Digital calendars for flexible organizational routines

Abstract

Purpose Online calendar services (OCS) are primarily used for temporal orientation and reminding. Nonetheless, calendar work may also entail generic activities such as scheduling, tracking, archive and recall and retrieval which are not adequately supported by available systems. The purpose of the paper is to explore how online calendaring may be re-configured and re-aligned to alleviate these shortcomings, thus servicing accountability in team work and flexibility in organizational routines. Design/methodology/approach Following a design science research methodology, the authors review “justifiable failures” or deliberate non-use of OCS and establish the rationale for, design and evaluate a digital service that configures calendaring as an ecology of separate digital materials supporting file-, photo- and video-sharing services, online argumentation, project/task management and social bookmarking. The new service is a digital composite of materials that incrementally co-adapt and co-evolve to serve primary and secondary work-oriented activities. The authors assess the value of the digital composite in two empirical settings and discuss intrinsic features that create new possibilities for action. Findings The authors present the rationale, design, implementation and evaluation of a new digital composite calendaring service which is deployed in two empirical settings, namely group vacation planning and collective information management. Each case features different re-configurations of calendaring to serve human intentions. In vacation planning, the digital composite of the calendar operates as a mashup allowing peers to negotiate, schedule and track vacation options and archive, recall or retrieve digital memories of vacations. In the case of collective information management, the digital composite is further augmented so as to re-align performative and ostensive aspects of routines in a regional organic farming partnership. Practical implications Digital composites rely on the interdependent operation of different bounded systems and services to establish configured ecologies of (previously) separate digital artifacts. The practical implications of digital composites are that they can appropriate performative capacities which are already established and embedded across different settings. As a result, they enact complex digital assemblages which can re-align not only daily activities but also organizational routines. On the other hand, digital composites remain in flux, since their state, at any moment in time, is partly determined (even temporarily) by the state of their constituent parts. Originality/value Calendaring as presented in this paper defines a genre of digital artifacts that promote flexible and accountable collaborative work while exploiting material agency and resources distributed across digital settings. As such, it establishes a kind of meta-material that invokes collective social agency, thus re-aligning performative and ostensive aspects of organizational routines.