When most people talk about technology, they’re talking about the electronic tools. But the notion of technology is much broader than that. If we think about technology in very basic terms, as the application of tools and techniques to extend the limits of the self in solving problems, we start to see how broad the category can be.

Technology can be all the “tools, machines, utensils, weapons, instruments, housing, clothing, communicating and transporting devices and the skills by which we produce and use them. But this definition doesn’t mean that everything (and anything) counts as a technology. We’re referring here to devices that mediate and construct the relationship between the person and the world.

With the point about the importance of meanings, we consider several ICT-oriented developments in the workplace. These are algorithmic management, mobile communication, and knowledge management. Across them, we show that these technologies may make work look different and occur in different locations, but they reinforce themes characterizing work and the workplace. In the simplest terms, a platform is digital infrastructure that enables two or more groups to interact.

Platforms bring us into the era of big data. Algorithms are rules that specify operations to find trends in data; they can learn from patterns, as well as make decisions and predict the future. When organizations can represent employees’ activity (behaviors, interactions, outputs, etc.) digitally, they seek ways of making sense of all those representations. This is where analytics comes in, since it refers to computerized techniques, including the algorithms mentioned above, to uncover and interpret meaningful patterns in these data.