| Supporting Distributed Office Problem Solving in Organizations | | BIBAK | 1 | |
| Carson C. Woo; Frederick H. Lochovsky | |||
| To improve the effectiveness of office workers in their decision making,
office systems have been built to support (rather than replace) their judgment.
However, these systems model office work in a centralized environment, and/or
they can only support a single office worker. Office work that is divided into
specialized domains handled by different office workers (where cooperation is
needed in order to accomplish the work) is not supported. In this paper, we
will present a model that supports office problem solving in a logically
distributed environment. In particular, we will discuss cooperative tools that
can be used to support office workers during the process of their problem
solving. Keywords: Managerial office work, Office communication, Cooperative tools,
Object-oriented environment Note: Appears in ACM Transactions on Office Information Systems, 4:3, 1986, 185-204 | |||
| Envoys in Electronic Mail Systems | | BIBA | 2-10 | |
| Eric Gold | |||
| Envoys are electronic mail messages that make requests at remote electronic mailers. Envoys differ from conventional messages in that they might be routed to recipients that have not been specified, their requests can often be carried out with no human intervention, they can be modified as they move from mailer to mailer, and they return to the original sender to inform her what actions have been taken. An electronic mailer that supports envoys needs reasoning systems to determine the recipients of the envoy and handle the requests. | |||
| The Organizational Consequences of Inter-Organization Computer Networks | | BIBAK | 11-20 | |
| Deborah Estrin | |||
| When two or more organizations interconnect their internal computer networks
they form an Inter-Organization Network (ION). This paper analyzes how this
new medium changes the economics of inter-organization communication and
interchange and can thereby support communications of greater intensity and
scope. Furthermore, in the spirit of transaction cost theory [15], we analyze
how the new communication patterns can in turn support changes in the
organization of work and industrial activities; in particular, by allowing
participants to carry out greater numbers of activities across their
organization boundaries, and to do so with greater numbers of interchange
partners. However, at the same time ION communications may be more penetrating
and segmented and thereby encourage participants to impose restrictions on
cross-boundary flows and interchange partners. To benefit from ION use
organizations will have to balance these opportunities and risks. We
demonstrate our model with examples of commercial buyer-supplier relationships
and an investigation of peer relationships among research and development (R&D)
laboratories. The model and study demonstrate that technical analysis can
inform organizational analysis of new technologies without being
technologically deterministic. Moreover, our organizational analysis has
implications for the technical design of IONs as described in [4]. Keywords: Organizational impacts, Computer networks, Electronic mail, Management of
computing and information systems, Inter-organizational systems | |||
| On the Malleability of People and Computers: Why the PC is Not a Projectile | | BIB | 21-32 | |
| John Law; John Whittaker | |||
| The Costs of Personal Computing in a Complex Organization: A Comparative Study | | BIBA | 33-42 | |
| Sonia Nayle; Walt Scacchi | |||
| The widespread adoption of personal computers (PCs) may be attributable to their apparent low purchase and operational costs. However, significant procedural costs arise in fitting a PC application into a work setting. Our investigation of the adoption and use of PCs in several departments of a complex organization reveals a large number of unanticipated costs. These indirect, deferred, and governance costs are chiefly borne by users not responsible for acquiring PCs. These costs represent additional demands for users' time, skill, expertise, and attention as well as money. We find that the distribution of deferred costs determines the viability of PC systems. We also find that the integration of PCs can alter the way people do their jobs. These changes in turn give rise to additional social and political costs within the organization. Subsequently, we find that the true costs of personal computing are typically underestimated and unaccounted. | |||
| Mappings between Office Work and Office Technology | | BIBA | 43-51 | |
| William C. Sasso; Sung K. Kim | |||
| While several procedures designed to facilitate office analysis have achieved success with respect to describing what happens in the office, they have contributed far less with respect to prescribing how computer-based technologies can support the office. Here we present TEMO (TEchnological Mapping of Office-work), a procedure which aids the analyst in determining the feasibility of supporting a given office task and suggests which specific software packages might improve performance of that task. In order to illustrate the procedure's application, we present a case in which TEMO is applied, in step-by-step fashion, in order to assess the feasibility of automating a simple set of tasks and to assist in the selection of an appropriate software package. Directions of continuing work in the procedure's extension, enhancement, and evaluation are also described. | |||
| A Visual Interface for a Database with Version Management | | BIBAK | 52 | |
| Jay W. Davison; Stanley B. Zdonik | |||
| This paper describes a graphical interface to an experimental database
system which incorporates a built-in version control mechanism that maintains a
history of the database development and changes. The system is an extension of
ISIS [GGKZ] -- Interface for a Semantic Information System, a
workstation-based, graphical database programming tool developed at Brown
University. ISIS supports a graphical interface to a modified subset of the
Semantic Data Model, SDM [HM]. The ISIS extension introduces a transaction
mechanism that interacts with the version control facilities.
