Abstract
This course describes the origin and composition of
groupware and workflow management, and discusses
significant behavioral and social (as contrasted with
technical) challenges to successful development. Recent
research prototypes and commercial products are covered,
focusing on advances in supporting communication,
cooperation, and coordination (primarily through workflow
management). Finally, we describe several approaches to
addressing the behavioral and social obstacles. Video
illustrations of systems and issues are used throughout the
tutorial.
Keywords
Groupware, workflow, computer-supported cooperative
work, computer-mediated communication, collaborative
work, electronic mail, computer-supported meetings,
desktop conferencing, video conferencing, coordination,
organizational design
GROUPWARE & WORKFLOW: HISTORY & FOCUS
Groupware is a broad designation covering a range of
technologies that support tasks that people carry out in
groups that vary in size and composition. A major
groupware focus has been computer-mediated
communication. Workflow technology to support
explicitly defined work processes is another focus that has
drawn considerable attention in the past couple years.
Different groupware technologies originated in differing
contexts. The issues and priorities of the researchers and
developers differed. To make sense of the overall picture,
this tutorial surveys the historical, demographic, and
geographical influences on the field, looking in particular at
the different needs for team, project, and organization-level
support. The European focus has been more theoretical an
directed at organizational support; a higher proportion of
U.S. and Japanese contributions are empirical and
concerned with small-group support. One challenge is to
apply lessons and technologies from one domain to others
[3].
CHALLENGES IN DESIGN AND EVALUATION
Our observation and experience is that successfully
overcoming technical hurdles is far from a guarantee of
success [2]. In this tutorial we focus on the behavioral and
social phenomena operating in user and developer
organizations that frequently undermine technically
impressive projects. These challenges are unfamiliar to
application developers experienced with single-user
applications and are encountered under conditions
unfamiliar to those experienced with large systems.
The challenges [4] are: disparities in who does work to
make an application succeed and who benefits from it;
challenges in obtaining a critical mass of users; social,
political, and motivational currents that software must
navigate; providing the flexibility required by often
surprisingly variable work routines; the challenge of
designing infrequently used features to be unobtrusive but
accessible when needed; the difficulty of learning from
experience, of evaluating groupware; our lack of intuition
for the needs of groups and their diverse members; and the
need to make acceptance management part of the design
and development job.
SURVEY OF GROUPWARE TECHNOLOGY
This section surveys three categories of groupware:
communication, cooperation, and coordination. Videos and
demos illustrate how products and prototypes from these
categories support cooperative work. The unique design
challenges for each category are illustrated.
Communication Support
Five trends are visible in the evolution of communication
groupware. (1) Capabilities for communication are
improving within a given medium. (2) Multiple media are
being integrated within single communication systems. (3)
The interfaces to communication tools are strongly
influenced by metaphors, and these metaphors are often the
basis of social control. (4) Structure is added to
communication media to support performing tasks.
(5) Standards are emerging and solidifying to support both
platform and application interoperability.
Electronic mail, desktop conferencing, and video
conferencing are changing both personal and business
communications. Businesses use email to accelerate the
flow of information and reduce coordination costs [7].
Video conferencing is used for group communication
within geographically distributed companies and between
corporate partners. Desktop conferencing focuses
communication on work products. Each type of
communication groupware offers unique advantages, and
new technologies can achieve all the advantages by
integrating email and conferencing features.
Cooperation Support
Groupware supports cooperation by enabling interaction
through a shared document or collection of documents. For
example, document management systems help teams
collaborate by providing access and version control,
document search, and status tracking. Application
development environments such as Oval and Lotus Notes
customize the structure and functionality of the system to
the task. These environments integrate both communication
and workflow features on a core of cooperation support [5].
Meeting support products and prototypes enable all
participants to collaborate in the production of a shared
document or documents. The strength of these systems is
generation of alternatives [6]. In a brainstorming session all
users can enter as many ideas as they want anonymously. A
recent study of the benefits of a meeting system found that
it saved 91% of the work flow time over 64 meetings.
Workflow: Support for Coordination
Businesses are attempting to increase quality and reduce
cost by modeling and improving their internal processes.
Coordination groupware can capture and coordinate these
processes. Work flow management systems model the
sequence of subtasks in a work process and the roles
performed by each individual. When each subtask is
completed, the work is automatically routed to the person
responsible for the next subtask.
Coordination groupware can also support group work that
does not conform to a formal process. Ad hoc coordination
is supported by groupware that accommodates the informal
rules of communication that occur in the workplace. The
theoretical foundation for these technologies is Speech Act
Theory [1].
APPROACHES TO DESIGN AND EVALUATION
Several approaches are used or being developed to address
behavioral and social challenges to groupware
development. First, certain principles for designing
interactive systems in general apply to groupware: focus
early and continually on
the eventual users, design iteratively, and consider all
aspects of usability together. But these are never easy to
apply and even harder with groupware. Also, market
research and consultants are likely to be of limited help for
these new technologies.
"Scandinavian approaches" to the design of systems
through collaboration of designers and users have received
considerable attention. People are working to adapt these
techniques in new settings. Traditional social science and
management studies can be scaled down from
organizational to group settings. Anthropological studies of
workplaces have also drawn increasing attention.
We conclude with two experimental approaches:
Contextual research, pioneered at Digital, focuses on an
interview that takes place during ongoing work practice,
permitting some disruptiveness in the quest for a greater
degree of shared understanding. And several researchers
are studying the use and evolution of specific objects to
obtain a specific understanding of what in their design leads
to success or failure, a search for understanding good
design in place of a search for design principles.
References
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3. Grudin, J. CSCW: History and focus. IEEE Computer ,
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4. Grudin, J. Groupware and social dynamics: Eight
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5. Malone, T.W. and Lai, K-Y. Toward intelligent tools for
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