bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Communication oriented organizational modeling
Authors: van der Rijst Nardo B. J.
Published: May 2014

Modeling of organizations currently has a strong focus on the business process. In contrast to e.g. data modeling, process modeling tries to provide a clear understanding of the whole business process without giving attention to the current organizational structure. Not only because of efforts in the area of total quality management, continuous improvement and business process engineering, it is possible to observe this shift. More important are developments in the direction of new organizational forms (i.e. networked organizations) and hence the coordination of activities.In this paper the DEMO modeling approach is presented. The approach entails a framework with several models incorporated in a methodology. Primary aim of the method is to provide insight in the business process, combining the notions of action, information and communication.The DEMO approach is founded in the Language Action Perspective (Winograd and Flores, 1986). This view on organizations strongly opposes the mechanical way in which many information system analysis and development methods approach organizations. Important insights from the original impetus by Flores and Ludlow (1980) stimulated many research groups around the world to incorporate the Speech Act theory (Searle, 1969) in their methods and tools.The methodology DEMO (Dynamic Essential Modeling nf Organizations) has been described and reported upon several times (Dietz, 1992; 1994a; 1994b). Its practical value has been demonstrated for a few small scale application domains like in (van der Rijst and Dietz, 1993; van Reijswoud and van der Rijst, 1995), and recently in a large scale project (Jansen and Poot, 1996) as well.The major motivation behind the development of DEMO was the strongly felt need for information systems analysts to have a theory about organizations (and, by way of analogy, about discrete dynamic systems in general) that is only and purely based on the role of information, taken in a very general sense. Having such a theory at one's disposal would make it possible to understand organizations in a new and original way.The theory would be independent of other theories, in particular the economic theories about organizations, like the Value Chain Theory (Porter, 1985), or the Transaction Cost Theory (1985). It would have its own value and just be complementary to those other theories. Because of this property, DEMO is most valuable for providing an original informatical contribution to Business Process Redesign and Reengineering, next to and in harmony with contributions from other disciplines, e.g. the economically founded discipline of business administration. The core concepts are discussed in the next sections.
Business process re-engineering
Authors: Blyth Andrew
Published: May 2014

Welcome to what will be I hope the first of many columns on Business Process Re-Engineering. The role of the advisor is to stimulate discussion, provoke debate, inform people, and provide a medium through which people can communicate with one another. What I am planning to do in the coming issues is to offer people the opportunity to comment on what I and others have written. So, if you have a comment or opinion that you would like to share with others, or if you have a review or critique of a book or someone else's work that you would like to share with everyone then please send it to me.
CSCW '96 workshop: widening the net
Authors: Whittaker Steve , Isaacs Ellen , O'Day Vicki , Adler Annette , Bobrow Daniel , Bollmeyer Joern , Damer Bruce , Dorish Paul , Erickson Thomas , Jones Mark , Larson Jim , Li Jin , Lutters Wayne , Paniaras Ioannis , Rein Gail , Sanderson Duncan , Sokolov Jeff , Tollmar Konrad , Wolf Catherine
Published: May 2014

This introduction is a summary of the workshop from the perspective of one of the workshop participants. It is followed by a report written by the workshop organizers, giving their perspective, and then the position papers.
Different strokes for different folks
Authors: Dourish Paul
Published: May 2014

Community: a group of people sharing not only a common interest in an issue or set of issues, but also some expectation of common perspective. Physical communities share not only interests (in the area they occupy), but also some predictably common perspective (the good of the land); research communities, similarly, are not so much aligned by issues (human-computer interaction) as by perspectives (it's a good thing). So, the pro-life and pro-choice camps of the Republican party clearly share an interest in abortion issues, but could hardly be described as "the Republican abortion community".
The VOODOO experience
Authors: Li Jin
Published: May 2014

This short paper addresses what we have learned from Virtual Open Office Dynamic Open Office (VOODOO), an existing CSCW system that was built by the author and associates as part of his Master thesis in 1992. Our system identifies one specific set of issues for the on-line community. We have developed a set of design requirements for this class of system and have found how different media affect the way people interact.
Using enterprise modelling to reengineer healthcare processess
Authors: Dhaliwal J. S. , Ramlochan R. , Heng K. J. , Khoon C. M. , Wong H. S.
Published: May 2014

This paper presents an overview of the application of enterprise modeling (EM) for the purposes of reengineering health-care processes. It provides an introduction to enterprise modeling focusing on how it can be integrated within business process reengineering (BPR) to provide a systematic approach to tackling process improvement and automational initiatives in the health care sector. The special problems faced by health care organizations are discussed together with the manner in which they affect attempts at reengineering. Three EM projects that have been undertaken within the health care sector in Singapore are presented to demonstrate both the use of EM within BPR as well as its value in improving health care service.
A reference model for manufacturing enterprise system by using object modelling technology (OMT) method
Authors: Umeda Shigeki
Published: May 2014

