Lecture 4, IS 904Genre-Based approach and

method: Planning for organizational information requirements

Tero Päivärinta

University of Agder

17.9.2010

Agenda

• Genre concept

• Role of genre in the organizational modelling landscape

• A method for recognizing and analyzing genres (+ some experiences)

• Exercise

Genre of organizational communication

• Bakhtin (1952) - >Yates & Orlikowski (1992): a recurrently instantiating communicative action– identified by its communicative purpose and form(s) (medium/media,

language, structural elements)– identified within a normative scope among a certain group of

stakeholders within a certain community– e.g. lutheran marriage ceremony, invoice, requirements specification,

sales report, project plan, budget, R & D meeting, ”The Diary” of papermill maintenance...

– various levels of abstraction vs normative scope: specific genres recognized in a group of employees ... globally recognized abstract genres : memo of our group meeting ... memo

• Genres can be ”emerging” or (to some extent) ”designed”– …or even ”given” by a 3rd party technology / application

• -> assumption: a design made elsewhere fits also to us

Genre system / repertoire / ecology

• genre system (Bazerman, 1994)– A set of interrelated genres in a wider communicative context

(e.g. the genres for project mgmt: plan, memo, meeting, budget, report...)

• Genre system for a meeting: scheduling (calender), invitation, agenda, (possibly document genres), meeting communications, minutes of the meeting

• genre repertoire (Orlikowski & Yates, 94)– The set of genres recognized within a certain community of

interest• E.g. genre repertoire of ”Aker Business Services”

• genre ecology (Erickson, 2000)– Communicative practices facilitated by the use of a certain

technological infrastructure/environment... e.g. Lotus Notes or virtual reality -applications

• E.g. ”Genre ecology ”which can grow in” SharePoint” or ”MS Office 2007 Pro”

Genre systems for (e-) Collaboration

Document / Datarepositories/workspaces

Documentgenres

Documentgenres

Awarenessgenres(Awareness of repositories,workspaces and users)

(e)Communicationgenres

Documentgenres

Documentgenres

F2f-genres

F2f-genres

Documentgenres

Documentgenres

Reminder: The ”Diamond” of ECM

PROCESSES(TASK)

CONTENT & COMMUNIC.

ROLES(STRUCTURE)

INFORMATIONTECHNOLOGY(IN CONTEXT)

Tec

hn

(olo

g)ic

alS

ocio

-or

gan

izat

ion

al

DATA

GENREREPERTOIRE

GENRESYSTEM

GENRE

PEOPLE

GOALS(OBJECTIVES)

Environment: INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY (OPPORTUNITIES)

Environment: BUSINESS ENVIRONMENT OF THE ENTERPRISE

CO

NT

EX

T

metadata

metadata

metadata

Reminder 2…

ContentInfrastructure Administration

Change Management

Objectives Impacts

Enterprise ModelPeople / Culture

Communication /

The genre-based method

• focus: identifying organizational information / communication requirements for varying IS development initiatives– ECM, KM, DW, BI...

• concepts: (become concrete in the organizational language)– genre (document types, types of meetings, reports, forms...)– property (of genre)– metadata (about genre, e.g. about its implementation, dev.

needs,)– PUI entity = producer/user of information (structure, task, people

etc.)

Overview of the method’s process

Identify stakeholdersof ISP

Identify PUI entities

Identify and name genres

Identify properties of thegenres relevant to ISP

List of participatingstakeholders

List of PUI entities

Diagonal matrices

Genres (listed in the leftcolumn of a spreadsheet)

Properties (titles of othercolumns of the spreadsheet)

Gather metadataabout the genres from

participants An unanalysedspreadsheet of

genre-based metadata

Examples of stakeholder roles(a part of method knowledge)

Categories and examples(a part of method knowledge)

LEGEND:Information storage

Step

Information flow

Control flowAnalyse and redefine

the genre-based metadatato constitute an IS plan

An analysed spreadsheet,other ISP documents

Identify stakeholders

• I.e., those who should be involved in the development process & req analysis– For instance: Chief information officer, Chief executive officer,

ISP champion, IS coordinator, Information technology manager, Information systems developer, Information security coordinator, Consultant, Researcher, Outside facilitator of ISP, Facilitator (from inside the company), Representative of a PUI entity in the ISP domain (including practically every identified work role in PUI entities), External stakeholder (affected by ISP decisions:customer, supplier, and subcontractor)

• Just list them & their contact information

Identify PUI entities• List of the PUI entities with which to start• Examples

– processes• Sales process, Purchasing process, …

– organization units & roles• Accounting department, Research & Development dept., Financial

manager, Regional managers

– individual people?• ”Pekka Toivonen”

– external PUI entities (with which ECM system exchanges information)• Customer, Subcontractor, Trade union, Department of Defense

– existing databases?? (sales transactions…)

• to be put in the diagonal matrix -model

Identify & name genres

• I.e., those meaningful recurrent information objects shared between at least two PUI entities– note: to identify genres within PUI entities, the

PUI entities could be structured further– > the diagonal matrix -technique– or otherwise (interviews, mind maps -

important, remember to document the PUI entities!!!!)

