Handling Human Factors in Cloud-based Collaborative Enterprise

Information Systems

Sergio L. Antonaya

, Crescencio Bravo Santos

and Jesús Gallardo Casero

Escuela Superior de Informática, Universidad de Castilla – La Mancha, Paseo del Rectorado S/N, Ciudad Real, Spain

Departamento de Tecnologías y Sistemas de la Información, Universidad de Zaragoza, Teruel, Spain

Keywords: Human Factors, Enterprise Information Systems, Collaborative Networks, CSCW, Social Computing.

Abstract: Many business sectors are currently facing emerging globalized scenarios that require effective coordination

of heterogeneous teams, involved in complex collaborative processes. For most of those processes,

organizations do not count with software tools providing an adequate support for collaboration needs from a

human-centred perspective. In this context, the recently born field of Collaborative Networks has introduced

some lines of work that must be deeply explored in order to improve collaborative processes support in

Enterprise Information Systems. Taking this paradigm as reference, in this article we provide a review of the

main areas related to collaborative work, enumerate some of the most common collaborative software tools

that are being adopted in organizations worldwide, and finally present a framework for the modeling and

development of Cloud Computing based Organizational Collaborative Systems as a solid basis for the

handling of human factors in global organizations.

1 INTRODUCTION

After the consolidation of the Age of Information,

the next major changes that are expected to happen

in many business areas (such as software, finance or

health industries), are related to the implementation

of industrial models for those processes that are

highly influenced by human factors. According to

some recent studies, the transformation that those

business areas will experience in the near future will

be driven by well-known human-related needs: the

adequate management of the knowledge that each

organization has at its disposal, the standardization

of those activities that are constrained by purely

human resources (such as creativity or expertise in

the case of innovation) (Amabile 1996), and the

proper handling of dispersed heterogeneous teams

(Brown, 2011). In the case of Enterprise Information

Systems (EISs), one of the first steps that must be

taken for undertaking these challenges is to ensure

an adequate support for the collaborative processes

in which people and technologies are involved

altogether. Recent paradigms such as Cloud

Computing encourage this evolving by easing the

construction of homogeneous computer-mediated

scenarios.

On the other hand, new research lines appear

from areas such as the novel field of Collaborative

Networks (CNs) which is focused on the structure,

behaviour, and evolving of dynamics of networks of

autonomous entities that collaborate to better

achieve common or compatible goals (Camarinha,

2005). As we have already suggested (Antonaya,

2013) the adaptation of EISs to modern collaboration

needs is enclosed to the integration of three distinct

domains: Organizational Structures, Collaborative

Workflows, and Groupware Tools. Nevertheless, the

multidisciplinary nature of collaborative work

implies that any research must consider not only

organizational and technological, but human factors

too.

In this article we examine some of the human

factors that must be considered during the adaptation

of EISs to nowadays global collaboration needs. The

article is structured as follows: section 2 provides a

review of key areas related to collaborative work

and CNs; section 3 revises most common software

collaborative tools that are being adopted by

organizations worldwide. Finally, section 4 presents

a framework for the modeling and the development

of Cloud Computing based Organizational

Collaborative Systems (Antonaya, 2012).

162

L. Antonaya S., Bravo Santos C. and Gallardo Casero J..

Handling Human Factors in Cloud-based Collaborative Enterprise Information Systems.

DOI: 10.5220/0004972801620167

In Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems (ICEIS-2014), pages 162-167

ISBN: 978-989-758-029-1

 2014 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)

2 HUMAN FACTORS ON

COLLABORATION

The history of the development of computer

interactive systems demonstrates that human factors

are what ultimately determine the success or failure

of the new methods and tools that are intended to be

implanted (Shum, 1997). In addition, current needs

for collaboration imply that human factors must be

considered from the point of view of both

individuals and groups. In order, to identify key

human factors and the main difficulties that arise

when facing them in computer-mediated working

scenarios, we have considered three main areas of

study: Computer-Supported Cooperative Work,

Human-Computer Interaction, and Psychology of

Organizations. These areas are reviewed in

following sections 2.1, 2.2 and 2.3, and some of the

main human factor that have been identified are

exposed in section 2.4.

2.1 Computer-Supported Cooperative

Work

The area of Computer-Supported Cooperative Work

(CSCW) is a multidisciplinary field of study whose

main objective is to find out how computers can help

groups of people to work in a coordinated manner

(Grudin, 1994).