Business process models are often useful to both information system and management in manufacturing enterprises. Many models are proposed to describe activities in manufacturing operations. Some of them describe manufacturing activity models in CIM system architecture[1-5]. These models combine business process models with information system infrastructure, and represents business activities in hierarchical function-oriented modeling approaches.Recently, the benefits of object-oriented (OO) modeling technologies are often discussed to information/operations management. Many OO models are proposed for manufacturing enterprise information systems. Majority of them are product models for concurrent engineering focused on CAD/CAM system [6,7], or operations models of real time shop-floor control and scheduling systems [8-10]. There are also modeling researches focused on Production Planning and Control (PPC) applications considering resource management in factory. These works propose OO manufacturing enterprise models [11], or BOM data model[12]. These are challenging works, but they do not include various factory management operations such as planning, ordering, logistics, administrations, maintenance, customer service, and others. Implementation of manufacturing enterprise information models requires modeling of the business operations in factory management. SEMATECH model is a good example such as the above approach, but, its business domain is focus on semiconductor manufacturing system[13]A modeling strategy is required to implement a general factory business process model. This paper describes a generic modeling strategy and a methodology through an implementation of a novel OO business process model.
A dynamic data production model for the Alaska SAR facility
Authors: Nance Kara L. , Zhang Yi
Published: May 2014

"Business process design is usually done informally, and individual design decisions are hard to relate to business objectives. [Yu96]" This statement succinctly describes a problem which plagues many businesses today. When a system is designed in a piecemeal fashion from semi-autonomous entities producing heterogeneous components which then are combined into one homogeneous system, an enterprise model is not a luxury. It is a necessity. The recent increase in support for formalized software engineering plans have contributed to a number of businesses backtracking and attempting to produce enterprise models which will enable them to investigate how subsystems operate, analyze why they operate in that manner, identify system bottlenecks, and provide a foundation for future development. Alaska SAR Facility (ASF) is one such entity. A Dynamic Data Production Model (DDPM) is being constructed as an enterprise model in an attempt to better understand the current system and provide a foundation for the creation of a Dynamic Data Load Module (DDLM).
A virtual test environment for business processess
Authors: Franken Henry M.
Published: May 2014

The current paper describes a major research project on knowledge, methods and (software) tools to test and redesign business processes in a systematic fashion. The project uses the following approach: create a model for an alternative, newly set-up business process containing a high reality level. Analysis and testing of this model is done 'off-line', separately from the actual business management. The project develops knowledge, methods and (software) tools for the modelling of such a test process, the analysis and manipulation of this model and the preparation of its introduction. Whilst the business process to be replaced continues undisturbed, a new business process is being designed in the test environment. The business processes of interest are so-called data-intensive and can be found in service-organisations such as banks, pension and insurance companies, and government institutions. In the project major service-organisations participate. The project has been set up by the Telematics Research Centere (TRC) in Enschede, the Netherlands, in co-operation with ABP (a large Dutch pension company), ING Group, the Dutch tax department and IBM, and is also subsidised by the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs.
The seven major aspects of enterprise modelling and integration
Authors: Lim Soon Huat , Juster Neal , de Pennington Alan
Published: May 2014

Enterprise Engineering (EE), Enterprise Integration (EI), Enterprise Modelling (EM) and Enterprise Integration Modelling (EIM), which have been given the collective term "Enterprise Modelling and Integration" (EMI) in this paper, are all concerned with, in one way or another, the definition, analysis, redesign and integration of business processes, process data & knowledge, software applications and information systems within an enterprise in order for it to achieve marked advancements in terms of overall organization performance. However, understanding the complexities involved and relationships between the theories outlined above is a taxing task. The objective of this paper is to provide a concise description on the assortment of topics associated with EMI. This is brought about by assembling and classifying EMI literature under seven major aspects: namely Drivers, Goals, Issues, Scale, Types, Domains and Modelling.
Workshop report of OOGP'97, the first international workshop on object oriented groupware platforms
Authors: von Lukas Uwe , van der Lugt Hermen J. , ter Hofte G. Henri
Published: May 2014

