Presenting the Past: A Framework for Facilitating the Externalization and Articulation of User Activities in Desktop Environment

Work processes are conducted in various contexts and they involve different tasks, interruptions, activities and actions. In all of these, tacit knowledge plays a part. Some part of that tacit knowledge can be externalized and articulated by continuously monitoring the user’s activities. Because the desktop environment is an integral part of almost any office work context, we chart the demands the unstructured and discontinuous nature of work puts on the management of desktop working context. We discuss possibilities to augment the user’s awareness of his/her desktop working environment by providing a context-aware application that can act as a map-like resource for the user’s past activiti…

From technology engineering to social engineering

Virtual worlds have a long history, and it also includes various technologies. Yet research interest towards them has diverged over the years. It seems that nowadays they are on focus again with the evolution of socially oriented and community-supporting virtual worlds. Instead of technical factors, human factors and the motivation behind the use are highlighted. In this paper, we will briefly review the research efforts made in the 90's, and derive a set of themes that were of interest back then. Next, we will expand the set by arguing for newer themes, identified in the latest information systems literature. These two sets of themes form a basis of a research agenda for studying virtual w…

Towards formalised end-user participation in information systems development process

Creating requirements specifications is one of the most challenging tasks in the systems development. For a complete specification, different kinds of information are gathered. This includes information about the domain and context specific technical issues, and about multifaceted cultural, political, communicational, motivational, and personal issues. As there is no information systems development (ISD) method that would yield such information comprehensively, it could be achieved by user-oriented approaches, for instance by participatory design (PD). Reciprocally, unfortunately those do not provide detailed instructions for the systems development. In this paper, we will present our exper…

Evaluating End-user Support : Validating the Use of Multiple Media in a CSCW Application

Human-centred views on information systems are gaining more and more attention in IS community. The need to evaluate information systems from such a perspective is thus evident. In this paper, we exploit our earlier developed theoretical framework for evaluating end-user support in information systems, and demonstrate its usage in validating the use of multiple communication and collaboration media in a CSCW application. The evaluation is performed in terms of user perception in ISD process, users’ role in organizational information processing, and users’ behavioural nuances. Our study shows that a context specific theoretical framework is useful in validating the empirical results of syste…

Opetusteknologia koulun arjessa

Opetusteknologia on osa monen suomalaiskoulun – opettajien ja oppilaiden – arkea eri puolilla Suomea. Opetusteknologian hyödyntäminen on avannut luokkahuoneiden ovia ympäröivään maailmaan ja samalla tuonut oppimisen maailmoista kiinnostuneita tahoja lähemmäksi koulun arkea. Edelleen on kuitenkin haasteita, jotta kaikki suomalaislapset ja opettajat saadaan innovatiivisten, inspiroivien ja luovuutta edistävien oppimisympäristöjen ja -kokemusten äärelle. Tässä kirjassa esitellään kansallisen Opetusteknologia koulun arjessa -tutkimushankkeen ensimmäisiä tuloksia. Tekes-rahoitteinen hanke on koonnut yhteen tutkimusryhmiä kahdeksasta yliopistosta ja 13:sta tutkimuslaitoksesta, liikemaailman edust…

Smart ICT Support for Business Networks

Modern companies lean increasingly towards innovating and renewing their business operations in a more value-adding and customer-centric direction. As a prerequisite to this, a number of companies are willing to combine their knowledge and resources, for instance by forming strategic alliances supported by a mixture of open ICT infrastructure and proprietary and interoperable ICT applications. This study examines a network of three focal companies that are seeking cost-efficient expansion of their services. As the potential market for these complex customer services is worldwide, the objective is expected to be met only with the help of ICT. Furthermore, the view among the companies is rela…

Multiple media in group work : emphasising individual users in distributed and real-time CSCW systems

