meaning-making in the creation of useful summary reports
Summary reports are the periodic assemblings of text, numbers, and other data, drawn from diverse sources to present a picture of some aspect of an organization's state. They have become ubiquitous in organizations with the advent of computers, but are not always as useful as their readers would like them to be. This paper focuses on the meaning-making work that report contributors and readers must do in order for reports to be useful and presents some examples drawn from everyday interactions in a business unit of a large corporation. The paper uses these examples as a foundation for asking what it might mean to purposefully support meaning-making in organizational reporting.
meaning-making mean summary reports text data aspect organization ubiquitous computation paper order examples interaction business support spreadsheets ethnography conversation analysis