Smart Organizations and Smart Artifacts

This book offers a multidisciplinary strategy for finding new and more effective human-computer interaction approaches, in particular from a socio-technical perspective, that facilitate the exploration and exploitation of benefits that information technologies (IT) offer organizations. Though the relationship between IT and organizations is certainly very strong, it is also one of the greatest obstacles to securing benefits from their interaction. The participation of organizational users in the planning and design stages of IT interfaces is the main area of human-computer interaction, where a wealth of contributions are positively enriching both the academic and management discussions. Thus, a new approach for managing this relationship is needed, one in which the different stakeholders are suitably taken into account. Moreover, the outstanding success of the 2.0 phenomenon offers an example of a relevant platform where human-computer interaction has been widely developed and exploited. Consequently, this will influence and already is influencing – the way IT and users interact with each other. The book is based on a selection of the best papers – original, double blind peer-reviewed contributions – from the annual conference of the Italian chapter of the AIS, held in Milan, Italy in December 2013.

Leonardo Caporarello, PhD, SDA Professor of Organization and HR Department at the Bocconi School of Management. He is the Director of the SDA Bocconi Learning Lab. He is faculty member of several executive and master education programs, at both national and international levels. Teaching and research interests focus on change management, organizational rethinking and restructuring, acceptance process of technology, the evolution and introduction of digital innovation in management education.

Beniamino Di Martino, Full Professor of Information Processing Systems at the Second University of Naples, where he is the vice-chair of the Industrial and Information Engineering Department. He has been the scientific coordinator of several international research projects. He is the Editor-in-chief of the IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing. His research interests focus on models and advanced programming environments for distributed systems, grid and cloud computing, knowledge management.

Marcello Martinez, Full Professor of Organization Studies at the Second University of Naples, where he is member of the Department of Management and Economics. He was Research Scholar at the London School of Economics and then at the MIT. He has been involved in the design and direction of many research projects related to the analysis of the organizational impact of ICT, promoted by European Universities, service companies and international centres of research. His academic interests focus on Organizational Theories, Organizational Compliance and Change, Policy Network Governance.