The first international workshop on Object Oriented Groupware Platforms (OOGP'97) was held September 7, 1997, as a full day workshop at the ECSCW'97 conference in Lancaster, UK. During this day, 25 participants from Europe, the US and Australia - which were invited to the workshop based on position papers -- gathered to discuss the question: "
What should an Object Oriented Groupware Platform look like and how do we get there from current state of the art?
". The full workshop proceedings [1], a list of participants and an index of research groups involved in research into object oriented groupware platforms are available on the workshop websitehttp:/Iwww.trc.nl/eventslecscw97oogp/ welcome.htm.
Reengineering for learning
Authors: Kouwenhoven Timo
Published: May 2014

Knowledge is of paramount importance in order to keep organizations on the right track. In times of fast changes, where knowledge is becoming an ever more crucial production factor, organizations need a systematic way in order to deal with knowledge: knowledge management therefore is of great importance. How do you manage knowledge? By implementing a knowledge infrastructure which tits to organizational goals and culture. In this article will be dealt with the design of a knowledge infrastructure, using the approach developed by the Knowledge Management Consulting Group of Kenniscentrum CIBIT, for an organization which aims at developing products 1 against the best price possible.
Center for innovation and knowledge management
Authors: Becerra-Fernandez Irma
Published: May 2014

This paper describes the activities of the Center for Innovation and Knowledge Management (CIKM) at Florida International University (FIU). The charter of the center is to research and evaluate the practices, processes and technologies that are being used in the practice of Knowledge Management. The need to acquire Intellectual Capital created the Knowledge Management (KM) movement, which aims to develop new practices and tools that capture organizational knowledge. The capabilities and strengths of the Center for Innovation and Knowledge Management are leveraged through close links to the government and to commercial sectors. Organizations such as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA),Cambridge Technology Partners (Cambridge), WorldAccess Communications, and Milagro Systems fund the activities of this innovative center. Graduate and undergraduate engineering students who work in a variety of Knowledge Management Projects staff the Center. Some of the projects carried at this center include harvesting intellectual capital for NASA and production testing of state-of-the-art Knowledge Management tools. Students are also experimenting with web-based tools that will allow to utilize and to deploy the expertise of virtual teams around the world. Finally, some students are working towards the creation of Knowledge Repositories to help organizations that want to harness their Intellectual Capital.
EULE2
Authors: Reimer Ulrich , Margelisch Andreas , Novotny Bernd , Vetterli Thomas
Published: May 2014

At Swiss Life, as in many other companies, office workers for customer support are no longer specialists dealing with certain kinds of office tasks only, but are becoming generalists who must deal with all kinds of tasks. There are many laws and company regulations which take influence on how a certain task is to be performed properly. As a consequence, the work of this new generation of office workers is quite demanding and urgently calls for a better support. For this purpose, the Information Systems Research Group of Swiss Life has developed a knowledge-based system, called EULE2, that aims at providing a user with a maximal guidance in performing office tasks he may not be familiar with. A research prototype is completed and we are now in the phase of developing the first official version which is intended to become deployed.In the following, Section 2 characterizes EULE2 as a user sees the system. Subsequently, the architecture of EULE2 is outlined (Section 3). EULE2 and issues of knowledge management it is related with are addressed in Section 4. Section 5 concludes the paper and gives an outlook on future work.
System aspects of sharing a virtual reality
Authors: Capps Michael , Pekkola Samuli , Greenhalgh Chris
Published: May 2014

We have recently held the second annual "System Aspects of Sharing a Virtual Reality" workshop, in conjunction with CVE '98 (see report in this issue). The single-day format allowed for twelve presentations plus discussion, which are summarized below. The topics addressed were: designing systems to cope with network limitations; managing communication and information; the construction of systems and toolkits; issues of presentation and user interaction; and application development and evaluation.
Research directions and emerging issues in business process re-engineering
Authors: Blyth Andrew
Published: May 2014

In the 1990 Business Process Re-Engineering (BPR) was seen as the wonder drug for organizations, with more and more organizations rushing to undertake BPR projects. Some of these projects have successful, however most have failed. The results of these BPR project have forced practitioners of Business Process Re-Engineering to recognize the need for structured and focused research to inform and direct there activities. The question for researchers is: "Into what areas is best and most productive to undertake research ?" In an attempt to answer this question in this papers I will outline some areas of research that are producing positive results. These research directions are:• The motivations and conditions for successful Business Process Re-Engineering.• Knowledge Management and Learning Processes.• Business Systems Modeling and Analysis.• Complex Adaptive and Evolving Systems.• Change and Innovation Management.
Designing virtual communities for work
Authors: Toomey Lori , Mark Gloria , Tang John C. , Adams Lia
Published: May 2014

