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Cooperative Work, Socio-technical systems, EngD, 2012 Slide 1

Cooperative work

Ian Sommerville


Teamwork


Why important?

• The aim of enterprise systems is to support work in complex organisations. To design these systems, we therefore need an understanding of how work is done.

• Poor understanding of the nature of work as it is actually practised, is a major contributory factor to the ineffectiveness of complex computer systems.

• Interactions between people, organisational structures, and systems lead to complexity.


Types of work

• Skill-based, which relies on specific skills developed by an individual

– Can often be highly automated if skills can be applied in a context-free way e.g. typesetting

• Rule-based, which relies on people following a pre-defined process or set of rules

– Automation is possible for ‘normal situations’ but more challenging for exceptional situations

• Knowledge-based, which relies on the application of the worker’s knowledge in new situations

– Automation of knowledge-based activities is very limited


Socio-complexity

• Complexity in a system that arises because of the interactions between the people who are part of the system

• Socio-complexity focuses on complexity caused by pluralities of perspective and people’s assumptions & interests.

– Manifested as explicit and implicit conflicts between actors and stakeholders in a system

– The larger the system, the more people who are involved and the greater the socio-complexity


Influences on work

• Organisational policies, processes and procedures

• Organisational culture– Anything allowed unless explicitly forbidden (ask for

forgiveness)

– Everything is forbidden unless explicitly allowed (ask permission)

• Background and education

• National culture

• Training


Types of cooperation

• Synchronous– People work together at the same time

• Asynchronous– People work together but at different times

• Co-located– People work together in the ‘same’ place

• Distributed– People work together in ‘different’ places


Processes and workflow

• Processes are mechanisms for coordinating work

– Activities

– Agents

– Artefacts

• A workflow is the automation of a business process, in whole or part, during which documents, information or tasks are passed from one participant (a resource either human or machine) to another for action, according to a set of procedural rules.


Process example – activity perspective


Division of labour


Taylorism

• The application of ‘scientific method’ to the organisation of work with a view to improving ‘efficiency’ and reducing waste

• Basis of ‘time and motion’ studies, where the way that work should be done was prescribed in detail

• Taylorism can be seen as the division of labor pushed to its logical extreme, with a consequent de-skilling of the worker and dehumanisation of the workplace.


Business process reengineering

• Business process reengineering (BPR) is a fundamental rethinking and radical redesign of business processes whose aim is to make dramatic improvements in cost, quality, speed, and service

• In essence, a form of Taylorism for business rather than production-line processes

• BPR combines a strategy of relating business innovation with major changes to business processes

• Focus is on workflow and process automation

• Generally reliant on complex IT systems to support work


The failure of BPR

• BPR was widely adopted in the 1990s but it is now generally accepted that, with a small number of exceptions, it has been an abject failure

• Few if any organisations have achieved the expected efficiencies promised by BPR

• Reasons– Work is, in practice, surprisingly complex

– The notion that knowledge-based work could be represented in simple workflows was mostly incorrect


Processes in an STS

• Operational and management processes are a fundamental part of a socio-technical system and there should be a clear understanding of the relationships between these processes and the use of the system

• However, process design should be indicative rather than prescriptive as there will almost always be a need to refine processes and adapt them to local circumstances

– Work is a social process governed by social and cultural norms so different teams work in different ways

– Within teams, the division of labour is being constantly renegotiated depending on workload, etc.


Process diversity

• Processes interpreted by individuals and teams according to their training, background, level of authority, etc.

• Processes have to be dynamically adapted to cope with changing local circumstances

– Workload

– Capabilities of local IT systems

– Availability of people or other resources

– Exceptions and failures

• Teams discover local optimisations to make processes more effective


Work-arounds

• A workaround is a bypass of a recognized problem in a system that is, generally, created and refined by the actors involved in the system

• From a dependability perspective, you can think of workarounds as a mechanism for fault tolerance

– They allow system operation to continue in the presence of ‘faults’

• Workarounds rely on:– Local resources – what do you have available at the

time

– Local knowledge – who is available, what are the local boundaries of responsibility, etc.