A series of version control support tools have been added to ISIS to provide a notion of history to user-created databases. The user can form new versions of three types of ISIS objects -- a class definition object (a type), the set of instances of a class (the content), and an entity. A version viewing mechanism is provided to allow for the comparison of various object versions. Database operations are grouped together in atomic units to form transactions, which are stored as entities in the database. A sample session demonstrates the capabilities of version and transaction control during the creation and manipulation of database objects. Keywords: Historical database, Semantic data model, Transaction processing, Version
control, Visual interfaces Note: Appears in ACM Transactions on Office Information Systems, 4:3, 1986, 226-256 | |||
| Adaptive Interface Design: A Symmetric Model and a Knowledge-Based Implementation | | BIBAK | 53-60 | |
| Sherman W. Tyler; Siegfried Treu | |||
| Adaptation in the user-system interface can be designed to benefit either
the system or the user. This paper presents a general model to portray that
symmetry and to describe the essential components of the user-oriented version
of an adaptive interface system. A function-based interpretation of the
process is also characterized. Finally, the types of knowledge bases upon
which the adaptation is dependent are described with reference to a prototype
system being implemented. Especially those users who have limited
understanding of computer technology, such as the numerous workers in offices,
are expected to be future beneficiaries of adaptive interface research. Keywords: Adaptive interface systems, User-computer interaction, Knowledge
representation, Intelligent systems, Design methodology | |||
| Automating Review of Forms for International Trade Transactions: A Natural Language Processing Approach | | BIBAK | 61-69 | |
| Vasant Dhar; Padmanabhan Ranganathan | |||
| A major challenge in Office Automation is one of automating routine jobs
that involve large-scale processing of ill-formed natural language data. Such
data are often present in documents such as forms where it is necessary and/or
practical to allow latitude in how the forms may be filled. In this paper, we
describe a computational model designed to process free-form textual data in
application forms for Letter of Credit (LC), which represent a common vehicle
for initiating international trade transactions. The model is based on a
variation of the case-frame or thematic-role frame instantiation methods. We
describe the implementation of the model, report empirical results with real LC
applications, and indicate directions we are currently pursuing to improve its
performance. Keywords: Office automation, Forms processing, Natural language processing, Artificial
intelligence | |||
| Analyzing Due Process in the Workplace | | BIB | 70-78 | |
| Elihu M. Gerson; Susan Leigh Star | |||
| The Integration of Computing and Routine Work | | BIBAK | 79 | |
| Les Gasser | |||
| Most computing serves as a resource or tool to support other work:
performing complex analyses for engineering projects, preparing documents or
sending electronic mail using office automation equipment, etc. To improve the
character, quality, and ease of computing work, we must understand how
automated systems actually are integrated into the work they support. How do
people actually adapt to computing as a resource? How do they deal with the
unreliability in hardware, software, or operations, data inaccuracy, system
changes, poor documentation, inappropriate design, etc. which are present in
almost every computing milieu, even where computing is widely used and
considered highly successful?