While the popularity of networked virtual communities has been growing, their us has been mainly to engage in online socializing. Given the necessity of communication and collaboration among distributed workers, it seems natural to consider how these spaces might be used to support work and the surrounding social interactions. This collection of papers summarizes a workshop that was held at CSCW '98 that focused on understanding how organizations are currently using virtual communities, and how they could be enhanced to better support the needs of collaborative workers. By "virtual communities" we think primarily of MUDs, and other collaboration software involving some text, graphics, and/or other media. The workshop explored how to take advantage of the inherently engaging attributes of virtual communities to accomplish work, preserve organizational memory, promote corporate culture, and encourage professional networking. We identified issues that were common to the various groups exploring work-based virtual communities and shared the design approaches currently being tried out.
The forum
Authors: McGrath Andrew
Published: May 2014

Working collaboratively over networks is ultimately about communication, if the interface between people communicating is not transparent enough then the event is affected and 'navigation' starts to replace the communication. The Forum is a two-part communication environment designed to transparently foster communication between colleagues who cannot be together but who work together. Combining virtual environments and agent technology and using implied navigation we have created a prototype environment that we will be using with customers in the near future.
Business value of 3d virtual environments
Authors: Fuchs Ludwin , Poltrock Steven , Wojcik Richard
Published: May 2014

As a large geographically distributed company, Boeing needs integrated technologies that support, even encourage, working together across distances. As a foundation for working together, employees need to become acquainted with one another, form communities around shared interests, develop relationships, build trust, and communicate. Social networks are important within Boeing; people use these networks to find and fill openings in projects and programs. Project teams will more readily span geographic distances when social networks span distances.At Boeing Applied Research & Technology (AR&T) we have been investigating 3D virtual environments as support for geographically distributed teams, including support for social interactions. In this paper we outline potential business applications within large companies such as Boeing, and we describe our experiences with
Boeing World,
a corporate 3D environment based on the Active Worlds systems from Circle of Fire, Inc. (see http://www.activeworlds.com).
Identity in virtual communities
Authors: Kivimäki Anri , Kauppinen Kaisa , Robinson Mike
Published: May 2014

The usability of Collaborative Virtual Environments is a function of technical affordances with the implicit and explicit intentions of users. Intentions can be revealed by 'cyborg ethnography' -- a close examination of interactions and conversations conducted in CVE's. Three CVE's were examined ethnographically and it is found that social conventions develop around the theme of producing identity. However, there is doubt that such conventions constitute evidence of a 'virtual' social system.
Network communities
Authors: Tang John C. , Yankelovich Nicole
Published: May 2014

Network Communities is a new project starting in Sun Laboratories at Sun Microsystems, Inc. Our goal is to develop new technologies to support distributed work groups so that they can conveniently find the right expertise at the right time. Our experience in studying distributed work groups has indicated that accomplishing their work often relies on personal networking with their colleagues. For example, among the system support engineers who provide technical support to our customers, when a customer has a technical problem, the engineers sometimes need to network with their colleagues around the world to find out who has the right expertise to resolve their problem. This can be a hit or miss process, and the engineers are looking for ways of helping them be more efficient and effective in finding the right expertise at the right time.We've been intrigued with the popularity of virtual community technologies in on-line socializing, and particularly the ways they have engaged people to invest time and effort into building their community on-line. Studies of virtual communities suggest that they encourage people to engage in social networking [Wellman et al., 1996]. It's interesting to note that they achieve such engagement using relatively simple technology (typically text chat rooms), and usually without tangible rewards outside of the social status within the virtual community.We would like to apply virtual community technologies to help support the social networking that our distributed work groups need to do to accomplish their work. We plan to apply ethnographic methods to study how a particular distributed work group accomplishes their work, and use that information to guide the design of a prototype system to support their work [1]. We will then deploy that system into the work group and observe how they use it over time. Although we have not designed our system yet, we imagine the following scenario of use.
Support for end user participation using replicated versions & group communication
Authors: Canals G. , Molli P. , Godart C.
Published: May 2014

We present Tuamotu, a prototype software system for the support of engineering projects distributed over the Internet. This system offers basic services for sharing persistent data between distant activities cooperating in a design project. It is based on replicating versions at each of the participant sites with the use of an atomic multicast mechanism and includes concepts for structuring the cooperation space. The application of these concepts to end-user support in design projects is discussed.
SMART ideas as a tool for user participation in product development
Authors: Fukushima Tom , Martin David
Published: May 2014

SMART Ideas is a tool designed to support the sharing of knowledge in an organization. Because of this, as well as its simple interface, integration with the Internet, and collaborative capabilities we feel that the product has potential to be a useful tool for interacting with users during product development.
Separating the wheat from the chaff in Internet-mediated user feedback expectation-driven event monitoring
Authors: Hilbert David M. , Redmiles David F.
Published: May 2014

