Future Work and Enterprise Systems

From its earliest days, research in business and information systems engineering (BISE) has been dedicated to envisioning how information technology will change the way we work and live. Today, technological innovation happens at a faster pace and reaches users more quickly than ever before. For example, while it took 75 years for the telephone to reach 100 million users, it was 16 years for mobile phones, 7 years for the World Wide Web, four and a half years for Facebook (Dreischmeier et al. 2015), and only a few weeks for Pokemon GO (Moon 2016). The rapid acceleration of technological diffusion confronts BISE researchers, who usually study technological innovations from the perspective of socio-technical systems (Bostrom and Heinen 1977). Work systems are conceptualized as an interplay of tasks, technologies, and people (vom Brocke and Rosemann 2014), systems “in which human participants and/or machines perform work (processes and activities) using information, technology, and other resources to produce specific products/services for specific internal and/or external customers” (Alter 2013, p. 75).