Samuli Pekkolan väitöstutkimuksessa selvitettiin, millaisia reaaliaikaista ja hajautettua ryhmätyötä tukevien tietojärjestelmien eli ryhmätyöohjelmistojen tulisi olla ja miten ne tulisi toteuttaa. Hajautettujen, verkotettujen ja verkottuneiden organisaatioiden määrä on kasvanut viime vuosina. Samalla niiden toimintatavat ja liiketoimintaprosessit ovat muuttuneet ja ryhmätyöskentelyn tarpeet lisääntyneet. Vaikka työtekijät eivät työskentelisikään samassa paikassa, dokumenttien ja muiden tietojen on oltava helposti saatavilla, ja kommunikoinnin kollegojen kanssa on onnistuttava. Computer supported co-operative work (CSCW) is a multidisciplinary research discipline studying technological solut…

The Studio: Reflections and Issues Arising

An advanced Telematic Studio was built at the University of Jyvaskyla to combine the latest technologies for local and distributed work and/or meetings. The objectives were to combine leading edge technologies with ethnographic design principles derived from CSCW and HCI to support a broad range of activities. We informed the design by studies of similar facilities on other sites. The Studio is popular, and it is easy to give glowing accounts of its use. Nevertheless, over three years a significant number of problems have arisen with both technologies and uses. Some of these are local. Others may be generalisable to any ‘cooperative building’. For example: problems with videoconferencing; i…

Together We Stand, Divided We Fall : Analyzing Information Systems Acquisition as Service

Information systems (IS) acquisition is not a widely studied topic in the literature. In particular, although the role and participation of different stakeholders such as business people, IT people, and external vendors and consultants is acknowledged, little is known about how they cooperate in an IS acquisition project. In this paper, we will apply a value co-creation framework taken from service research as a lens to study an IS acquisition project in an organization. The case organization intends to acquire their new IS as a cloud service. This approach is novel to all stakeholders, so they have to intensively cooperate for example under tight time constraints. The analysis reveals that…

Timing the information system upgrade

A system upgrade requires careful planning as its implications to organizational systems might be enormous. Although in IS literature the requirements and process of systems upgrade have been discussed, the timing when to upgrade and what factors guide it has been of lesser interest. Consequently, in this paper we focus on information systems upgrading and its timing from the perspective of the user organization. Upgrading is enabled by the availability of a new software version. When to upgrade, meanwhile, is determined by the business interests of the customer organization, business calendar, development projects, and the vendor. These factors were identified by interviewing 14 IT manager…

Critical approach to 3D virtual realities for group work

Collaborative virtual environments (CVEs) have been studied extensively during the past few years. In this paper, the concept of virtual reality (VR), and its value for group work are critically examined. To ground the discussions, experiences from a virtual reality project, from 3D chats, and from present CVE applications are analysed in the light of human communication. It is argued that the value of virtual reality is often overemphasised and overrated in the group work context, especially when conce rning desktop virtual realities and generic groupwork without an explicitly defined task or purpose. The main problem with VR is its self-centricity and inadequate support for shared real-li…

Designed for unanticipated use

Common artefacts have been identified as fundamental characteristics for framing activities in workplaces. Mike Robinson's article 'Design for unanticipated use...' conceptualised and defined the dimensions of common artefacts as consisting of predictability, peripheral awareness, implicit communication, double level language and overview. These dimensions have often been used in explaining unexpected uses of different applications and systems. In this paper, experiences from common artefacts as CSCW application design principles, indicating that unanticipated uses are expected and further supported, are discussed. Two distinct cases, a physical room and a software application, are presente…

Mitä on sosiaalisen median sosiaalisuus?

Sosiaalisen median sosiaalisuutta tarkasteltaessa on perusteltua kysyä, onko sosiaalisen median käyttäjä aina sosiaalinen. Millaiseen sosiaalisuuteen sosiaalisen median sovellukset kannustavat? peerReviewed

Meeting others—supporting situation awareness on the WWW

Abstract World Wide Web (WWW) techniques provide a simple interface, which is accessible almost everywhere. The WWW supports document sharing and information retrieval, but has no tools for direct user interaction, simply because the mechanisms to support user awareness are missing. The aim of this paper is twofold. First, we present general concepts of situation awareness, which concerns the user interaction on the WWW platform, and a theoretical framework, which is used in examining existing awareness support systems. Second, we provide an analysis of PeopleAwarenessEngine, which supports situation awareness and enables user communication and collaboration on the WWW.