The Internet enables cheap, rapid, and large-scale distribution of software for evaluation purposes. It also presents hitherto unprecedented, and currently underutilized, opportunities for increasing user-developer communication in software development. For instance, the Internet can be used as a medium for collecting "direct" user feedback in the form of subjective user reports, as well as "indirect" feedback in the form of automatically-captured data about application and user behavior. Both of these practices, however, face a number of challenges that can be summarized in the following statement: there is more feedback to be collected -- ranging in quality from useful to useless -- than there is time and resources to sift through and act upon the meaningful parts. This paper describes an Internet-based approach for capturing user feedback -- both "direct" and "indirect" -- that attempts to address this problem by focusing feedback collection based on the notion of "usage expectations" in the development process.
Engineering support for business process analysis and (re)design
Authors: Franken Henry , Janssen Will , Bal René , van den Berg Harmen
Published: May 2014

In the ACM Siggroup Bulletin of April 1997 we announced the start and objectives of the Testbed project. We now report on the results achieved so far. Testbed stand for virtual test environment for business processes. Testing takes place outside the actual business operations, using understandable models built and analysed with a ready-to-use methodology and supporting tools. The main users are business consultants. In Testbed major Dutch companies from financial service sector participate, being ING Group, ABP and the Dutch Tax Department. Furthermore IBM and Telematica Instituut participate, the latter being the initiator of the project. Testbed has been validated successfully in practice by working out several pilot projects. Besides the results achieved so far, we also present our plans for the future and indicate where further literature can be found.
Factors affecting discussions in on-line forums in local governments
Authors: Ranerup Agneta
Published: May 2014

In the following, experiences will be found of on-line discussion forums that have been introduced in three local government districts in the City of Göteborg, the second largest town in Sweden (432.000 inhabitants). The main aim is to present factors that, according to the politicians and civil servants that have been involved, are likely to have influenced the size of the debate in the on-line forums. Consequently, the factors can be seen as decisive for if the debate in on-line forums shall be of a sufficient size to fulfill the ideal of deliberative democracy. As thus, the ideal of deliberative democracy values a deep discussion between politicians and citizens before the former make a decision. Therefore, the factors that will be presented should be of interest to system developers working with democracy issues. The following experiences pertain to the research area of Community Networks in a local government context [7] [9] but have a special focus on democracy issues.
Methodologies for evaluation of collaborative systems workshop
Authors: Drury Jill
Published: May 2014

This paper presents some of the issues I've encountered in evaluating collaborative systems. To place my issues in context, it begins with a brief introduction of the systems I work with and the evaluation methods I usually employ.
Towards adaptive workflow systems
Authors: Bernstein Abraham , Dellarocas Chrysanthos , Klein Mark
Published: May 2014

The workshop Towards Adaptive Workflow System was organized by the authors of this report as part of the 1998 Conference on Computer Supported Collaborative Work (CSCW-98), and was held at the Westin Seattle on Saturday, November 14, 1998. The workshop had about 30 attendees and included invited presentations, paPer presentations/discussions and a panel. This report summarizes on the Goals and topics of the workshop, presents the major activities and summarizes some of the issues discussed during the workshop.
In search of a new generation of knowledge management applications
Authors: Liongosari Edy S. , Dempski Kelly L. , Swaminathan Kishore S.
Published: May 2014

Today's typical Knowledge Management systems are not much different from document management systems. In both cases, the retrieval process involves entering a set of keywords and then browsing through a list of documents related to those keywords found by the systems. If Knowledge Management is to live up to its promises, a new generation of Knowledge Management-enabled applications has to be developed. The information has to be presented beyond just a list of documents. Applying data mining techniques to these systems is one of the few promising avenues that may yield a new set of applications. This paper describes our on-going research effort to extract and mine information from one of the largest private Knowledge Management systems in the world.
Research directions in designing intercultural interactions in collaborative virtual communities
Authors: Raybourn Elaine M. , McGrath Andrew , Munro Alan , Stubblefield William A.
Published: May 2014

