ENHANCING COMPUTER MEDIATED COMMUNICATION BY DESIGNING AN EMAIL PROTOTYPE: A CASE STUDY

In today\u27s modern world, computer supported cooperative work (CSCW) and computer mediated communication (CMC) are central and most crucial in the activities of organizations and in their success in achieving their goals and purposes. Organizations are established to achieve goals that one person cannot accomplish alone, and the knowledge that is collected by individuals should be reserved for the general use of the organizational community. Now, organizational workers need more than ever to share the knowledge they each gather, and they are involved in joint activities that need the support of information systems. Communication between individuals is at large extent in the form of computer mediated cooperation, and computerized applications ascribed as groupware (group support systems) include shared environments, whiteboards, electronic group calendars, chat rooms and more. Groupware systems support groups of people that work together by facilitating communication between them and by improving coordination. The overall success of organizations is certainly dependent on computer mediated communications that need to be designed to achieve a high level of mutual understanding and minimal occurrences of communication breakdowns. Perhaps the most widespread mode of CMC at work is email. Organizational workers are engaged in this asynchronous communication on a daily basis, having multiple contacts and the ability to preserve exchanged messages in an archive for future use. This study examines the possible ways to enhance CMC among users exchanging email messages in a company named Artigiani that specializes in manufacturing handles, hooks, hangers, and bathroom accessories. We closely Artigiani, and conducted content analysis of email messages. We were particularly interested in the exchanging of messages between customer service representatives (CSRs) and their customers which are professional workers such as carpenters, contractors, architects, interior designers and personal customers. CSRs in Artigiani are in great pressure to respond quickly to emails, and they feel stressed by the high volume of incoming messages, and by the fact that they tend to lose important items when they need them (such as previous messages exchanged, and items that they wish to attach to new messages). In addition, we identified communication breakdowns and misunderstanding that mainly result from differences in knowledge and perspectives of communicators. We follow previous work in CMC that stress the need for reinventing the email client, and put our focus on a communicational strategy called contextualization, which is the activity of providing the explicit addition of contextual information to a core message to ensure effective communication. We present a prototype for an email user interface that puts contextualization as a central component for enhancing effective CMC and for effectively managing and controlling organizational activities, especially the ongoing management of product ordering, and related decision making. examined communication i

Designing an E-Mail Prototype to Enhance Effective Communication and Task Management: A Case Study

This paper deals with communicational breakdowns and misunderstandings in computer mediated communication (CMC) and ways to recover from them or to prevent them. The paper describes a case study of CMC conducted in a company named Artigiani. We observed communication and conducted content analysis of e-mail messages, focusing on message exchanges between customer service representatives (CSRs) and their contacts. In addition to task management difficulties, we identified communication breakdowns that result from differences between perspectives, and from the lack of contextual information, mainly technical background and professional jargon at the customers’ side. We examined possible ways to enhance CMC and accordingly designed a prototype for an e-mail user interface that emphasizes a communicational strategy called contextualization as a central component for obtaining effective communication and for supporting effective management and control of organizational activities, especially handling orders, price quoting, and monitoring the supply and installation of products

Architecture of a mobile-agent of a distributed knowledge management system

This work describes a multi agent system designed to support the management of tacit knowledge that belongs to people of an organization. This is a distributed knowledge management system based on the use of mobile agents, which receive the user's queries and visit the organization domains where this information can be generated. The system has been developed using an approach based on the organizational concept of business processes to identify roles and protocols as part of the analysis stage of a methodology for agent-oriented analysis and design. The mobility of the agent is defined using an approach based on both the quality attributes specified for the multi-agent architecture and the execution environments of the multi-agent system. Particularly, this work is focused on describing the designed mobile agents’ architecture and some implementation details of it.Eje: Agentes y Sistemas Inteligentes (ASI)Red de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI

Enhancing Groupware For Knowledge Management.

Groupware is popularly used for organisational knowledge management. However, present features of groupware, arguably, only allow very limited knowledge management to be carried out

Architecture of a mobile-agent of a distributed knowledge management system

This work describes a multi agent system designed to support the management of tacit knowledge that belongs to people of an organization. This is a distributed knowledge management system based on the use of mobile agents, which receive the user's queries and visit the organization domains where this information can be generated. The system has been developed using an approach based on the organizational concept of business processes to identify roles and protocols as part of the analysis stage of a methodology for agent-oriented analysis and design. The mobility of the agent is defined using an approach based on both the quality attributes specified for the multi-agent architecture and the execution environments of the multi-agent system. Particularly, this work is focused on describing the designed mobile agents’ architecture and some implementation details of it.Eje: Agentes y Sistemas Inteligentes (ASI)Red de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI

Agent for information source location in a dynamic DSS

Inside an organization there is information that can only be generated by people, then, when a decision maker in any time and anywhere of an organization requires this information, he/she has to solicit it to who has the ability of generate it. To fulfill this information requirement, we are developing a multiagent system that we call dynamic Decision Support System (DSS). This system is composed by Domain Representative Agents (DRAs); an Information Source Locator Agent (ISLA) and mobile agents called Query Coordinator Agents (QCAs). The ISLA is the agent responsible for guiding information requirements from users to distributed DSS domains that offer greater possibilities of answering them. It has the ability to interpret queries formulated in natural language, to identify the relationships among the characteristics of queries and domains, and to learn from errors that it make during its operation to diminish the number of consulted domains in each information requirement. The purpose of this work is to describe the ISLA architecture and its main components; using design patterns and knowledge engineering methodologies.Eje: AgentesRed de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI

The Chronicle [February 9, 1979]

The Chronicle, February 9, 1979https://repository.stcloudstate.edu/chron/3103/thumbnail.jp

The Chronicle [February 9, 1979]

The Chronicle, February 9, 1979https://repository.stcloudstate.edu/chron/3103/thumbnail.jp