Suchman, L. A. (1983): `Office Procedures as Practical Action: Models of Work and System Design', TOIS, vol. 1, no. 4, 1983, pp. 320-328.  Home/Search   Document Not in Database   Summary   Related Articles   Check

....elicitation in interactive systems development. The turn to ethnography is a response to the need for an adequate understanding of the nature of work to underpin the construction of interactive systems. In the context of system design, ethnographic studies have included photocopier use [13], office work [14] air traffic control [7] police work [1] and underground control rooms[8] However, ethnography though holding much promise is still relatively untried in system design. It has been, and still is, strong on its critique of other methods, such as Task Analysis [4] but it has ....

.... crucial aspects of the real world are not never properly treated [2] It is in this respect that analytic approaches which decompose elements of the work activities and tasks, such as Task Analysis and Office Automation, which focuses on the flow of data within a domain, are found wanting [12, 13]. The result is, so it is argued, that essential aspects of the socially organised character of the domain concerned are obscured or, worse, misrepresented. There are, of course, many aspects to these kinds of arguments, some of which involve a critique of the nature of work in modem society ....

Suchman, L., Office procedures as practical action: models of work and system design, ACM Transactions on Office Information Systems, Vol 1 No 4, pp 320- 328.

....of a mediaspace, we must think of it in terms of components to integrate into existing practices, not in terms of a new application. The affordances of analog mediaspaces not only depend on the physical properties of the devices, but also on how people can use them. As Suchman points out [15], people are used to improvise and repurpose their actions. Mediaspace hardware configurations can easily be tailored by moving devices, adjusting them (e.g. the volume or the brightness) replacing them, or combining them (e.g. adding a wide angle lens or an audio mixer) Again, this contrasts ....

L. Suchman. Office procedures as practical action: Models of work and system design. ACM Transactions on Office Information Systems, 1:320-328, 1983.

....of or support for the more informal aspects of getting work done. Support for routine, predictable, product based processes may be desirable in some cases but the question that arises is, how much of work is in reality routine and predictable. Many reports suggest that the answer is very little [15, 10, 45, 85, 185, 222, 247, 248, 259, 260]. The following quote from Wastell et al. [260] highlights the problem of trying to solve a wicked problem with a tame solution. Reflecting on the failed application of a process support system that was modelled on clear and detailed work instructions, they state: routine work, which appears ....

Lucy A. Suchman. Office procedure as practical action: Models of work and system design. ACM Transactions on Office Information Systems, 1(4):320--328, October 1983.

.... places and time zones, with the result that the employee has to rely on asynchronous communication [5] Due to the fact that even in routine work there is a need for ad hoc problem solving and negotiations with experts [19] and bearing in mind that no workplace has entirely structured tasks [24], we can conclude that there is also a requirement for unstructured communication. The procedure can be summarized as follows: the employee searches for a communication medium which, at the minimum, will allow him to conduct unstructured communication in an asynchronous manner with an undefined ....

Suchman L.A.: Office Procedure as Practical Action: Models of Work and System Design. ACM Transactions on Office Information Systems, 1 (1983) 4, 320-328.

....the role had not been given to another person, and the key was not changed. In both of these situations, subjects did not seem confused. Five questions touched on differences between acceptable organizational practice (i.e. work arounds and alternative methods of acting) and official practice (Suchman, 1983). In these cases, the correct answer was ambiguous, since subjects could have interpreted either practice as best. In one of these questions, the acceptable organizational practice was largely historical the company legend behind a name but management officially did not recognize that ....

Suchman, Lucy A. "Office Procedure as Practical Action: Models of Work and System Design," ACM Transactions on Office Information Systems (1:4), October 1983, pp.

....for modelling technical systems have long been the subject of study in computing science. But what are the appropriate concepts for modelling organizations Some Requirements for an Organization Modelling Framework. Many authors have pointed to the pitfalls of mechanistic views of organizations [32] [17] 14] 36] 11] Formal procedures do not describe how work is actually carried out in organizations [32] They overlook the problem solving activities that are involved in getting work done. Organizational work is often open ended [14] because social actors have limited knowledge about, and ....

....concepts for modelling organizations Some Requirements for an Organization Modelling Framework. Many authors have pointed to the pitfalls of mechanistic views of organizations [32] 17] 14] 36] 11] Formal procedures do not describe how work is actually carried out in organizations [32]. They overlook the problem solving activities that are involved in getting work done. Organizational work is often open ended [14] because social actors have limited knowledge about, and limited control over their environments. Social actors are best seen as being situated within a network or ....

