Revealing the inside workings of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), this text studies the culture of organizations and uses sociological methods to understand the technology which underpins office and commercial life. It advises on how to improve work processes and computer systems by exploring systems which use search and retrieval applications, hypertext documents, and shared database applications such as Lotus Notes.

Financial organizations, like many others, are undergoing radical change. This is affecting both their organizational processes and the technology that supports those processes. This book reports on the use of sociological ethnography in helping guide these changes, both in terms of helping better understanding and redraw work processes and through providing more accurate and flexible understanding of the role technology plays. It places the reported research in context by contrasting it with those approaches more commonly associated with change, including business process engineering,...