The diagonal matrixPurchasing

Process

SalesProcess

AccountingDept.

Financial Manager("Joe Smith")

Externalorganization

List of sales

Bills Order

Invoice

Payment (info)

Payment (info)

Accepted billsBudget

Invoice

Genres PUI Entities

Direction of communication ”flow”: clockwise

Diagonal matrix (2)

Identify relevant properties to be analysed

• I.e., those things which we want to analyse further about genres in connection to this particular ECM initiative -> genre list

• …tens of them possible– those describing further production & use– those describing related technologies & applications– those describing development needs / problems– those describing relationship to other information

resources

A general-level set of analysis questions: 6W1H:s

• …when need to discuss the organizational purpose & implementation of a new or elaborated genre or genre system– Why? (Purpose(s) of communication)– Who? (Who communicate to whom?)– Whose? (Who ”owns” the communication – who can stop it?)– What? (Subgenres of a genre system, content/communication

elements of the related genres)– When? (Any time-related issues between subgenres and about

particular ones)– Where? (Where does the content /communication reside)– How? (How is it technically implemented – or should be?)

Genre list (unanalysed)Genre

Pro

du

ce

r

Us

er

De

sire

d

me

diu

m /

ap

plic

atio

n

to s

ha

re?

De

sire

d

sto

rag

e

form

at?

De

sire

d

arc

hivin

g

time

(ye

ars

)

?. . .

P aym ent (info) A ccounting S ubcontrac tor (E x t. organization)E DI (3),

paper (1)

Database (3),

paper (1)

4 (2), 6(2) ...

P aym ent (info) Cus tom er (E x t. organization)A ccounting paper (2),

E DI (2)

S canned (2),

database (2)

4 (1), 6(2),

?(1)

...

B udget F inanc ial M anagerP urchas ing W ord (2),

E xcel (1),

W P (1)

W ord (2),

Htm l

(intranet, 2)

1 (1), 0 (1),

4(2)

...

A ccepted bills F inanc ial M anagerA ccounting A cc .prg (3) Database (3) 6 (3) ...

B ills P urchas ing Financ ial M anagerpaper (3) S canned (3) 6 ( 3) ...

O rder P urchas ing S ubcontrac tor (E x t. organization)E DI (3),

paper (1)

Database (3),

paper (1)

4 (2), 6(2) ...

Lis t of sales S ales A ccounting A cc .prg (3) Database (3) 2 (2), 0 (1) ...

Invoice S ales Cus tom er (E x t. organization)paper (2),

E DI (2)

S canned (2),

database (2)

4 (1), 6(2),

?(1)

...

Invoice S ubcontrac tor (E x t. organiz .)P urchas ing E DI (3),

paper (1)

Database (3),

paper (1)

4 (2), 6(2) ...

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

PROPERTIES

METADATA

-> 10-20 (>50)

-> 300-800

Analyse & redefine genre-based metadata

• …to constitute an IS/IT implementation plan for ECM in the modelled domain

applications to produce / distribute / publish / communicate– technological functionalities

• Useful to scrutinize, which useful in which context• consultants representing particular solutions -> those functionalities in their solutions

• About Content: From genres to ”technical content types” and elements– Content genres sharing (almost) exactly the same technical metadata / flexible

structure -> same technical content types– …the more tailored content systems -> the more genre-specific content types

supported• give some examples?

– Technical content types = aggregations of technical content elements• figure, text, formatted data field, etc.• the more tailored system -> the more semantically specific content elements /

content structure models

Genre list (analysed)

Genre

Producer

User

Medium

/ A

pplication to share

Storage

format

Archiving

time

(years)

. . .

A c cepted bills F inanc ial M anagerA c counting A c c .prg Databas e 6 ...

Lis t of s ales S ales A c counting A c c .prg Databas e 2 ...

Invoice S ubcontrac tor (E x t. organiz .)P urc has ing E DI Databas e 6 ...

O rder P urc has ing S ubcontrac tor (E x t. organization)E DI Databas e 4 ...

