Managing digital eco-systems to drive market success

‘App’ networks are key to the success of iOS and Android, according to research led by LSE Associate Professor Carsten Sørensen

The iPhone X in context

So, there is another line of iPhones out – big deal? The iPhone 8, 8 Plus, and the X. The iPhone X – or, for people without knowledge of Roman numerals, the one-phone-ten – has a brighter and more advanced screen, can recognise you through 30,000 facial features, and has a number of other improvements over the previous versions. It is not cheap, which has resulted in the collective Internet imagination going in hyper-drive with commenters on Twitter sarcastically suggesting they will be selling a kidney as payment

Future of work: making a living from cutting our own hair?

We're fast changing from paid effort to customer self-service, while there are few new job categories in sight, writes Carsten Sørense

Will remote working digital infrastructures become the norm?

A global experiment of communicating almost entirely through the use of digital infrastructures is unfolding, writes Carsten Sørense

The Curse of the Smart Machine? Digitalisation and the children of the mainframe

We are the children of the mainframe. From the early 1950s this smart machine glowed its alluring lights, zoomed its magnetic tapes, and worked hard a couple of megabyte memory worth millions of dollars. The mainframe computer created a foundation for the field of Information Systems (IS) educating IS professionals and researching how software and organisational practices could be designed and implemented, and what effects could result from such efforts. Nearly 70 years on, since the Lyons Electronic Office began in 1951, much has happened. The radical digitalisation and transformation of organisational and public service processes challenges not only perceived wisdoms amongst IS practitioners, but also within academia. This essay challenges the IS field on its fundamental ability to address the grand challenges associated with the digital transformation of societies, organisations, as well as the lives and livelihoods of individuals. The essay argues that the IS field will need to more explicitly address its assumptions rooted in the organisational mainframe. The IS field must transcend the mainframe heritage from our inception if it wishes to escape a pathological curse rendering the field unable to deal with the powerful synthesis of: wholesale digitalisation of society; the computerised distribution of human activities; and exponential scaling of computational capabilities

Naps in the office - perhaps the secret of China's digital success?

We have just spent a week visiting Shenzhen, China, to see the headquarters of one of the world’s most innovative and fastest-growing companies – Huawei. Since its founding in 1987, Huawei has grown to become one of the world’s largest telecoms companies, with revenue of $75 billion. Globally it employs 180,000 with nearly 60,000 of these based at the Shenzhen campus

Tokens Matter

During the global pandemic, information workers were abruptly forced to engage in virtual work. This paper reports on an experiment seeking to formalize the formalization of small team coordination at London Blockchain Lab through the use of blockchain-supported tokenization. The Web3 organizing vision promotes the technology as an enabler of new ways for individuals and organizations to engage in the transparent exchange of scarce digital rights. However, little attention has been paid to the use of blockchain technologies to coordinate distributed collaborative activities. This paper seeks to understand the viability of this vision amongst a community of expected early adopters through design experimentation resulting in interview data. The study points towards the significant gap between the Web3 vision and the problems of realizing this in practice. This highlights fundamental barriers to using blockchain for team collaboration while also pointing toward its potential. Even the most willing and able find it hard to turn code into law through tokenizing collaboration