[Article contains additional citation context not shown here]

L. Suchman, Office Procedures as Practical Action: Models of Work and System Design, ACM Trans. Office Information Systems, vol. 1, no. 4, October 1983, pp. 320-328.

....coordinating activities of work consist of discrete instructed actions observable (and thus describable or reportable) embodiedorganisational practices for 4 A popular contemporary version of this orientation to work and organisation is provided in the form of Giddens structuration theory. 5 Suchman (1983) makes a similar point regarding technological models of work in system design. See also (Section 2.5) herein for some good organisational reasons for the inadequacy of such systems, reasons that compliment Suchman s insights and in many senses constitute the case against traditional systems ....

Suchman, L. (1983) Office Procedures as Practical Action: Models of Work and System Design, ACM Transactions on Office Information Systems, 1 (4) 320-328.

....environment and intended to go one step further than activity models by focusing on the coordination of activities in groups or teams without a specific application or domain in mind. In reality, work is not well structured or defined, people more often do the unexpected than the planned [Suchman 1983] to perform a task. Several systems focus on coordination while cooperation in work is often mediated through the material, the documents or the notes. A Model of cooperation based on messages seems too limp, cooperation based on sharing seems equally important. We therefore wish to add another ....

Suchman, L.A., Office Procedures as Practical Action: Models of Work and System Design, ACM Transactions on Office Information Systems, vol. 1, no. 4, October 1983, pp. 320-328.

....that is perceived to be similar to (or at least only incrementally different from) an extant manual environment. Leverage is gained from computers by computation support and incremental micro level automation by which various tasks in the environment are accomplished using software tools [38]. This fits well with the trend in personal productivity tool development. CSCW systems must support the interaction of different people using distinct computing devices, e.g. a network of workstations and server machines. This hardware autonomy implies the need for the system to provide ....

Lucy A. Suchman. Office procedure as practical action: Models of work and system design. ACM Transactions on Office Information Systems, 1(4):320--328, October 1983.

....describe how the procedure performs the work, and to analyze the behavior of a procedure. Over time, neither situated work nor workflow has dominated the way general CSCW systems are designed. There are strong arguments for why one approach or the other is appropriate in different situations; in [12] Suchman carefully explains how a prescriptive workflow system would have simply complicated a group s work for the case described in her classic paper; the feature articles in [13] update that view and explain the difficulty in representing how work should be performed. Robinson and Bannon argue ....

....for failures in the procedure through informal activity. By formalizing the coordination and step definition, there are fewer opportunities for human workers to compensate for inadequacies in the process. State of the art workflow enactment systems [5, 21] do not address the issues described here [1, 2, 12, 19, 62]. One solution to this problem is to remove the coordination component from the system; this amounts to taking the situated work approach. However, all organizations impose at least some minimal set of procedural guidelines on how its workers perform their work. For example, a corporation has ....

[Article contains additional citation context not shown here]

Lucy A. Suchman. Office procedure as practical action: Models of work and system design. ACM Transactions on Office Information Systems, 1(4):320--328, October 1983.

....to minimize or eliminate error patterns. Recording large amounts of process information is costly [7] but as we found, can be justifiable. Thus we would advocate recording as much history as possible, not just that of unstructured exceptional activities. Other than these examples (but see also [41, 42, 44, 45]) there seems to be relatively little attention paid in the CSCW literature to the role of errors as either a source of insight into current problems or an inevitable aspect of human performance that should be considered during systems design. The CSCW literature does focus, however, on such ....

Suchman, L. Office procedures as practical action: models of work and system design. ACM transactions on Office Information Systems, 1 (4). 320-328.

....and are intended to go one step further than activity models by focusing on the co ordination of activities in groups or teams without a specific application or domain in mind. In reality, work is not well structured or defined. People do the unexpected more often than the planned (see e.g. Suchman 1983) to achieve a task. Robinson (1993) has in his research argued the importance of use common artifacts to understand and be able to support a multidimensional world of activities. Several systems focus on co ordination, while co operation in work is often mediated through the material, the ....

Suchman, L.A. (1983): Office Procedures as Practical Action: Models of Work and System Design, ACM Transactions on Office Information Systems, vol.1, no.4, October 1983, pp. 320-328.

....work knowledge. These assume that the information necessary for a task is known in advance and that the work follows a set procedure. In reality, work is not well structured or defined (i.e. the handbook is not followed and procedures are used as a resource rather than literally interpreted [Suchman, 1983]) Ishii and Ohkubo [Ishii, 1991] have also found this to be true in their experience of office tasks: we found that office workers made many short cuts and modifications to the standard procedures defined in the handbook. Therefore, it was no easy task to determine the actual standard ....