There are many results regarding the area of

CSCW that must be considered when studying

human behaviour in computer-supported working

scenarios. One of the most valuable results is the

concept of Awareness, which can be defined as the

conscious perception or knowledge about an object

or event (Dourish, 1992). As a matter of fact, the

study of human factors in CSCW implies that special

attention is required to be paid to the following types

of awareness: Informal: online members of a

community, the activities for which they are

prepared, and their availability; Structural: formal

organization of a group and the working

relationships that exist between its members; Social:

social connections that exist between the members

of a group; Conversational: communication

activities that are being carried out; Task: actions

that must be performed to accomplish a task;

Change: changes performed on shared items by

other members of a group; Workspace: interactions

performed on a shared workspace by other members

of a group; Concept: manner in which a particular

knowledge fits to the knowledge that people already

keep (Schmidt, 2002).

From the previous list of types of awareness, it

can be deduced that an effective support for human

factors in CNs requires dealing with very

heterogeneous issues: user typologies, characteristics

and behaviours, goals to be achieved, tasks required

to be performed, and situations or contexts in which

each activity occurs.

2.2 Human-Computer Interaction

The area of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) is

focused on the creation of User Interfaces that

effectively satisfy the needs of users.

Many of the challenges that have been faced

within this area have been historically focused on

single-user systems (Bannon, 1991). Nevertheless,

new lines of research are addressing the need for

incorporating social aspects in system designs. Most

of those researches could be framed within the

emerging concept of Social Computing, which is

defined as the computational facilitation of social

dynamics, as well as the design and use of

information and communication technologies that

consider social context (Wang, 2007). In fact, social

factors have already been discussed for many

particular scenarios, as in the case of Office

Automation, although the unit of analysis has been

progressively translated from single offices or

workplaces to full organizations or societies (Ala

Mutka, 2009).

Anyway, human behaviour in collaborative

working scenarios must be faced as an individual

and social question, so lessons learned from success

histories as the case of social networks must be

considered when designing social interfaces for CNs

and collaborative EISs too.

2.3 Psychology of Organizations

The area of Psychology of Work and Organizations

is focused on the study of human behaviour in

working and organizational contexts, both to

individual and group levels.

Most of the results achieved in this field have not

been obtained from computer-mediated scenarios,

and are attached to reduced geographical locations

such as offices or factories. All the same, those

results should be translated to computer-mediated

scenarios, especially when considering emerging

organizational models like adhocracies, virtual

enterprises and networked organizations (Griese,

1998). In these new contexts, elements such as

organizational structures or business processes tend

to be diffused and confusing for people.

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Given the premises above, it seems necessary to

assume some proposals formulated from psychology

in order to improve the support for collaboration that

is provided through Social Computing, as well as

certain work-related constructs such as motivation,

resilience, self-efficacy or work-engagement.

2.4 Identified Human Factors

In order to illustrate some of the key human factors

that have been identified, in Table 1 we expose some

that has been obtained through the revision of the

scientific literature that has been generated from the

three selected areas (Parameswaran, 2007), (Dieng,

1999), (Grudin, 1985), (Hoc, 2001).

Table 1: Human factors.

Factors Description

Disparity

between work

and benefit

Everyone in a working team must

benefit from the use of

technologies, since a critical mass

of users is essential for the success

of any collaborative system.

Motivation for

Participation

Anonymity seems to be the general

rule for participation in online

communities, so an absence of

incentives can have a critical impact

on the level of non-anonymous

participation.

Cooperation

and Altruism

Cooperation processes often require

altruistic behaviours by part of

participants, although the real

motivation for altruistic behaviours

has not been clearly identified yet

Organizational

Culture

Symbols, language and practices

constitute part of what is known as

Organizational Culture, and that

must be provided through

computational mechanism when

tangible workplaces do not exist.

Organizational

Identification

People tend to identify with the

company or team they belong to. In

geographically dispersed teams, the

lack of traditional human

relationships must be replaced by

tools such as social networks.

Occupational

Stress

Poor or hindered communication,

diffuse definition of organizational

roles and lack of feedback on one-

self performance can produce a

negative impact on Occupational

Stress.

Role Ambiguity Role Ambiguity is the uncertainty

about what actions must be taken in

order to fulfil the assigned role.

There is a wide range of software tools that can

result highly useful in order to apply solutions for

factor listed in Table1. In fact, some of them are

under study now through the analysis of several

Internet applications like wikis, social networks or

MMORPG games.

