SUPPORTING UNSTRUCTURED WORK ACTIVITIES IN

EMERGENT WORK PROCESSES

Cláudio Sapateiro

Superior School of Technology, Polytechnic Insitute of Setúbal, Estefanilha, Setúbal, Potugal

Pedro Antunes

Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon, Bloco C6 - Piso 3 - Sala 6.3.19

Campo Grande, 1749-016 Lisboa, Portugal

Keywords: Emergent Work Processes, Collaboration, Situation Awareness, Social Networks.

Abstract: When existing information systems and organizational procedures lacks to support work needs, people

engage in informal networks of relations and make use of their tacit knowledge promoting this way the

emergence of unstructured work activities. To improve the consistency and effectiveness of such practices

we propose a model and a prototype to assist collaboration needs in such scenarios. Our contribution

defends the need of the construction of a shared awareness to improve situation understanding and

collaboration. Supported on the Reason’s Swiss Cheese model for accidents we propose the use of a

collaborative constructed artifact: Situation Matrixes (SM), to relate the different situation dimensions. The

information needs in the existing contexts of action where the situation unfolds, will be supplied by different

views over the (sub)set of matrixes.

1 INTRODUCTION

The existing work processes in organizations are

supported in a continuum of structured and

unstructured activities (Sheth, Georgakopoulos et al.

1996). Unstructured activities usually emerge from a

lack of support of existing Information Systems (IS)

and/or organizational procedures to deal with

unplanned situations.

The most common approaches to IS development

focus on identifying the structure of work processes

to produce a system specification. However, many

unknown a priori variables, both external (e.g.,

market dynamics, natural disasters) and internal

(e.g., latent processes or work structures) are among

the factors that may promote the emergence of

unstructured work activities. Within these

unstructured activities we include exception

handling, business process reconfiguration and crisis

management.

To get the work done when facing such unstructured

scenarios, people usually engage in informal

relationships and make use of their tacit knowledge

in an opportunistic manner, which quite often

reveals as a source of innovation, creativity and

flexibility.

We find in the research literature several projects

addressing business process reconfiguration and

exception handling e.g. (Kammer, Bolcer et al.

2000). The research reported in our work goes

beyond the specific context of exception handling

towards the much more complex scenario of

emergent work processes supported in unstructured

activities. We characterize such scenarios in the

following way (Markus, Majchrzak et al. 2002): No

best structure or sequence, Typically distributed,

Dynamically evolving, Actor roles unpredictable

and Unpredictable contexts.

When organizations deal with crisis management

even contingency plans may be challenged by

particular situations.

The concept of resilience, which may be

characterized as a comprehensive endeavor towards

increased organizational resistance and flexibility

dealing within exceptional situations, has recently

emerged (Hollnagel and Woods 2006). This concept

encompasses that technology and in particular

information systems should be analyzed and

359

Sapateiro C. and Antunes P. (2008).

SUPPORTING UNSTRUCTURED WORK ACTIVITIES IN EMERGENT WORK PROCESSES.

In Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - HCI, pages 359-362

DOI: 10.5220/0001693403590362

 SciTePress

designed to incorporate resilience concepts and

contribute to organizational agility. Considering our

concrete research objectives, we aim to increase

organizational resilience by focusing on the

technology support: developing a model and tool

supporting collaborative unstructured activities in

emergent situations.

In the next section we review this problem in more

detail. Section 3 will present some related work. In

Section 4 we describe in detail the proposed

collaboration model. In section 5 we make some

practical considerations about the collaborative tool

and its implementation. Finally, we discuss the work

done so far and present directions for future research

and development.

2 PROBLEM STATEMENT

Many effective collaborative structures used in such

emergent situations are not present in the

organizations charts. People very heavily rely on

their own networks of relationships to find

information and make decisions. Regarding

technology support, nowadays we still cannot

provide flexible/agile software tools that may be

reconfigured or redesigned at run-time to

accommodate unexpected and unpredicted

requirements emerging in dynamic real life

situations. Many unpredicted situations are solved

with a mix of activities inside and outside formal

organizational rules, procedures, tools and systems.

We defend that a shared understanding of the

situation is fundamental to bring some coherence

and efficiency concerns to unstructured activities.

We note however there are a number of cognitive

factors affecting SA, such as perception, attention,

workload or training that are difficult to tackle with

technology (Endsley 1988).

An additional difficulty to SA technology

support is to devise information sharing,

coordination and collaboration mechanisms avoiding

work overhead, seamlessly integrating with current

work practices and minimizing the gap between the

perceived and the real situations.

3 RELATED WORK

From an analysis of the proceedings of the

International Community on Information Systems

for Crisis Response and Management conferences

(ISCRAM) between 2004 and 2006, some recurrent

concerns may be identified: Shared awareness of

crisis situations, information and knowledge

management, information representation, usability

and interface design concerns. Studies like (Milis

and Walle 2007) and (Kanno and Futura 2006) also

emphasises communication, information

management and SA as major endeavours.