As applications and environments supporting collaborative virtual communities (CVEs) become increasingly available, opportunities to work, learn, play, and share experiences trans-culturally are not only more appealing, but also more feasible. Distributed cross-cultural and cross-organizational interactions are here, now. The emergence of such synchronous, post-geographical, virtual communities raises particular issues around fostering the intercultural 'chemistry' of online interactions and online community design.Elaine Raybourn and Andrew McGrath facilitated a one-day workshop at Group 99 on online community design, highlighting the potential for intercultural communication as an over-arching design principle. The program committee included Elizabeth Churchill, Alan Munro, Wolfgang Prinz, William Stubblefield, and Eunice Young. Workshop participants represented intellectually and culturally diverse backgrounds and fields including computer science, systems engineering, ethnography, HCI, intercultural communication, design, and psychology. Private sector, public sector, and university affiliations were also represented.
Inhabiting space
Authors: Munro Alan J.
Published: May 2014

We wish to look at the ways in which we use 'places' in our everyday lives. We wish particularly to look at a certain type of place, which we think may provide some insights into the ways in which we can create places and spaces of different types in the virtual world, making them as enduring or as ephemeral as we might wish. Particularly, we will look at the ways in which different communities can overlap in a given space.
Collaborative virtual environments - what next?
Authors: Tomek Ivan
Published: May 2014

As work becomes increasingly geographically dispersed over time zones and cultures, new types of environments are needed that make collaboration in these conditions more productive and more enjoyable. In this contribution, we list some of the issues that we have tentatively identified and that we used to conclude that Collaborative Virtual Environments are ideally suited for this purpose. We then very briefly describe a working CVE framework that we have developed to address the issues that we have raised. The main point of the paper is an admission of the ad hoc nature of our work and a plea for the development of solid understanding of collaborative work in the area of software development that could be used to construct a realistically grounded collaborative environment.
Designing for and interacting with CVEs
Authors: Bullock Adrian , Fahlén Lennart
Published: May 2014

As CVE technology matures there is a natural shift away from simply providing places or spaces for people to meet towards providing a useful, task-oriented environment that supports its participants in whatever it is they are doing. Notably, CVEs are collaborative environments, so in order to provide appropriate environments we need to understand what it is that makes collaboration possible. To do this we need to consider collaboration in both real world and virtual world setting, e.g. [1], and how the two interact with each other. After all we are not going to use either of these environments (real and virtual) exclusively, rather they should complement each other and we should be able to work with people as easily in either.Presently, the boundary between physical environments and digital space can be over complex and poorly designed. We often take a narrow perspective, seeing interaction as information processing, and interaction technology as simply a desktop computer. We need to broaden our view to consider the whole gamut of human activities, understanding how information systems are a medium of communication between people as much as a tool individual access to data. We can use the findings on collaboration to influence how we design and build future CVEs so they afford the best chance of supporting meaningful and useful interaction between participants.
Designing an emergent culture of negotiation in collaborative virtual communities
Authors: Raybourn Elaine M.
Published: May 2014

In Beyond Culture, anthropologist Edward T. Hall indicated that "culture is the total communication framework" comprised of words, actions, nonverbal behaviors, the handling of time, space, and materials, world view, beliefs, and attitudes passed over time from generation to generation. Culture often serves as a perceptual filter with which we determine that which is important to us, and that which is not. In many ways, it is necessary to unlearn the lessons of culture in order to effectively communicate with others whom we perceive to be different from ourselves. Some readers might recall the 'golden rule' which states--treat others the way you would like to be treated. In fact, when engaging in an intercultural interaction, this rule is precisely what one wants to avoid. It is more useful to consider the following as a rule of thumb--treat others as they would have you treat them, not as you would like to be treated. To this end, effective intercultural communication cannot successfully occur without collaboration, the co-creation of meaning, and negotiation. I define intercultural communication as the exchange, and co-creation, of information and meanings by individuals or groups when at least one party perceives itself to be different from others. Collaborative virtual environments (CVE) offer unique opportunities to begin anew--and experiment with unlearning the lessons, or biases, of culture to ultimately foster more equitable communication.
Here and there, now and then
Authors: Erickson Thomas
Published: May 2014

For the last eight years I've worked as a long-distance teleworker from my home in Minneapolis, first for Apple Computer in California, and then for IBM in New York. In this essay I offer reflections on the nature of my workplace(s), in the hope that they may provide grist for those concerned with providing technological and organizational support for remote workers.Obviously this is a highly personal and particular account. Nevertheless, I believe that such reflections on personal experience have an important role to play in informing the ways in which the meaning of 'the workplace' is changing under the impact of new technologies. As such, this essay fits into a tradition of examinations of ways in which particular workplaces are shaped by technologies, ranging from a wide variety of studies carried out in the ethnographic tradition (e.g. [8, 9]) to more personal, reflective accounts (e.g. [1, 3]).In this essay, I work from the macro level to the micro level. I begin with the organization for which I work, and take up the complexities which emerge when I try to answer the question "Where do you work?" While one might think that at least
saying
where one works is a relatively simple matter, I suggest that this isn't so. Next I focus on group workplaces. In particular, I look at the meeting room, and describe an unusual experience attending a meeting via speaker phone. On the basis of this example, I suggest that while places are obviously important, something that is also important --- and much more difficult to support --- is the way in which collective interaction changes over time within a workplace. Third, I focus in on my personal workplace in my home office. I note that much of my daily activity can be viewed as movement through a trajectory of places, each which provides a different configuration of resources for collective interaction. I conclude with a discussion of my personal experiences with Loops, an online environment under development by my work group, that blends elements of group and personal workplaces.
Of maps and guidebooks
Authors: Brown Barry , Perry Mark
Published: May 2014

