The Digital Design of Work: The Implications of Project Management Information Systems for the Meaningfulness of Work

Project management information systems are an example of digital technology tools increasingly adopted to boost productivity by helping organizations plan work, organize documentation, automate processes, monitor (and control) employees more effectively, and enhance communication and collaboration among colleagues. Widely acclaimed for their promise to revolutionize the way people work, the impacts of PMI systems are neither unproblematic nor fully known. As emphasized throughout this chapter, the current design of these systems and the discourse surrounding them unmistakably evoke concepts and attitudes that hark back to a dehumanizing scientific management perspective of productivity and the principle of maximizing organizational efficiency in the workplace. The resurgence of such a reductionist perspective of work after half a century or more in which humanistic ideas have steered the development of human-resource management practices and work design is cause for alarm, we argue, especially regarding the potential impacts of PMI systems on the meaningfulness of work for employees. To explore these impacts and how they might best be addressed, we discuss the affordances of PMI systems and their possible implications for the meaningfulness of work. We conclude with suggestions for how PMI systems might be implemented in more mindful and humanizing ways.