The effects of the digitization of the work provide companies and educational institutions uncertainty. Therefore new future working skills of employees will be necessary. This applies in particular to those employees in the field of information technology who are particularly affected by digitization and who mostly perform on the technologically cutting edge of information technology. The practical part of this article aims to present an analysis model which explores the work activities of IT specialists through quantitative and qualitative analysis methods and shows which informal skills are placed in the work activities of the employees. A methodological triangulation should enable a multi-layered view of work activity. The developed framework will be discussed during the conference contribution in order to enable reflection and improvement of the approach with the aim of enabling a good practice for other researchers

Linke, Knut

Zobeltitz, André von

English

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www.ssoar.infoInfluence of Informatization on Working Activitesin the Information Technology Business - anApproach for an Analysis Framework of LaborCapacityLinke, Knut; Zobeltitz, Andre# vonErstveröffentlichung / Primary PublicationKonferenzbeitrag / conference paperEmpfohlene Zitierung / Suggested Citation:Linke, K., & Zobeltitz, A. v. (2019). Influence of Informatization on Working Activites in the Information TechnologyBusiness - an Approach for an Analysis Framework of Labor Capacity. In Proceedings of the Weizenbaum Conference2019 "Challenges of Digital Inequality - Digital Education, Digital Work, Digital Life" (pp. 1-5). Berlin https://doi.org/10.34669/wi.cp/2.29Nutzungsbedingungen:Dieser Text wird unter einer CC BY Lizenz (Namensnennung) zurVerfügung gestellt. Nähere Auskünfte zu den CC-Lizenzen findenSie hier:https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.deTerms of use:This document is made available under a CC BY Licence(Attribution). For more Information see:https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0INFLUENCE OF INFORMATIZATION ON WORKING ACTIVITES IN THE INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY BUSINESS – AN APPROACH FOR AN ANALYSIS FRAMEWORK OF LABOR CAPACITY  Knut Linke University of Applied Sciences Weserbergland Institute for Knowledge Management  Am Stockhof 2 Hameln, Germany linke@hsw-hameln.de Prof. Dr. André von Zobeltitz University of Applied Sciences Weserbergland Department of Business Economics Am Stockhof 2 Hameln, Germany vonzobeltitz@hsw-hameln.de ABSTRACT The effects of the digitization of the work provide companies and educational institutions uncertainty. Therefore new future working skills of employees will be necessary. This applies in particular to those employees in the field of information technology who are particularly affected by digitization and who mostly perform on the technologically cutting edge of information technology. The practical part of this article aims to present an analysis model which explores the work activities of IT specialists through quantitative and qualitative analysis methods and shows which informal skills are placed in the work activities of the employees. A methodological triangulation should ena-ble a multi-layered view of work activity. The developed framework will be discussed during the conference contribution in order to enable reflection and improvement of the approach with the aim of enabling a good practice for other researchers. KEYWORDS Informatization; Digitalization of work; Labor Capacity; Working Assets; Agile Work; DOI: 10.34669/wi.cp/2.291 INTRODUCTION Information has become a pillar for value crea-tion in this time of digital capitalism (Schiller 1999) within the structural change of the society from industrialism to informatization (Castells 2001; 2003) in which value is created digitally and globally. For the future education of em-ployees, it is mandatory to understand which (in-formal) personal skills need to be developed to work in companies, which fulfil agile or hybrid working strategies. The research project OPEN IT (Städler et al. 2018) analyses those skills within the working world of IT workers. The focus of the research project is to construct, test and evaluate IT study programs. Those take IT workers’ competencies from the field of IHK education (DIHK 2010; Rogalla and Witt-Schleuer 2004) into account to reduce academic workload. 2 INFORMATIZATION AND LABOR CAPACITY Informatization describes the process of gener-ating and using information (Schmiede 1996: 27) for value creation. In capitalist production, ashift from material to immaterial products hastaken place. The informatization of the workingworld (e.g. Schmiede 1996; 2006; Boes andPfeiffer 2006) means that services and produc-tion processes are decentralized continuously,virtualized as well as offered and provided inter-nationally (Boes and Kämpf 2006). In the con-text of this change, information technology al-lows the globally organized production capital asmooth, distributed production and exercise ofservices (Boes and Kämpf 2011) as well as therealization of global and virtual project work(Will-Zocholl 2016). The progress of the com-puterization of work is favored by the infor-mation space created by computerization (Boesand Kämpf 2011: 56-63), especially on the In-ternet (Boes et al. 2014). The central assumptionof informatization is that services and produc-tion processes are increasingly digitized and dis-tributed in a global context within decentralized and virtualized work. For the future develop-ment of capitalism, it is essential to expect how capital can generate further value. It is essential to reflect the Marxism terms of real and formal subsumption (Marx 1979: 431-440). Real sub-sumption is the classification of living labor into the production process through standardization and formalization (Schmiede 1981). In formal subsumption, capital, its benefit solely through the formal subordination of a production process into a capitalist system. The production itself, in the information space and of application and IT products, is already following standardized pat-terns to organize development processes (Böhle et al. 2008: 93). The necessary qualification for the development of products is beyond conventional formaliza-tion and categorization, and soft skills such as communication skills, the ability to work in a team, or creativity and the ability to improvise are gaining importance. In addition to the classi-cal qualifications that workers must bring, vari-ous skills are difficult to formalize. They con-cern cognition as well as informal soft skills that play a role in agile organizations. The concept of work capabilities tries to make this informal knowledge and skills empirically tangible (Pfeiffer 2004).  