The late Claudio Ciborra had an interesting take on the world and his book “The Labyrinths of Information: Challenging the Wisdom of Systems” is worth setting aside some time to read. The taster I have chosen is, fittingly enough, from a chapter focused on drift:
“System development methodologies maintain that applications should be aligned with their initial specifications. They are horrified by fluctuations and deviations; therefore, they strive to keep them in check through systematic monitoring, fedback, and learning. Somehow, though, shift and drift in systems development and use always succeed in creeping in, and subtract value from the methodologies, contributing to the frustration and scepticism among conscientious practitioners. We choose, instead, to be funky once again and celebrate deviations and mismatches: looking at them positively as a source of innovation, or simply as that existential dirt which is destined to corrupt the neat but idealized picture of any systems development project. Chapter 3 showed that the use of applications is always shaped by hacks, short cuts, and twists, or punctuated through unpredictable processes of re-invention. Drifting is the result of these processes – ranging from sabotage, to passive resistance, to learning-by-doing, to astonishing micro discoveries and radical shifts – or plain serendipity. In these processes, usage, maintenance and redevelopments, and continuous, or sometimes fortuitous, improvements take place simultaneously. In a corporate world without drifting, service technicians would have no war stories to swap, coffee machine chats would only deal with football, cars, and dirty jokes, and office automation ethnographers would be out of work.”