We had considered to our proposal the

contributions from several research areas,

highlighting: contexts representation (Bouquet,

Ghidini et al. 2002; Brezillon 2008), social networks

(cross, Borgatti et al. 2000; Liben-Nowell and

Kleinberg 2003), situation awareness e.g. (Gutwin

and Greenberg 2002), exception handling (Kammer,

Bolcer et al. 2000), technology adoption (Bansler

and Havn 2003; Bygstad 2005), and visual

representation (Erickson 2001; Thomas and Cook

2004).

Some remarks about the above studies

contribution for our proposal, follows:

Regarding contexts works we are adopting the

definition of contexts which states that: contexts are

a relational property and is managed moment by

moment (Dourish 2004).

In what concerns with social network analysis,

existing works typically do not address real-time

enactment, which is mandatory in our context.

As mentioned earlier is this paper, the problem

addressed by our research goes beyond dealing with

business process exceptions, towards support to

emergent work processes heavily relying on

unstructured activities.

In respect to awareness research, the vast

majority of works had focused in specific

context/domain proposals (a product perspective),

while we emphasize a process perspective,

considering the information acquisition behaviour

and the resources available for processing that

information into decisions and actions.

As may be read in cognition studies, information

visualization improve information sense making and

may constitute a driver for technology adoption. For

both mentioned goals we also emphasize the need of

information visualization in our proposed model.

Considering that in crises contexts both rule-based

(contingency plans) and knowledge-based behaviors

will coexist, we focus our research focus in the

knowledge-based behavior. In this domain one

abandon models guidance and adopt map guidance

for situated action (Suchman 1987; Gasson 1999)

when facing situations that the existing models and

procedures doesn’t cope with a particular emerged

context.

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360

4 ADOPTED APPROACH

We propose the use of a shared artifact to organize

actions and relations, for both internalize and

externalize information and knowledge (Nonaka and

Takeuchi 1995) in order to develop SA. The

proposed model supports the collaborative

construction of SA by sharing individual

assessments, facilitating collective sensemaking

activities and providing situated framing (Gasson

1999).

Our proposal was inspired by the Swiss Cheese

model for accidents (Reason 1997) which posits that

for an accident to occur, an alignment of holes

(weaknesses, latent problems,...) in different

organizational dimensions must occur. We defend

that in order to construct SA, essential to mitigate a

crisis, the involved actors should be able to manage

different situational dimensions (e.g. involved

actors, actions, resources, goals, etc.). Regarding the

representation issues of SA, we adopt a perspective

proposed (Miles and Huberman 1994), using several

types of matrixes to represent qualitative

information. We therefore defend the use of

Situation Matrixes (SM) to correlate the situation

dimensions (e.g., goals/actions, actions/actors, …

see Figure 1). The dimensions of the circles that

mark the correlation are directly related with how

strongly (qualitative assessment) is perceived that

correlation. Of course for a useful sense making of

the gathered information (semantics), we are

assuming that people operating under such

circumstances are professionals in their work and

trained with the proposed methodology.

As situations evolve, more information may be

brought into the SA (e.g., more actors involved,

more actions proposed, ...) and organized in existing

and/or new dimensions.

Figure 1: Situation Matrixes.

5 IMPLEMENTATION

We focus our actual concerns in the SA

(re)presentation and usability issues. One key aspect

to consider is related to the user interface: users

should easily obtain an overview of the situation in

which they are involved, and should efficiently

manage the relevant awareness information. The

developed prototype may be accessed from a

desktop computer as well as from a Personal Digital

Assistant (PDA). The PDA will allow supporting a

more operational level, which entails how awareness

information is maintained in the field of action. For

a more tactical level SM can be managed in a

desktop computer. The developed prototype is

presented in Figure 2.

Figure 2: Developed prototype.

Keeping information up to date in such unstructured

activities without adding overhead work presents

some difficulties. For instance, status reports are

hard to track due to their dependence of explicit user

declarations. To address this problem, we adopted a

pulling strategy. As SA information becomes old,

users are prompted to report their validity, combined

with a visualization schema to express the

degradation of the quality of the information

presented in the system.

6 DISCUSSION AND FUTURE

WORK

The contribution presented in this work mainly

defends that a collaborative SA model is essential to

develop a shared understanding of an unplanned

scenario. Similar collaborative approaches exist and

are already used in some domains. For instance,

flight operations and firefighters adopted a Crew

Resource Management (CRM) training, which

concerns not so much the technical knowledge and

skills but rather the interpersonal skills used for

SUPPORTING UNSTRUCTURED WORK ACTIVITIES IN EMERGENT WORK PROCESSES

361

gaining and maintaining situational awareness,

solving problems and taking decisions.

The next step in our work will focus on the

collaborative management of SM.

Once we refine our prototype an evaluation should

be made. In order to validate the proposed model we

must evaluate its impact against organizational

elements: the nature of work; individuals;

organizational communication; relationships;

organizational structure and processes (Vyhmeister,

Mondelo et al. 2006).

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This work was partially supported by the Portuguese

Foundation for Science and Technology, Project

POSI/EIA/57038/2004.

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