Today, NewWOW shared its draft white paper, WORK 2020: The Effect of Higher Oil Prices on the Future of Work, with its membership. Using scenario analysis to examine how work systems would evolve under different possible future settings, the authors — Jim Creighton, Joe Ouye, and June Langhoff—looked at the larger context in which we will work.

Mike Joroff sent us a new study to share with the NewWOW group. Mike was writing in response to an article we featured last week on urban office parks (See http://www.newwow.net/members/node/1459#comment-968). Mike and a team from MIT are studying "new century city projects." He says these projects are a very new type of 21st century development and his "MT research and consulting teams are advising half of these and we are doing research about all of them." The report, New Century City Developments: Creating Extraordinary Value, was produced for a workshop held in Seoul in November.

David Coleman has contributed his latest white paper, Enterprise Social Collaboration Research Study, to our library. David's research addresses these questions: Which business processes lend themselves to social networks? Which industries and functional areas are more likely to adopt these collaborative technologies? He looked at three categories of social collaboration based on who populates them and what they are used for: Inside, Outside and Both.

Our latest library acquisition is a paper by Joe Ouye, "The Wickedness of Work-Systems Problems," a chapter in the book, Architecture-Design Methods-Inca Structures, by Johanna and Hans Dehlinger. Joe's paper describes the lack of appreciation or understanding of the wicked nature of work-systems problems. Wicked problems behave badly.

The white paper for Symposium 7, Shifting from “Change Management” to Systems Sensemaking and Design, by Dr. Terri Griffith, is now available in our library. Dr. Griffith, Professor of Management, Leavey School of Business, Santa Clara University, will present her paper at next week’s symposium in Chicago.

“Organizational change programs continue to fail more than they succeed,” states Dr. Griffith.

The goal of her report is to push for greater sophistication on the part of those people bringing about change, equipping them to meet the demands being placed on them, and providing greater organizational support for their activities.

Sun's Open Work Services Group developed this white paper It is based on research by Glenn Dirks and Edel Kelville. The pair interviewed successful virtual managers at Sun, including people from MySQL, a company that merged with Sun earlier this year. MySQL's 400 employees are located in 30 countries and 70 percent of them work from home.

Edel Keville contributed a new white paper from Sun's Open Work Services Group. The paper lists ten common myths (Examples: #3 -Teams can't be productive if they don't sit together; #4 - Employees prefer traditional work arrangements; #8- If managers allow mobile work, they will lose control). It then provides research-based information to help organizations assess distributed work options. http://www.newwow.net/members/node/956