Contingent division of labour

• Teamwork involves a contingent division of labour

• The formal division of labour is constantly (and often implicitly) renegotiated depending on workload, context, availability of expertise and knowledge, etc.

• Formal process descriptions therefore are an impoverished description of the work being done


Examples

• Team working on deliverable to deadline– Formal roles tend to be abandoned – everyone mucks

in to get the work done in time

• Unexpected absence of team members– Work is dynamically re-allocated to those members

that are available

– Tasks are prioritised and lower priority tasks are discarded

• ‘Normal’ fluctuations in workload– Managers and support staff take on operational

responsibilities

– People do what they can to reduce workload of key staff


Perspectives on work

• Awareness

– How do team members become aware of what others are doing and how do they use this information to coordinate activities and schedule their own work

• Artefacts and affordances

– How is the work made visible and hence shareable? What affordances are provided by the artefacts and what are their limitations?

• The workplace

– How is the workplace physically organised to support cooperation

• Local knowledge

– How is local knowledge used to facilitate cooperation


Awareness

• Knowledge of who is around and what is going on in the work environment

• Essential mechanism for providing information to individuals that helps them organise their work

– X is not around tomorrow so, although the deadline is tonight, it is OK to delay for a day

• Problem with many software systems is that they don’t provide awareness of what else is going on in the system, who is available and what they are doing


Control rooms 1


Control rooms 2


Artefacts and affordancies

• Artefacts– The objects that are used by people in an STS

• Affordances– What you can do with artefacts as a consequence of

the way that they are designed/represented

• Affordances of paper documents– Portable, flexible, robust, annotatable, persistent


Flight strips


Annotations

• Annotation is an important mechanism that we use to support coordinated activities

• Annotations on paper documents are – Flexible. They can be graphical or textual

– Identifiable. Individual annotations can be identified

– Organised. Annotations can reveal the workflow in a system



The workplace

• Workplaces are often designed or organised with the aim of facilitating cooperation

• This often relies on the spatial arrangement of the workspace i.e. the placement of furniture, etc.

• This may support awareness, coordination of work, joint working or informal collaboration

• Challenging to replicate for distributed work


Examples


Local knowledge

• Knowledge that is particular to a setting– Who are the local experts?

– How to work with individuals?

– What is permissable in that setting?

– What are the real deadlines?

– Formal and actual responsibilities and authority

• How is this local knowledge used to inform the way that work is done?


Examples

• Getting support from systems administrators– Bypassing formal ‘help desk’ systems to solve

problems more quickly

– Knowing which of the sysadmins deals with your class of problem

– Knowing how best to approach them as individuals for help

• Organisational routines and calendars– Organisations often have ‘calendars’ – times and

dates that are important e.g. end of financial year, beginning of semester, etc.

– Formal deadlines may be set without regard for these calendars

– Local knowledge of calendars allows work to be scheduled appropriately


Computer Support for Cooperative Work

• Until the early 1990s, computer support was primarily focused on the individual worker

• Coordination of the work was a not automated and few systems took the interactions between people into account

• In the 1990s, it was suggested that this should be extended to cooperative work

• Supporting systems are sometimes called groupware


Supporting teamwork

• Automation of teamwork can be viewed from two perspectives:

– A control perspective, where the role of the automated system is to control and monitor the work of the team. This is the workflow/BPR approach

• Practically limited to rule-based work

– A support perspective, where the role of the system is to support work as it it, rather than as it is defined

• The CSCW perspective. Look at work as it is practised and devise tools that can be adapted by teams to support their work


Groupware


Key points

• Work using an LSCITS is inevitably a cooperative activity so an understanding of how work is actually practised helps us understand (a) requirements for and (b) limitations of supporting systems

• Socio-complexity is complexity that arises from the interactions between people in a work setting

• Work is often complex and workflow-based systems are rarely effective in supporting knowledge-based work

• Key issues to consider when studying work are awareness, artefacts and affordances, the organisation of the workplace and local knowledge