The physical environment plays a large role in the design and use of technology. So called "context-aware" systems use ultrasound, GPS or cell-tracking, to work out their position and infer something of their context [9]. These systems offer the possibility of technology which responds better to the environments it is in [4], and also technologies which interact with the physical world in new ways [5]. Through these developments technology is increasingly taking on a geographical aspect, as it both disappears into the environment, and in turn make increasing use of that environment.Along with this work there is increasing interest in a more conceptual consideration of how we interact with the physical environment, and how we might think about the relationship of the environment to technology [11]. As HCI conceptualised the user, and CSCW, collaborative activity, with these new technologies there is a need to consider the physical environment and the role that geography could play in technology use and design. In this paper we discuss through these issues using the concepts of "space" and "place" from human geography. Our aim here is to inform design through developing a conceptual understanding of the geography of technology; something lacking in many discussions of context-awareness. If we are to design new technologies for the city, how is the city experienced and what form does in take? In particular how can we design technologies that take better account of the physical location of users, and their movements?
Toolkit for enabling analysis and modeling of adaptive workflow (TEAMWORK)
Authors: Benjamin Perakath C. , Erraguntla Madhav , Mayer Richard J. , Marshall Charles
Published: May 2014

The increasing uncertainties of the global economy necessitate a radical rethinking in the way enterprises will operate in the coming millennium. A key challenge in the coming years will be
agility,
the ability to respond adequately to and thrive within an unpredictable and continuously changing environment. This ability will distinguish the successful organizations of the next decade. Important prerequisites for agility are the ability to: (i) design and produce products that are agile (i.e., product agility); (ii) design, execute, and maintain processes and organizations that are responsive to unpredictable change (i.e., organization and process agility); and (iii) rapidly evolve the infrastructure and technology of the enterprise in response to the changing environment (i.e., technology and infrastructure agility). This paper describes the architecture and concept of operation of TEAMWORK, a Toolkit for Enabling Analysis and Modeling of Adaptive Workflow--that addresses some of these requirements.
Workarounds and distributed viscosity in a workflow system
Authors: Poelmans Stephan
Published: May 2014

This research aims at studying enduser acceptance of workflow system. Enduser acceptance is crucial when considering the implementation success of workflow systems (WFS). The case study reported here is the first step in the development of a general diagnostic tool for evaluating the implementation of workflow systems.Many case studies have been presented in the field of Workflow Management [1;2;3]. Some focus on the design of WFS tools, others are ethnographic in nature and describe the factors that lead to success or failure of the WFS. However, most case studies provide case-specific insights and no general systematic framework has been presented yet to evaluate workflow implementation.
Simple models for articulating complex work processes
Authors: Agostini Alessandra , De Michelis Giorgio
Published: May 2014

Adaptability of workflow models can be achieved if the specification module of the Workflow Management System (WMS) is based on a theoretical kernel, allowing minimal effort for the creation of a workflow model capable of providing, when necessary, any view (and the related services) the users may want of it. The specification module of the Milano WMS has been developed on the basis of the above assumption [2, 3], so that it supports the articulation of complex work processes. Milano [1] is a system integrating in the user workspace a WMS with a multimedia conversation handler, and, finally, an object repository where an organizational handbook is stored.The workflow models of Milano constitute a small subcategory of ENS (Elementary Net Systems), namely Free-Choice Acyclic ENS. Free-choice Acyclic ENS have some nice, efficiently computable, properties: there is a synthesis algorithm from Elementary Transition Systems (ETS) to ENS so that the user can have different views of the workflow; it is possible to compute and classify the jumps recovering exceptions; morphisms between models allow an efficient correctness check for changes and support on-the-fly enactment of changes. The formal aspects of the Milano WMS are described in [2, 3]. Figure 1 presents the Workflow Net Model (WNM) (in the state {b4, b9}) of the first part of a Credit Procedure.
Optional and responsive locking in collaborative graphics editing systems
Authors: Chen David , Sun Chengzheng
Published: May 2014

