Positive Ict Quotes

I question this stereotype of the technologically tethered worker with no control over his time. Instead, the use of information and communication technology (ICT) for both work-related and personal matters is shown to have positive, as well as negative, implications for men and women workers. The contemporary office has by my account morphed into a ubiquitous technoscape, and this has reconfigured the very nature of working time.

Many man-made systems, including ICT systems, have positive feedback loops that cause certain local events to propagate and create extreme global behaviors. The extreme behaviors, especially unplanned downtime, become more common than stakeholders can accept. These outliers are modeled by probability distributions with thick tails. Unfortunately, classical methods for risk analysis based on predictions of future events tend to underestimate or ignore extreme global behaviors in complex adaptive ICT systems, even though these events may very well dominate the overall risk to stakeholders.

... we should develop and operate so-called anti-fragile systems characterized by two important properties: First, an anti-fragile ICT system fails early with a small, local impact to break positive feedback loops before they can create extreme global behaviors. Second, the prevention of extreme global behaviors allows stakeholders to learn from small-impact incidents about new vulnerabilities caused by changes in the system and its environment. The vulnerabilities can then be mitigated to avoid future extreme behaviors.