P aym ent (info) A c counting S ubcontrac tor (E x t. organization)E DI Databas e 6 ...

B ills P urc has ing F inanc ial M anagerpaper S c anned .bm p 6 ...

Invoice S ales Cus tom er (E x t. organization)paper S c anned .bm p 6 ...

P aym ent (info) Cus tom er (E x t. organization)A c counting paper S c anned .bm p 6 ...

B udget F inanc ial M anagerP urc has ing W ord W ord .doc 4 ...

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . (also: reference to specificcontent structure definitionsabout more tailored contenttypes)

…until gap-fit analysis• Product analyses to be done in parallel with /

after genre-based requirements analysis– with regard to the functionality of a product of interest– The genre-based analysis provides a basis to see,

which functionalities of the available products would be highlighted in the selected domain

• e.g. which existing meeting genres would fit to be replaced / elaborated with ”Live Meeting with Round Table” best, which with more advanced video meetings with ”presence feeling”.

– …and would we able to envision new meeting genres now made possible with the technology?

Side-jump to the other article

• What did you think about analysing the meeting genres at the level recommended by Antunes et al. 2006?

Background of g-b method

• Dev. of electronic document management in industry (3-yr.METODI project, end of 1990s)– heterogeneous document resources -> the problem is

first of all about IS planning

• Need to delve deeper into doc resources– people tend to recognize genres rather naturally– IS developers were uncommon with the most genres

in big organizations (although they must decide on IT implementation issues) -> practical need for a collaborative approach, genre repertoire forms an easily comprehensible, still comprehensive, conceptual ground for the stakeholders to collaborate

Experiences from action research

• The reported method version elaborated in collaboration with industry– from the development of EDM to ISP in general– easy to find hundreds of genres in organizations– IT people recognize their lack of knowledge and

need for closer collaboration– ”end users” can express their problems and

requirements in a detailed way, with a language familiar to them

• e.g cf. to ”entity-relationship” modelling of data

Experiences from action research (2)

– managers get insight into the actual practices of communication (by themselves they, too, are rather incapable of discussing the development of IT use for effective communicative practices)

– help discuss, identify, and demarcate potential targets for development and prioritize them

– ”The method works too well. I dare not to analyze our other departments with my current dev. resources, people would expect fast improvements to the now defined needs in vain...” (A CIO).

Experiences from consulting

• A consulting company has used the method in the business for specifying requirements for ECM since 1999

• > 100 customer organizations 1999-• independently of the original method engineers• sizes vary 40-600 employees, interorg. domains• manufacturing, engineering, financing, consulting,

interorganizational domains...

Observations from consulting• genre-based approach works in practice (as illustrated

also by the earlier action research –based efforts) <– req. anal.– simple, communicative, efficient, sometimes emancipatory?

• genres & PUI entities useful as robust ”metaconcepts” of analysis– practical language = customers’ terminology for genres and

PUIs• speak of ”what kind of documents, meetings etc.” does the

customer have

• socio-org. vs technology-oriented concepts– genres can bridge req. eng. and implementation issues of EDM– Here we are (still) at the beginning in terms of research!!!!

Observations from consulting (continued)

• participative debate on genres is efficient and effective in requirements engineering for ECM

• technology-oriented consultants tend to adopt the ”technology language” of a particular application -> genres represent still the customer business view better

• a quick basis for analysing work processes– it seems for many to be easier to identify genres first and then to

discuss about the processes which they relate to (than to start directly with a business process analysis)

(Very brief) comparison to some other modelling concepts

• Data modelling / relational databases– Genres correspond roughly to reports (i.e. report

types, not individual instances) and forms• (actually, the method has been used for clarifying possibilities

of data warehouses in another consulting firm, occasionally)

• Object-orientation, object classes– A genre can be an object class

• which describes aggregations of content objects and sets of functionalities in use, production, and interaction contexts of the application under analysis

• an instance document genre = a permanent object• an instance of an interaction genre = a run-time object (which

may become a permanent object if stored)

Exercise• Let us do individually a diagonal matrix about ”the course

communication”– for the virtual eCollaboration course at UiA

• use the excel-sheet given for this purpose– …you can use the wikisite:

http://ecolearn.wikispaces.com/How+do+we+communicate+throughout+the+IS+904+course%3F

• …as the basis (OBS! this does not involve all of the genres!)• -> Move 3-4 genres of communication to a ”genre list”• The second task is to suggest ways to improve collaboration in a

virtual eCollaboration course at UiA…• …discuss about each of those

– improvement ideas– functionality requirements etc.

• 45 minutes… -> coming back to present the model(s)– (if no time – do this exercise before the next lecture)