In resume, the multidisciplinary nature of

collaborative work requires a deeper study of how

collaborative software tools can support human

factors that influence on collaborative processes that

are performed in computer-mediated environments.

3 COLLABORATIVE TOOLS

In this section we provide a general review of the

most common types of tools that are currently being

used by organizations worldwide in order to increase

their internal levels of collaborative activity.

Nevertheless, these tools present some lacks relating

collaboration that must be also remarked

(Orlikowski, 2001). In this sense, the review is

focused in three domains taking into consideration

the three main components of collaborative

processes, known as the 3Cs of Collaboration:

Communication, Coordination and Cooperation

(Ellis, 1991). So, Communication Issues are

reviewed in section 3.1, Coordination Issues are

reviewed in section 3.2, and finally Cooperation

Issues are reviewed in section 3.3.

3.1 Communication Issues

Nowadays organizations can select among a large

amount of tools intended to facilitate communication

between its members. However, it is remarkable that

communication technologies must facilitate smooth

and natural communication activities, avoiding the

coexistence of an inadequate number of different

communication channels. An excess number of

communication mechanisms can lead to a harmful

consumption of people attentional resources, since

users are required to manage every different channel

independently. Although it is nearly impossible to

replace certain communication tools, such as

telephone, some synchronous communication

technologies can lead to an increasing amount of

interruptions while work is being performed. These

interruptions can consequently produce a negative

impact on the performance exhibited when teams are

involved in complex processes, and lead to an

increase in the factor of Occupational Stress that

was listed in Table 1 (Speier, 1999).

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3.2 Coordination Issues

Coordination tools are usually oriented to the

management of individuals and teams that are

working in a cooperative way in order to fulfil

organizational goals (Dietrich, 2013). These tools

are very popular since they allow flexible

management, and fits typical hierarchical structures

of traditional organizations. However, additional

efforts are usually required, especially when team

members are geographically dispersed (Nouri,

2013). On the other hand, many of these tools do not

allow certain activities and constraints to be

specified with enough detail, and required resources

for the accomplishment of organizational goals

cannot be attached to those specifications.

A further problem arises when considering the

negative impact on the Role Ambiguity factor that

was listed in Table 1, and that can appear if required

tasks are not properly specified, or people consider

that assigned tasks do not match their skills or

responsibilities.

Additionally, most of these tools do not provide

adequate support to the types of awareness explained

in section 2.1. This can be considered a significant

lack in order to achieve the full acceptance of a

system by part of end users.

3.3 Cooperation Issues

Nowadays, cooperation and collaboration tools are

being applied in many different domains. The

evolution of communication technologies and the

rise of technologies such as Web 2.0 and Cloud

Computing has established relatively new ways for

work activities.

Common practices carried out by today

organizations, in order to raise its internal levels of

collaboration, are usually based in the acquisition of

several different commercial software tools. This

option can result quick and easy, but it also carries

some risks associated with the poor management of

human factors related to the nature of computer-

mediated collaboration. In this sense, the adoption of

different specific purpose tools can lead to an

increase of the cognitive load required to perform

the work, since a large amount of psychological

resources have to be assigned to the management of

different heterogeneous interfaces or functional

constraints (Arnetz, 1997). This increase in the

cognitive needs can in turn conduce to an increase in

Occupational Stress levels, diffuse the components

of the Organizational Culture, reduce the levels of

Organizational Identification, and finally ruin the

evolution of the EISs (Shum, 1997).

Table 2: Collaborative tools.

