Managers typically dread discovering the next new thing their employees are using. Yet individuals’ pioneering is often the way in which new technologies — blogs, Skype, or electronic bulletin boards, for example — are ultimately merged into an organization’s mainstream, often with significant payoff, although the very same technologies could be problematic to other organizations if adopted wholesale.

In other words, no technology is inherently “right” or “wrong.” Instead, managers must evaluate how it will work in the context of their specific organization. Such an approach allows for the flexibility to change with the times, possibly avoiding the loss of competitive advantage relative to more nimble or tech-savvy companies, while also maintaining control and gaining insights into the technology’s wider implications. Thus a company may choose to adopt, partially or completely, a new technology or, if indicated, to limit or shut down its use.

Our own preferred guide to understanding and evaluating the use of communication technologies in the workplace, and how such use may evolve over time, is called the Genre Model. Based on a methodology developed in academia, this model can help practitioners assess a technology’s potential benefits and risks for their organizations. (See “About the Research,” p. 64.)

Six Key Dimensions

Management researchers first used the concept of “genre” — a recognizable type of communication — in the 1990s as a way to understand how the paper-based memo developed from the older business letter, how early e-mail users imported a number of paper-based genres into e-mail, and how these new forms began to exhibit some striking changes as e-mail became an increasingly prevalent medium. The speed of communicating, the ease of cc’ing and other e-mail capabilities not only changed the ways in which people used it but also led to the emergence of other new genres. In the dialogue genre, for example, the originator of an e-mail message embeds all or part of a previous message into the current one before responding to it, thereby creating the effect of an oral conversation.

The Genre Model, which identifies both the elements of media adoption and the consequent changes in patterns of user communication, was devel-oped as a tool for evaluating new technology in the context of a specific organization, its goals and its existing media usage. How will the new medium align with the organization’s mission, culture and business practices? How will its use change productivity and effectiveness? Evaluating the medium’s similarity to