A Coordination-Theoretic Approach to Understanding Process Differences

Supporting human collaboration is challenging partly because of variability in how people work. Even within a single organization, there can be many variants of processes which have the same purpose. When distinct organizations must work together, the differences can be especially large, baffling and disruptive. Coordination theory provides a method and vocabulary for modeling complex collaborative activities in a way that makes both the similarities and differences between them more visible. We illustrate this, in this paper, by analyzing three engineering change management processes and demonstrating how our method compactly highlights the substantial commonalities and precise differences between what are on first glance are extremely divergent approaches

A team collaboration space supporting capture and access of virtual meetings

In this paper, we address the design issues of a collaborative workspace system, called TeamSpace, that supports geographically distributed teams by managing shared work processes and maintaining shared artifacts in a project. TeamSpace attempts to integrate both synchronous and asynchronous types of team interaction into a task-oriented environment. Since meetings are an integral part of teamwork, our current work focuses on supporting virtual meetings as part of a larger collaborative work process. We present an initial TeamSpace prototype that supports asynchronous meeting management seamlessly integrated with capture and access of synchronous distributed meetings. The captured synchronous data is integrated with other related information in TeamSpace, enabling users to efficiently gain knowledge of both current and past team activities

Holistan Revisited: Demonstrating Agent- and Knowledge-Based Capabilities for Future Coalition Military Operations

As a fundamental research program, the International Technology Alliance (ITA) aims to explore innovative solutions to some of the challenges confronting US/UK coalition military forces in an era of network-enabled operations. In order to demonstrate some of the scientific and technical achievements of the ITA research program, we have developed a detailed military scenario that features the involvement of US and UK coalition forces in a large-scale humanitarian-assistance/disaster relief (HA/DR) effort. The scenario is based in a fictitious country called Holistan, and it draws on a number of previous scenario specification efforts that have been undertaken as part of the ITA. In this paper we provide a detailed description of the scenario and review the opportunities for technology demonstration in respect of a number of ITA research focus areas

Network-Enabled Collaborative Problem Solving

People working together can accomplish tasks and solve problems that far exceed the capabilities of a single individual. In this paper, we consider how people collaborate when solving problems and the role of networks in supporting this collaboration. We consider what aspects of problem-solving are best performed alone, what is best done in collaboration with others, and the communication needed to support collaboration while solving complex problems. We also consider the cognitive processes and mental representations involved in problem-solving. When people collaborate, cognitive processes and problem representations are socially distributed. This means that it is important to understand the dynamics of information transmission and transformation in networks comprised of human problem-solving agents; i.e. social networks. Understanding the effect of social network variables on the quality and timing of problem-solving outcomes is, we suggest, a key factor in developing supportive socio-technical interventions for groups of problem-solving agents

A Coordination-Theoretic Approach to Understanding Process Differences

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