Tele-Commuting, Medicine, and Work - Week of October 7, 1996
Schedule
- Monday. Reports on interviews. Project plans due -- send to class distribution list.
- Wednesday. Telemedicine and global radiology, Betty Levine and Walid Tohme, Georgetown University.
Required Reading
- Paul Strassmann
- The Internet: A Way Of Outsourcing Infomercenaries?
- E-mail is Only One Path to Success
- The Value Of Computers, Information and Knowledge
- Jonathan Green, Why Telecommute?
- Lynn A. Streeter, Robert E. Kraut, Henry C. Lucas, Jr., and Laurence Caby, How Open Data Networks Influence Business Performance and Market Structure, Comm. ACM, Vol. 39, No. 7, July 1996, pp. 62-73.
Questions
- What are the key claims of the authors?
- What are the benefits and drawbacks of telecommuting, both from the perspective of the employee and
the organization?
- What are the benefits and drawbacks of using information technologies in a business?
- In what ways can network technologies enhance productivity? Degrade productivity?
Interview Project
Interview someone who is knowledgeable about some organization or part of that organization. You can
pick any organization (e.g, bank, school, retail store, government agency, law firm), but pick one that is at
least partially wired, preferably to the Internet. Ask them the following questions:
- In what ways are they using networks (Internet or intranet)?
- How has it changed the way they operate?
- What led them to decide to use networks?
- When did they connect?
- What benefits have been realized? Have they been measured?
- What problems have they encountered?
- What would they like to be different?
- What are their plans for the future?
Feel free to add to this list. Be prepared to present your results in class on Monday. You can do this
project alone or with one other person.