From its earliest days, research in business and information
systems engineering (BISE) has been dedicated to envisioning
how information technology will change the way
we work and live. Today, technological innovation happens
at a faster pace and reaches users more quickly than
ever before. For example, while it took 75 years for the
telephone to reach 100 million users, it was 16 years for
mobile phones, 7 years for the World Wide Web, four and
a half years for Facebook (Dreischmeier et al. 2015), and
only a few weeks for Poke´mon GO (Moon 2016).
The rapid acceleration of technological diffusion confronts
BISE researchers, who usually study technological
innovations from the perspective of socio-technical systems
(Bostrom and Heinen 1977). Work systems are conceptualized
as an interplay of tasks, technologies, and
people (vom Brocke and Rosemann 2014), systems ‘‘in
which human participants and/or machines perform work
(processes and activities) using information, technology,
and other resources to produce specific products/services
for specific internal and/or external customers’’ (Alter
2013, p. 75).
Against this background, much of the current discourse
about future work systems addresses automation, as work
is increasingly performed by machines. For example,
blockchain and smart contracts can automate large parts of
the supply chain (Mendling et al. 2018), and machine
learning now facilitates automation in business areas that
were once too unstructured for automation (Willcocks et al.
2015). In such settings, people are likely to contribute to
work systems by means of creative work and exploration
(as opposed to exploitation), a distinction that O’Reilly and
Tushman (2013) referred to as organizational ambidexterity.
Therefore, from the perspective of BISE research, the
future of work poses questions about the interplay of
people and machines, as Lehrer et al. (2018) outlined in
their work on digital service innovation.
In this discussion, we differentiate between the social
intensity and the technical intensity of work and define four
basic types of work systems, as shown in Fig. 1.