Tool Types Examples

Communication

Phone / VoIP Skype, Asteris

Email Outloo

, Gmail

Chats GTalk, Sametime, Pidgin

Instant Messaging WhatsApp, Line, Telegra

Videoconference Netmeeting, Hangouts

eMeetings UberConference, Lotus

Notes, Hangouts, Lync

Coordination

ERPs SAP, PeopleSoft

Projects Project, DotProject,

Collabtive, Wrike

Business

Processes

Bonita BPM, ARIS,

ADONIS

flows JIRA, BaseCamp,

RedMine, Asana, YAWL

Cooperation / Collaboration

Social Networks Facebook, Google+,

LinkedIn, Yammer, Ning

Document

Management

Documentum, Alfresco,

Google Drive, Office 365,

Workspaces LogMeIn, TeamViewer

Modeling LucidChart, ConceptBoard,

Cacoo, Diagramly

Software

Development

GitHub, Cloud9, Koding,

CodeAnywhere,

eLearning Moodle, Chamilo, EDU 2.0,

Knowledge

Management

MediaWiki, TiddlySpot,

Joomla, Drupal

4 OUR PROPOSAL

After examining three areas of main interest (CSCW,

HCI and PO) closely related to the study of

collaboration in EISs in section 2, and reviewing

most common tools adopted by organizations from

the perspective of Communication, Coordination

and Cooperation in section 3, it seems clear that

most of the results that have been obtained when

studying the presence and effect of human factors in

computer-mediated working scenarios, have not

been widely analysed. By contrast, due to the

proliferation of specific purpose commercial tools,

current organizations tend to acquire many tools to

partially cover singular lacks, omitting the lacks

related to the human factors mentioned above.

Our recent work (Antonaya, 2012) (Antonaya,

2013) has been focused in the development of a

framework for the modeling and development of

organizational collaborative systems taking

Organizational Structures, Business Processes and

Workflows, and Groupware Tools as basis. From the

results obtained in those works, the human factors

and types of tools reviewed in this article, and the

associated identified needs, we are currently

adapting our work to the field of CNs in order to

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include awareness and social aspects too.

In following sections we discuss the principles of

our current line of work: in section 4.1 we expose a

summary of our framework for the development of

organizational collaborative systems; in section 4.2

we study how to approach the development of CNs

in order to facilitate the handling of the human

factors that were identified in section 2, as well as to

overcome some of the difficulties related to

communication, coordination and cooperation that

were discussed in section 3; finally, in section 4.3

we present a system called HARMONIA that will

help us to validate our proposals.

4.1 Framework

Our framework pretends to harmonize the

development of organizational collaborative systems

by means of the integration of three domains:

Organizational Structures, Business Processes and

Workflows, and Groupware. The framework is also

divided in a Conceptual Framework and a

Technological Framework that ease the modeling of

static and dynamic aspects of organizations, and the

development of systems from the resultant models

by means of Model Driven and Component Based

approaches.

4.2 Handling Human Factors

The evolution of EISs in order to handle human and

social factors requires the consideration of the three

domains of our framework. From this premise, the

modeling of organizational systems in terms of

networks or graphs can help to tackle with emerging

organizational models, and to take advantage from

the lessons learned from the use of some of the tools

reviewed in section 3. Figure 1 shows the relation

between all these concepts:

Figure 1: Relation between our framework, CNs modeling

methods and identified human factors.

4.3 The HARMONIA System

The HARMONIA system is a sample application

that illustrates the modeling of structures, workflows

and collaborative tools by means of our framework.

As stated previously, the main paradigm in which

this system is based is Cloud Computing, so that all

resources and applications that may be required by

members are hosted in the cloud. This model, in turn

facilitates a better support for awareness as the status

of any element related to the system is accessible

from anywhere and at the same time by part of all

the members of the working group. Figure 2 shows a

screenshot of the HARMONIA system:

Figure 2: HARMONIA system.

The underlying idea of the HARMONIA system is

that a holistic-oriented working environment can

help to handle human and social factors in global

scenarios, as well as to overcome known harms that

come from the ambit of Communication,

Coordination and Cooperation. In this sense, it will

help us to conclude following ideas:

 Communication: a unified working environment

facilitates the arrangement and management of

communication channels available for the

members of the organization.

 Coordination: can be transformed from a

question that requires active management to

something to the activity that is carried out by

working groups.

 Cooperation: the Cloud Computing paradigm

can help to incorporate existing tools or use

external APIs in order to help organizations to

develop expand existing EISs and maintain high

levels of homogeneity, what can in turn help to

reduce cognitive demands for users as pointed in

section 2. In this sense, it seems especially

relevant the possibility of take advantage of

development paradigms such as Model Driven or

Component Based methodologies.

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5 CONCLUSIONS

To provide EISs with adequate support mechanisms

for collaboration seems to be quite important in new

global working contexts. At the same time, the field

of CNs reveals that further study on both human and

social factors is required. In fact, the appropriate

handling of these factors can critically influence in

the success of new systems. In this sense, we have

illustrated the use of our framework for the

development of organizational collaborative systems

from the perspective of CNs, and proposed it as a

possible solution for the integration of results

obtained in the areas of CSCW, HCI, and PO, in

order to promote holistic approaches for the

development of collaborative systems, what in turn

can become highly valuable for the evolution of

traditional organizational software.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This research has been partially supported by the

Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (Spain) in

the TIN2011-29542-C02-02 project.

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