This paper presents some results of a detailed empirical study of routine computer use in several organizations. We present a theoretical account of computing work, and use it to explain a number of observed phenomena, such as: * How people knowingly use "false" data to obtain desired analytical results by tricking their systems. * How organizations come to rely upon complex, critical computer systems despite significant, recurrent, known errors and inaccurate data. * How people work around inadequate computing systems by using manual or duplicate systems, rather than changing their systems via maintenance or enhancement. In addition, the framework for analyzing computing and routine work presented here proves useful for representing and reasoning about activity in multi-actor systems in general, and in understanding how better to integrate organizations of people and computers which in which work is coordinated. Keywords: Integration of computing, Computing and work, Multi-agent systems,
Workarounds, Articulation work, Social analysis of computing, Computing in
organizations Note: Appears in ACM Transactions on Office Information Systems, 4:3, 1986, 205-225 | |||
| Offices are Open Systems | | BIBA | 80 | |
| Carl Hewitt | |||
| This paper is intended as a contribution to analyzing the implications of
viewing offices as open systems. It takes a prescriptive stance on how to
establish the information processing foundations for taking actions and making
decisions in office work from an open systems perspective. We propose due
process as a central activity in organizational information processing.
Computer systems are beginning to play important roles in mediating the ongoing
activities of organizations. We expect that these roles will gradually
increase in importance as computer systems undertake more of the authority and
responsibility for ongoing activities. At the same time we expect computer
systems to take on more of the characteristics and structure of human
organizations. Note: Appears in ACM Transactions on Office Information Systems, 4:3, 1986, 271-287 | |||
| Decision Support for Coordinated Multi-Agent Planning | | BIBAK | 81-91 | |
| Thomas L. Dean | |||
| An important component of planning involves keeping track of what various
agents intend to do and recognizing situations in which certain planned-for
activities are likely to interfere with one another. In planning situations
involving several agents participating in a cooperative endeavor, this process
can be automated to a high degree thereby facilitating coordination between
agents. The more difficult aspects of planning, how to choose what activities
to perform and what to do when those choices lead to problems, are left to the
agents themselves. This paper demonstrates how the use of an interactive
temporal data base management system can direct the inter-agent communication
necessary to coordinate the use of shared resources and deal with complex
scheduling problems. It is argued that much of the paper work normally
associated with routine office transactions can be eliminated through the use
of this temporal data base. Keywords: Planning, Temporal reasoning, Reason maintenance | |||
| Language Constructs for Programming by Example | | BIBA | 92-103 | |
| Robert V. Rubin | |||
| Systems for programming by example permit the specification of algorithms through the use of demonstrations that manipulate examples. This paper analyzes systems for programming by example from a language point of view. Examples are analyzed as data abstractions, and demonstrations as abstractions for evaluation and control. Criteria are introduced for evaluating both the computational power and the expressiveness of the abstractions. The analysis demonstrates the existence of several previously unconsidered approaches to the more difficult problems associated with programming by example. | |||
| Providing Intelligent Assistance in Distributed Office Environments | | BIBA | 104-112 | |
| Sergei Nirenburg; Victor Lesser | |||
| We argue that a task-centered, an agent-centered and a cognition-oriented perspective are all needed for providing intelligent assistance in distributed office environments. We present the architecture for a system called OFFICE that combines these three perspectives. We illustrate this architecture through an example. | |||
| Graphical Database Browsing | | BIBAK | 113-121 | |
| Michael Caplinger | |||
| The knowledge stored in the information networks of the near future will not
resemble that in today's conventional database systems. Instead, systems will
look more like electronic libraries, with millions of items in many different
media and with widely varying formats and levels of detail. Using foreseeable
searching mechanisms, the results of queries will often be very coarse,
containing a large fraction of all the items in storage. To make up for this
coarseness, users must be able to browse the database, discarding unneeded
items rapidly -- but the sheer size of the result sets will make textual
presentation useless. As an alternative, we have investigated ways to arrange
the data into information spaces that can be presented graphically. Users
browse the space simply by moving their viewpoints within it, selecting
interesting features of the "information landscape" for closer examination. Keywords: Information retrieval, Spatial data management, Computer graphics, Very
large databases Content analysis and indexing, Information search and
retrieval, Computer graphics | |||