Collaborative virtual environments in the year of the dragon

Three suggestions are made for extensions from and to CVE's: awareness of others, multiple media, and scalability. Awareness of others and their activities is strongly desirable in all media and applications, not just in CVE's. Multiple media are not seriously catered for in existing CVE's, and a suitable architecture will precede popular applications. CVE's need to be scalable to greater numbers of people, and achieving this also has implications for greater flexibility and reconfigurability. With respect to awareness of others, we argue that the Web and most document handling applications are unaware of others in the workgroup or community, and this limits the ability to support real work…

System aspects of sharing a virtual reality

We have recently held the second annual "System Aspects of Sharing a Virtual Reality" workshop, in conjunction with CVE '98 (see report in this issue). The single-day format allowed for twelve presentations plus discussion, which are summarized below. The topics addressed were: designing systems to cope with network limitations; managing communication and information; the construction of systems and toolkits; issues of presentation and user interaction; and application development and evaluation.

Studying Utility of Personal Usage-History: A Software Tool for Enabling Empirical Research

Managing personal information space and working context is complicated in computerized environment. One well-known cause for the problem is that digital information is superficially fragmented into different data types and structures. Several unifying approaches have been proposed to facilitate semantic connections between them. Particularly in personal information retrieval, temporal information has turned to be useful. Hence, in this article, we present an empirical research setting for studying the utility of representing personal usage-history in information retrieval by comparing it with more traditional hierarchical representation. The research setting is based on a software Tool that…

Introduction: Reframing Humans and Information Systems

Recent development of information and communication technologies (ICT) provides information systems (IS) designers with new potentialities to build systems for various purposes. The ongoing digital convergence refers to and discloses new views on the interactive reconfiguration of technological and social arrangements on a large scale in the contemporary society (Tilson et al. 2009). In addition to work-related activities, people use new technologies for increasingly diverse purposes, for example organizing their domestic affairs, for finding information and e-services, and for staying in touch with their friends and relatives (Lyytinen and Yoo 2002; Sorensen and Yoo 2005; Iivari et al. 201…

How is the problem solving process of a paper machine in Indonesia progressing?

Nuances of Human-Centredness in Information Systems Development

Numerous methods, methodologies, approaches, techniques and tools have been developed over the years to ensure successful accomplishment of information system development (ISD) projects in terms of user satisfaction. However, different methodologies and approaches perceive the user differently; sometimes the user is seen as an anonymous 'object' that is going to use the system, or as an evaluator confirming the correctness of the design, or even as a critical contributor along the way to user-friendly information system. Each of these approaches has their own benefits from the ISD point of view but they lack a holistic view of the user. In this paper, we will review the trajectories of ISD …

Multimedia application to support distance learning and other social interactions in real-time

Supporting social interactions, in distance learning situations for example, with modern technology is very difficult. Generally Internet, networked PC, document handling and communication services and applications are not designed from a multiple user perspective but to support a one-person-one-device (or tool) interaction. This approach creates problems for supporting awareness of, and communication with other people while simultaneously working on documents. Such simultaneous activities have been identified as essential by CSCW and CHI studies, where users are reported to move promiscuously between media and devices, and combine applications and media intuitively, while maintaining aware…

From information to conversation

We support the calls from many commentators to include human interaction in the web, rather than as an extra outside the web. We suggest a generic model of awareness, and some specific interpretations: action-event couplings to call a receiver; general awareness of known others; and local awareness of all others. We then consider extensions to the web into mobile and domestic appliances, and suggest that an underlying awareness service will be needed there as much, or more than in classic desktop web access.