Labor capacity can be a key aspect of the com-puterized economy: „The qualitative and social essence of work is displayed in laboring capac-ity;… The comprehensive forming and applica-tion of the senses, living working knowledge with its objectified (but not yet objectified) and non-objectified shares of experiential knowledge and, finally, capabilities of the situa-tional concretizing application of theoretically-grounded knowledge or theoretically-grounded procedures and methods.“ (Pfeiffer 2014: 610-611). The subjectivation of labor action as a phe-nomenon of living labor ability understands ex-perience not as a static accumulation of routines, but as a particular way of dealing with things, people, and situations (Pfeiffer and Suphan 2015). For some time, employers themselves have been expecting virtues and qualities from employees in addition to technical skills (Opaschowski 2006). Those requirements go in line with analysis, which examines job descrip-tions (Kanning 2007: 13-19). Since the end of the 1990s, those descriptions have shown an in-crease in the requirements for social compe-tences in job advertisements. Suphan and Pfeiffer (2015) propose an analysis of labor capabilities (AV index) and the associ-ated capacity to work. Their analysis focuses on the questions of a German labor analysis con-ducted by the Professional Institute for Educa-tion and the Federal Institute for Occupational Safety and Health in 2012 (Rohrbach-Schmidt and Hall, 2013). They different the selection of 18 questions into three separate divisions: Situ-ational handling of complexity, Situational im-ponderables and Increase in structural complex-ity. The results of the three sections are multi-plied by the relevance of experiential learning for the job. 3 RESEARCH AND DATA ANALYSIS In order to meet the demands of work in a com-puterized world, the following question arises: Which working competences and working abili-ties must employees have - especially in the area of IT workers, who are particularly affected by digitalization?  Based on the theory of informatization and the approaches of working asset analysis a triangu-lated research design is performed to understand the working worlds of IT workers. A contrast between traditional and agile working assets in the IT departments will be the result of the anal-ysis.  In the first research step, the questions of the AV index (Pfeiffer and Suphan 2015), extended by quantitative questions on work activity, and are used to gain an impression of the group struc-tures and hierarchical levels in companies. Based on the results of the first research step, in-terviews with different roles within IT and IT projects will be conducted in the second step. This second step is planned as a set of intensive interviews based on narrative depth controlled by impulse questions. The qualitative data col-lected will be used to support the quantitative statements on roles and for the formation of in-ductive categories (Berger-Grabner 2016) for work activities. The interviews will be accom-panied by a description of the respective work-place and working environment. The information collected in the second step is used for the third and final analysis for inductive category formation. In the observation in the third step, employed persons in companies will be observed in group discussions (Kauffeld 2005: 290) and structured within interactions (Lamnek 2010: 509-510; Kauffeld 2005: 275). The focus in this last step is on the differentia-tion of the interaction in project sprints and pro-cess steps, customer interaction and administra-tive management. 4 CONCLUSION The results will provide information about those kinds of skills, which are necessary for self-de-termined work and display how different ap-proaches result in several types of outcomes. The results should display the inequality in the analyzed workforce regarding work behavior, working assets, labor capacity and the dedicated requirements to fulfil within an agile and tradi-tional working place. The results will be used to define a framework for scientific education of-fers as well as for the participation of employees and the necessary participation of companies. 5 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The project underlying this document was funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research Germany under funding code 16OH22005. The author is responsible for the content of this publication. 6 REFERENCES 1. Berger-Grabner, D. (2016). Wissenschaftliches Ar-beiten in den Wirtschafts- und Sozialwissenschaften.Wiesbaden: VS.2. Boes, A., Kämpf, T. (2006). Internationalisierungund Informatisierung: Zur neuen Produktivitätskraft-struktur globaler Wertschöpfungsprozesse. In Bauk-rowitz, A., Berker, T., Boes, A., Pfeiffer, S.,Schmiede, R., Will, M. (Eds.): Informatisierung derArbeit - Gesellschaft im Umbruch (p. 320-334). Ber-lin: Edition Sigma.3. Boes, A., Kämpf, T. (2011). Global verteilte Kopfar-beit – Offshoring und der Wandel der Arbeitsbezie-hungen. Berlin: Edition Sigma.4. 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Influence of Informatization on Working Activites in the Information Technology Business - an Approach for an Analysis Framework of Labor Capacity

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Influence of Informatization on Working Activites in the Information Technology Business - an Approach for an Analysis Framework of Labor Capacity

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