Management tools: a definition

Management tools can simply be defined as activity measurements and procedures used to develop choices and judgments. They obviously encompass reporting tools but they also encompass a lot of the devices that help people deliver in an organisation. Tools have three roles; they help:
• Investigating the functioning of the organisation.
Management account reporting tools are a good example as they often create a photography of past activity.
• Steering change.
Project management tools but also management account tools help benchmark two situations or the same situation during a length of time.
• Exploring novelty.
Metrics of prospective and intelligence but also real life tests of instrumented processes are examples.
The notion of tools is rooted in a specific, Marxist-influenced understanding of work where tools are radically different from machines (Girin). Machines force employees to follow a specific process while tools help employees deliver work the way they want. Machines are devices that ‘alienate’ people; tools increase their autonomy.
Blogs by favouring conversations, wikis by favouring collaboration, RSS feeds and votation by filtering information, social bookmarks, tags and personalised pages by organising in a personally meaningful way contribute to the formation of choices and judgements. As such, Enterprise social computing extends and generalise this perspective to all knowledge related tools that are used within organisations.