At the University of Rochester, Foster studied how faculty worked. Her research led to a customized application that allows faculty members to create a page showcasing their work. "At all the other institutions where this is installed, no one has come up with what we have," Foster says. She adds that understanding the faculty's needs was instrumental in the decision to customize.

No boundaries

That dynamic doesn't surprise anthropologist Patricia Sachs, founder and president of Social Solutions Inc., a consulting firm in Half Moon Bay, Calif. "Technologists tend to look at the user and the user's relationships to the technology. It tends to be very task-focused. And the funding for a lot of technology tends to be done by the business unit, so it has boundaries around what it's going to try to fix," she explains. "Anthropologists look at the missing social layer."

That's clear when anthropologist Eleanor Wynn describes her work. As a social technology architect at Intel Corp., Wynn was part of a cross-functional group that studied how employees work together across time and distance. Wynn asked questions such as "How much do you socialize with teammates outside of meetings?" and "How often do you socialize with people sitting around you who aren't your teammates?"

"That's something that might not be asked by a regular IT person but still influences what kind of social aspects are built into a tool," Wynn explains.