The IEUC Guide to End User Computing 9/7/10 — 3:28 EDT

This is where you will find a gentle introduction to just what End User Computing is!

End User Computing Defined

End User Computing is an emerging multi-discipline that looks at the impact of Information Technologies on society.

It looks both back into the past to explore how technologies evolve, are deployed, and are used and forward into the future to shape this evolution in the hope that we might craft a more habitable, enriching, and empowering information ecology.

Indeed, in its applied form, End User Computing is the study and development of deployable environments that integrate research technologies and put them in the hands of ordinary people from all walks of life.

We will treat Enabling Technologies separately as something of a bridge to our own research and focus on the nature of our field in this section.

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The Multi-Discipline

These days 'interdisciplinary' is a raging buzzword that can denote anything from the use of analytic tools developed in a related discipline to the forging of deep theoretical frameworks that effectively fuse previously unrelated fields. On a more mundane level, it often denotes the alliance of previously marginalized academics from two of more rival departments for the purpose of jointly pursing grant funding and alumni support, often under the aegis of a newly minted 'Center'.

The trouble is that there are already too many Centers and in aggregate these collaborations sometimes have the perverse effect of further atomizing the disciplines. But from a Game Theoretic perspective, they undeniably work for their participants and can leads to broader inter-institutional alliances to promote the launching of new academic conferences that can confer precious refereed publication brownie points so necessary to the advancement in academe.

End User Computing takes an even broader and more holistic view than traditional Interdisciplinary forays. We aren't just working in the overlapping region of one or two fields. Like the technology that drives it, End User Computing is truly pervasive and cross-cutting. It raises questions that squarely fall within the purview of many disciplines and uses those findings to inform a wide range of activities.

While it may spawn projects that have a more conventional interdisciplinary nature, it sees them as inputs to a much larger guiding vision — the vision of a future where YOU are an informed participant in the co-evolution of technology and society.

To realize that vision we need your help, whether you are an academic or just an average citizen of the globe. Only your support can help us transcend the game playing imperative that has for so long distorted our best intentions.

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Its Sub-Disciplines

The Multi-Discipline of End User Computing is composed of a number of Sub-Disciplines including:

Computer Science

Computer Science is undoubtedly the bedrock and wellspring of End User Computing.

Computer Science has a Janus-like quality with one face looking towards theory and abstraction and another which looks toward the user where questions of basic design and engineering dominate.

Economics

Economics teaches us about markets and resource allocation. It can grapple with hard questions of who should be compensating whom for the creation of social goods. Most importantly, it can highlight the points of leverage than enable YOU to play a role in the shape of things to come.

Remarkably, it can also serve an engineering purpose by providing models that can be implemented in the machine to address issues of computational resource allocation, both internally with respect to storage and CPU cycle allocation and externally in terms of prioritizing quality of service guarantees among End Users.

The History of Technology

There is a surprising amount of history that has been packed into the decades since the emergence of personal computing. Looking back, we can find much to learn from.

Indeed there were many roads not taken given the state of technology at the time which may now be re-opened to us. Thus looking back can truly illuminate the road ahead.

Information Studies

Information Studies, once known as Library Science, teaches us how to organize and make use of vast seas of raw facts and the far more elusive nuggets of Knowledge buried among them.

Innovation Management

Innovation Management looks at Technology Transfer & Diffusion, Pure Research & New Product Development, and Entrepreneurship & Intrapreneurship — considering how business decisions are made and what organizational forms are most efficacious in turning ideas into marketable products.

Law

The discipline of Law is one of the cornerstones shaping all facets of our technology infrastructure. It determines what ideas can be protected, who will bear the risk of the unknown, and what agreements among technology creators, backers, and users can be enforced.

Political Science & Public Administration

Political Science and Public Administration address how society decides what Laws and Regulations to enact. They reflect on the social compact behind our legal frameworks and how the many stakeholders strive to protect and advance their varied interests as Government, The Courts, and the Civil Service strive to implement policy decisions.

Pyschology

The field of Psychology looks within the individual to understand thought processes and motivations. Its range of application to End User Computing ranges from studies of Computer Rage to The Psychology of Programming.