Object-based collaborative graphics editing systems allow multiple users to edit the same graphics document at the same time from multiple sites. This paper examines the use of locking to prevent the generation of conflicting operations in this type of systems. Two types of locks are examined: object and region. A locking scheme which preserves the intentions of all operations is proposed. Furthermore, the problems of lock ownership caused by concurrent operations are resolved.
Awareness and the WWW
Authors: Liechti Olivier
Published: May 2014

The notion of awareness has received a lot of attention in the CSCW literature for quite some time now. Because it cannot be very precisely and uniquely defined, this notion covers a range of issues and is critical in very different situations. This is also true in the particular context of the WWW, where awareness has more than one facet. One objective for this paper is to give an overview of the field, by reviewing different awareness categories and by showing how they relate to Web-based systems. The discussion also gives an overview of the work done by the author in this area. Another goal for the paper is to introduce the papers presented at the CSCW'2000 Workshop on Awareness and the WWW with a short summary.
Supporting project awareness on the WWW with the iScent framework
Authors: Anderson Kenneth M. , Bouvin Niels Olof
Published: May 2014

Supporting project awareness in the context of large-scale software development is difficult. One problem is identifying appropriate abstractions and techniques that support the insertion of project awareness mechanisms into a software development environment with minimal impact. An additional problem is scaling project awareness mechanisms to handle the demands of large software development projects. The Web is increasingly being used to support software engineering and, as such, becomes an additional target for project awareness mechanisms with its own unique challenges. To maintain awareness of information evolving on an Internet scale, and to address the problems and challenges mentioned above, we present a framework to support awareness and intersubjectivity among software team members through the use of automatically collected, hypermedia-enabled event trails. The concepts, techniques, and tools of event notification and open hypermedia are used to support a new project awareness framework. A distinction of this framework is the presence of mechanisms that explicitly support intersubjectivity among team members and the use of event trails as a new abstraction for providing project awareness information.
Awareness of presence, instant messaging and WebWho
Authors: Ljungstrand Peter , af Segerstad Ylva Hård
Published: May 2014

We report from a study of how awareness of presence can affect instant messaging behavior. WebWho is a web based awareness system that visualizes where people are located in a large university computer lab. It allows students to virtually locate one another and, among other functions, to communicate via an instant messaging system. Typically, instant messages are signed with the sender's name, but messages can also be sent anonymously. The students use the messaging system to support collaborative work and coordinate social activities, as well as for playful behavior. We have performed analyses of messages logs with respect to sender location, anonymous or not, and message content. Results show that awareness of both physical presence, i.e. when both when sender and recipient share the same room, and virtual presence, mediated via WebWho, affect the message contents.
Supporting awareness among virtual teams in a web-based collaborative system
Authors: Jang Chyng Yang , Steinfield Charles , Pfaff Ben
Published: May 2014

This paper overviews a Web-based collaborative system called TeamSCOPE that has been designed to support awareness needs of globally distributed teams. Four types of awareness needs of virtual teams are defined and the awareness support features of TeamSCOPE are described. The use of TeamSCOPE in a project involving a number of globally distributed engineering design teams is outlined, and evaluation results are provided. Findings illustrate how group process interacts with technology to create design challenges in the support of virtual team awareness needs.
Supporting awareness of shared interests and experiences in community
Authors: Sumi Yasuyuki , Mase Kenji
Published: May 2014

In this paper, we propose a notion of facilitating encounters and knowledge sharing among people having shared interests and experiences in museums, conferences, etc. In order to show our approach and current status, this paper presents our project to build a communityware system situated in real-world contexts. The aims of the project are to build a tour guidance system personalized according to its user's individual contexts, and to facilitate knowledge communications among communities by matchmaking users having shared interests and providing real and/or virtual places for their meetings. In this paper, we first show PalmGuide, hand-held tour guidance system. After that, we show two systems to increase "community-awareness". One is Semantic Map, a visual interface for exploring community information, such as exhibits and people (exhibitors and visitors). Another is AgentSalon, a display showing conversations between personal agents according to their users' profiles and interests.
Web-Browsing on stage
Authors: Gross Tom , Prinz Wolfgang
Published: May 2014

In many situations users can benefit from group awareness--information about remote users' presence, availability, activities and other information about the remote environment. In this paper we present the Theatre of Work Enabling Relationships (TOWER) awareness environment. We particularly focus on the presentation of the awareness information in a 3D world and on mobile devices. Furthermore, we introduce awareness contexts for structuring awareness information and exemplify their use in a WWW context.