ork systems involve people engaging in activities over time-not just with each other, but also with machines, tools, documents, and other artifacts. 1 These activities often produce goods, services, or-as is the case in the work system described in this article-scientific data. Work systems and work practice evolve slowly over time. The integration and use of technology, the distribution and collocation of people, organizational roles and procedures, and the facilities where the work occurs largely determine this evolution. Improving or redesigning systems is sometimes accomplished through a business process reengineering approach. 2 Business process reengineering is usually based on business process flow analysis, typically performed by business consultants who focus on work products. The result is usually an improvement involving technology, such as a workflow tool. We call this a machine-centered approach for work systems design because functional transformations are the focus of attention. However, focusing on the flow of products and data through a work system often ignores the way the people in the organization actually prefer to work. 3,4 As a result, engineers often receive requirements for new technology without a thorough understanding of how the newly designed system might affect human communication, collaboration, and workspaces, as well as problem solving and learning. In this article, we present a human-centered work system design method based on modeling and simulating work practice-that is, what people actually do. Rather than abstracting human behavior as work processes or tasks-functional idealizations of the work to be accomplished-we model people's activities comprehensively and chronologically throughout the day. 5 We emphasize that an analysis of how work gets done must be open to understanding the effects of behaviors in different places and times, details often omitted in a product-oriented task analysis. For example, someone might not schedule meetings at the office before 10:30 a.m. because of a babysitter's schedule, or he or she might use scheduling software on a computer at home to reserve meeting rooms for later that day. Such practices are relevant to the design of workplace facilities and scheduling. We call our method human-centered because we focus on how people organize their work life and the details of their practices. We believe this best suggests work system transformations, including any different tools and processes that might eventually be required. 3 For a look at other relevant research, see the sidebar "Related Work." Most engineering disciplines have methods and tools to help in understanding complex system interactions; often such tools help engineers develop system prototypes. We have developed a tool called Brahms that supports our method for modeling and simulating work practice. 6, 7 Brahms is a multiagent modeling and simulation environment for dealing with the complex human-machine system interactions. In software engineering, model-based refers to a system design approach in which the system is described in terms of the structure and behavior of
He focused on the observation of human behaviour while performing job in the real work practice system, and with the help of Brahm's Simulation and Modeling technique work practice system can be designed REF .
Modeling and Simulating Work Practice : A Method for Work Systems Design
IEEE Intell. Syst.
IEEE Intell. Syst.
Computer Science