Discusses fundamentals of cooperative work and how an understanding of cooperation is important when examing organisational systems

1. Cooperative work
Ian Sommerville
Cooperative Work, Socio-technical systems, EngD, 2012 Slide 1

2. Teamwork
Cooperative Work, Socio-technical systems, EngD, 2012 Slide 2

3. 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.
Cooperative Work, Socio-technical systems, EngD, 2012 Slide 3

4. 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
Cooperative Work, Socio-technical systems, EngD, 2012 Slide 4

5. 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
Cooperative Work, Socio-technical systems, EngD, 2012 Slide 5

6. 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
Cooperative Work, Socio-technical systems, EngD, 2012 Slide 6

7. 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
Cooperative Work, Socio-technical systems, EngD, 2012 Slide 7

8. 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.
Cooperative Work, Socio-technical systems, EngD, 2012 Slide 8

9. Process example – activity
perspective
Cooperative Work, Socio-technical systems, EngD, 2012 Slide 9

10. Division of labour
Cooperative Work, Socio-technical systems, EngD, 2012 Slide 10

11. 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.
Cooperative Work, Socio-technical systems, EngD, 2012 Slide 11

12. 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
Cooperative Work, Socio-technical systems, EngD, 2012 Slide 12

13. 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
Cooperative Work, Socio-technical systems, EngD, 2012 Slide 13

14. 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.
Cooperative Work, Socio-technical systems, EngD, 2012 Slide 14

15. 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
Cooperative Work, Socio-technical systems, EngD, 2012 Slide 15

16. 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.
Cooperative Work, Socio-technical systems, EngD, 2012 Slide 16

17. 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
Cooperative Work, Socio-technical systems, EngD, 2012 Slide 17

18. 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
Cooperative Work, Socio-technical systems, EngD, 2012 Slide 18

19. 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
Cooperative Work, Socio-technical systems, EngD, 2012 Slide 19

20. 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
Cooperative Work, Socio-technical systems, EngD, 2012 Slide 20

21. Control rooms 1
Cooperative Work, Socio-technical systems, EngD, 2012 Slide 21

22. Control rooms 2
Cooperative Work, Socio-technical systems, EngD, 2012 Slide 22

23. 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
Cooperative Work, Socio-technical systems, EngD, 2012 Slide 23

24. Flight strips
Cooperative Work, Socio-technical systems, EngD, 2012 Slide 24

25. 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
Cooperative Work, Socio-technical systems, EngD, 2012 Slide 25

26. Cooperative Work, Socio-technical systems, EngD, 2012 Slide 26

27. 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
Cooperative Work, Socio-technical systems, EngD, 2012 Slide 27

28. Examples
Cooperative Work, Socio-technical systems, EngD, 2012 Slide 28

29. 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?
Cooperative Work, Socio-technical systems, EngD, 2012 Slide 29

30. 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 30
Cooperative Work, Socio-technical systems, EngD, 2012 Slide

31. 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
Cooperative Work, Socio-technical systems, EngD, 2012 Slide 31

32. 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
Cooperative Work, Socio-technical systems, EngD, 2012 Slide 32

33. Groupware
Cooperative Work, Socio-technical systems, EngD, 2012 Slide 33

34. 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
Cooperative Work, Socio-technical systems, EngD, 2012 Slide 34