Sociology

Sociology looks group behavior and can be applied within the organization or at a might broader level to look at cross-cultural patterns in technology usage.

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End User Goals & Activities

Perhaps the best treatment of End User Goals & Activities can be found in the Activities and Relationships Table (ART) taxonomy developed by Professor Ben Shneiderman of The University of Maryland's Human-Computer Interaction Lab.

The ART presents a two dimensional analysis arraying functional activities over time (collecting, relating, creating, donating) against the human relationships it impacts ranging from oneself, to family and friends (2-50 intimates), to colleagues and neighbors (50-50,000 regular encounters), to citizens and markets (5,000+). (p. 88)

Collecting Information

Virtually all human activity begins with some form of research (in the 'background-reading and keeping an ear open for new ideas' sense).

For End Users this can take the form of scanning print sources, searching with Google, following blogs and newsgroups, informally making a mental note when a coworker gripes about a buggy software package, or making a foray to a research library.

Sorting though the countless leads and potential future leads and organizing one's findings can alas become a job in itself, begging for automation support.

Relating to Others

Once we have grounded ourselves in a topic area, it is only natural to pursue it in depth by actively consulting colleagues and experts. Then we reach the point at which we can join communities and become regular participants in their evolving dialog.

Creating Innovations

Sooner or later, we then see an unfilled need and find a solution or idea bursting from our subconscious to demand expression. So we write, draw, design, forge plan, and run simulations — all of which can be greatly facilitated by the use of End User Computing Technologies.

Disseminating Ideas & Content

When we have given form to our thoughts we strive to share them with as many others as possible, be it to earn our paycheck, to support and strengthen our extended families, or to advance broad societal aims with no expectation of tangible rewards.

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Types of End Users

If you ask someone to picture an End User, they are apt to envision a Dilbertesque cubical worker or a teen playing bootlegged music files while blasting away at a first person shooter desktop arcade game. The sad unifying theme is often one of an individual with no real control over how the technology is presented to him or her — a mere consumer, not an active citizen.

We reject this narrow view and embrace all types of End Users as potentially informed and efficacious members of a virtual polity.

End Users have the potential to become far more sophisticated than conventional wisdom would assume and they hold tremendous latent market power. But with power, comes responsibility. Thus, we are not content to merely advance developments on a technical front — we want to foster the advance of civilization and culture on the electronic frontier!

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Business Users

The history of End User Computing in the business world is that of a decades long battle for control between the forces of centralization and decentralization.

The forces of centralization argue for standardization to minimize support costs and lost productivity, while the forces decentralization argue for giving individuals the freedom to chose the tools that will maximize their productivity.

Neither extreme is optimal in all circumstances and the real key is to develop a healthy Information Ecology.

Researchers

Researchers (be they in academia, government, or industry) need extra support for information retrieval, organization, and analysis. They need to be able to work with large bodies of raw data that can be drawn upon for use in simulations or to back up structured arguments in collaboration support systems.

Thus, even those whose core research interests are far from computer science have come to recognize the importance of computing and programming as they have found more and more of their time consumed by such concerns. This brings to mind the old adage about the frog being boiled alive in a pot of water because its temperature rises too slowly for the amphibian to take notice and leads to our recognition of the particular irony that scientific users will often tolerate baroque interfaces that an objective observer would be loath to endure.

Students & Educators

Students see computers and related technologies from a wide range of perspectives. For the well to do from technology-rich backgrounds, they are second nature extensions of themselves, while those from technology-poor backgrounds they can seem cold and intimidating. But whatever there background, virtually all students recognize the importance of mastering the use of these tools if they are to achieve success either in academia or more immediately in the real world.

Thus, Educators face the ongoing challenge of trying to find appropriate uses for computing technologies in the classroom. Indeed, an internet connected terminal at every seat can make for a high value grant application it can also have a devastating impact on student attention spans and the eternal battle against plagiarism.

