to the conference theme, and will provide "instant-replay"
commentary on the presentations made up to this point.
DAY 3: PROGRAMS. Speakers will focus on software technologies
capable of supporting and propagating human understanding,
workgroup coordination, apprenticeship training and continuous
learning within redesigned workplaces. Confirmed speakers
include:
David Auer VP, North American Operations, CIMLINC, Inc.
(Linkage)
Mark Penrose Director, Information Systems, GTE Research
and Development (in-house multimedia
information systems)
Michael Pliner President, Verity, Inc. (Topic)
Lou Reynolds President, Electronic Book Technologies
(DynaText)
Howard Rheingold Editor, Whole Earth Review (The WELL)
Haviland Wright President, Avalanche Development Corporation
(FastTag)
WHO SHOULD ATTEND?
COLLABORATION '92 represents an opportunity to network across the
industry, organizational and disciplinary boundaries that tend to
divide us all. We hope the audience will represent as many
differing perspectives and areas of professional involvement as
the speakers we are bringing together here. Because old ideas of
functional specialization are counterproductive today, we hope
that conference participants will reflect a highly heterogeneous
set of professional experience and concerns. Cross-disciplinary
discourse and recombinant collaboration are not just passive
themes, but active goals of this conference. In the spirit of
learning to speak each other's languages, we invite:
business managers and team facilitators
total quality managers and "concurrent engineers"
information vendors and "lean producers"
human resource managers and research analysts
software developers and customer service representatives
management consultants and computer scientists
government administrators and corporate change managers
environmentalists and marketing directors
financial analysts and labor leaders
information systems managers and unmanageable "end users"
In short, we invite anyone and everyone who plans to play a
substantive role in shaping the new human-centered corporations
of the 1990s.
COLLABORATION IN ACTION
GCA has established an electronic forum on the WELL (Whole Earth
'Lectronic Link) so that participants can get to know each other
before the conference, and keep in touch until COLLABORATION '93
(microcomputer and modem required). We hope that this ongoing
electronic discourse will spawn a powerful virtual community
whose boundaries will extend far beyond the geographic and
temporal limitations typical of traditional conferences. For
details contact conference Chair:
Christopher Locke
CIMLINC, Inc.
1222 Hamilton Parkway
Itasca, IL 60143
Voice: (708) 250-0090 ext. 1661
Fax: (708) 250-8513
The Well: clocke
Internet: clocke@well.sf.ca.us or
well!clocke@apple.com
REGISTRATION INFORMATION
Contact: Mr. Marion Elledge
Vice President, Information Systems
Graphic Communications Association
100 Daingerfield Road
Alexandria, VA 22314-2804
Voice: (703) 519-8160
Fax: (703) 548-2867
The Well: mern
Internet: mern@well.sf.ca.us or
well!mern@apple.com