So, while we at The Institute are unabashed optimists about the potent of Information Technology to enhance learning, we are particularly sensitive to the risks of its indiscriminate use as a "drill and kill" babysitter or substitute for individual thinking an analysis. The student who tries to shortcut the learning process by downloading the first page his or her search engine falls upon practices the most serious form of self-deception. Learning isn't just about grabbing handy factoids and absorbing a few for later regurgitation. It is about developing search strategies, evaluating bias, forming and testing theories, crafting arguments & alliances and defending them in the social context. It is these skills that truly matter and offer the student his or her only real hope for long term career advancement.

Home Users

Home use of computing technology is perhaps one of the most nebulous although it can generally fall into the categories of simple research (e.g. looking up prices and deals, learning about a medical condition, or finding out about a politician's stand on an issue of importance), personal communication (e.g. email, online-dating, and posting personal web sites), entertainment (e.g. dedicated Game Consoles and PC-based games or simulations), and personal improvement (e.g. typing tutors and interactive foreign language kits).

Additionally, there is a tremendous sphere of invisible computing applications embedded in our radios, VCRs, DVDs, laundry and kitchen appliances that in the next few years will become interconnected with a web of wireless links. As End Users, this advance can lead to all sorts of George Jetson applications like refrigerators that warn you that your milk has gone sour and automatically order more through a local deli-to-door delivery services.

Quite honestly, we can say whether consumers will embrace such seemingly trivial applications, but we can draw attention to the potential erosion of privacy interests that their attendant data collection capabilities would entail.

Programmers

Programmers represent a unique class of End Users in that their role as developers of everyone else's technology is such a central underpinning of our societal infrastructure while at the same time their role as End Users of the tools that they use to create that technology is so widely overlooked.

Today most programmers still code in programming languages whose designs place unnecessary burdens on them to manage computing resources and avoid misusing language features when it is well known that dealing with such complexity is highly likely to lead to serious programming errors, software instabilities, and pervasive security holes their work product. Ironically there are alternative programming languages that eliminate entire classes of such errors which are rarely used out of academia for largely sociological reasons.

Where research does focus on reducing programming errors, it tends to focus on the output side of the process by performing rigorous examinations of what the programmer actually wrote rather than on the input side be making it easier for the programmer to write what he or she intended to have written. In effect, we treat programmers as if they were just programs themselves rather than focusing in on improving the usability of their tools!

It should also be noted that the notion of who is a programmer doesn't just extend to the professional employed to develop shrink-wrapped software. If you've ever struggled to figure out how to a record a show with a VCR, tried to lay out a new spreadsheet, or wanted to customize the menus and macros in a word processor, you have experienced the joy and heartbreak of End User Programming.

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End User Computing Around The World

It is very important to recognize that in our ever more globalized international society, not all important trends and technologies originate in the United States. So, while its common for technology transfers to flow out of the States, we do ourselves a grave disservice if we don't make a concerted effort to learn as much as we can from our colleagues and fellow End Users overseas.

Indeed, as we can see from the transformations of nations in the former Soviet block, the spread of Internet access and decentralized computing often comes hand in hand with improved human-rights, lowered trade barriers, and reduced international tensions. This is not to say that there are no potentials for economic dislocations as such eagerly expanding workforces join the global market and we need to look at these issues as well since they are inextricably part and parcel with the spread of End User Computing in its broadest sense.

To this end, The Institute has already begun to seek out International Research Associates whose reporting and analysis in these pages will open our eyes to new perspectives from the rest of the world.

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The Early Years of End User Computing

Those who remember the 1980's, will recall something of a golden age in which personal computers were finally liberated from the research lab and burst forth upon the national scene.

The Internet had yet to take form and computer users shared a more direct sense of shared discovery and camaraderie both as users and hobbyists. It was a time when the scope of system was still manageable enough that you could curl up with a phone book sized "Inside Macintosh" manual and over a course of a week or two emerge with a sense of enlightenment and understanding.

It was in someways, despite (or perhaps because of) the limitations of the day, a more elegant and accessible age that gave rise to strong feelings of accomplishment, personal mastery, and empowerment upon which we reflect with a sense of loss and yearning.

So take some time to enjoy our catalog of historical resources and gird yourself for the challenge ahead, then join with us to recreate the magic of that Golden Era!

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