Suchman, L.A. (1983): "Office Procedures as Practical Action: Models of Work and System Design", ACM Transactions on Office Information Systems, vol.1, no.4, October 1983, pp.320-328.

....approaches to supporting these goals within the design of a workflow system infrastructure. Finally, we describe the implementation of many of these approaches in the Endeavors workflow support system. 1 Introduction The occurrence of exceptions is a fundamental part of organizational processes (Suchman, 1983). In order for workflow system to support these processes they must be able to support the handling of these inconsistencies and adapt to changes over time. Exceptions can result from such sources as inconsistent data (Cugola et al. 1996) divergence of tasks from the underlying workflow model ....

....perspectives on exceptions in information processes. The random event perspective suggests that exceptions are random and uncommon occurrences. This perspective is, according to the authors, commonly assumed by managers and researchers. It is not, however, born out by research studies (e.g. Suchman, 1983). The error perspective is that exceptions are errors to a normally executing process that may be targeted and eliminated. These can be further distinguished into subcategories describing the source of the error. Operation errors are those that result from mistakes in the execution of the ....

Suchman, L. (1983): "Office Procedure as Practical Action: Models of Work and System Design." ACM Transactions on Information Systems, 1(4), October 1983.

....that work is much more complex and involves the evolution of work practices by managers and workers that are continuously adapted and that employ a rich pattern of human communication and sense making activities. These work practices enable work to be done despite frequent unforeseen exigencies [Suchman83]. These two views of work are summarized in Table 1 which combines two tables from Sachs [Sachs95] and adds several additional issues that we feel are relevant to BPA. Organizational Explicit Activity based Implicit Position in hierarchy Informal politics and network of contacts Definable roles ....

Suchman, L., "Office Procedures as Practical Action: Models of Work and System Design", ACM Trans on Office Systems, Vol. 1, No. 4, October 1983, pp. 320-328.

....as generic information processing tools. Today there is a strong interest in using computers to assist groups of people to work on a common problem [8, 14, 16] However, there is a diversity of opinion about how computers might best assist a group in its work, ranging from situated work [26], to automatic coordination systems [20] There is an emerging camp that takes an intermediate position: the computer might be used to assist in computation and the coordination or work, though the team should not rely on the machine to do all the computation nor all the coordination for the work. ....

Lucy A. Suchman. Office procedure as practical action: Models of work and system design. ACM Transactions on Office Information Systems, 1(4):320--328, October 1983.

.... with the result that crucial aspects of the real world of work are obscured, misrepresented or never properly treated [26] It is in this respect that analytic approaches , Task Analysis, Office Automation for example, which focus on the flow of data within a domain, are found wanting [28,30]. While it is accepted that a balance needs to be found between the 1 Ethnography has a long history in social research. See, for a review, Ackroyd and Hughes (2) for a brief overview. Also Hughes et al. [18] requirements of engineering and the need to adequately characterise the domain of ....

Suchman, L. (1983), Office procedures as practical action: models of work and system design, ACM Transactions on Office Information Systems, 1(4):

....workflow model of Figure 1 could be interpreted as a plan to achieve the overall goal of purchasing an item. Although this kind of goal graph does reveal, to some degree, the intentionality behind the work, it does not accurately reflect the way work actually gets done. Empirical research (e.g. [31, 13]) has indicated that a large part of organizational work has to do with addressing problems. Because of the open endedness of organizational work situations, the exact kinds of problems that has(item) ordered(item) received(item) paid(item) delivered(item) Figure 2: A Goal Graph for Goods ....

L. Suchman, Office Procedures as Practical Action: Models of Work and System Design, ACM Trans. Office Information Systems, vol. 1, no. 4, October 1983, pp. 320-328.

....traditional procedural conception of office work (Ellis Nutt, 1980, Hammer Sirbu, 1980, Zisman, 1977) These types of systems are suitable for office work that is structured around actions where the sequence of activities is similar, but they do not deal well with unanticipated conditions. As Suchman (1983), Wynn (1979) Gerson and Star (1986) and others have shown, much daily office work involves more than the execution of office procedures, so the simple procedural model has been discredited (Barber, 1983) The need to develop office systems that play more of a support role for people in their ....

.... work, conducted by anthropologists and sociologists, have emphasised the rich nature of many allegedly routine activities and the complex pattern of cooperative decision making and negotiation engaged in by co workers, even at relatively low positions within the organisation (Wynn, 1979, Suchman, 1983, Gerson Star, 1986) Suchman gives a concise account of this discrepancy between the office procedures that supposedly govern office work and the practical action carried out by office workers. She notes: the procedural structure of organisational activities is the product of the orderly work ....

[Article contains additional citation context not shown here]

Suchman, Lucy A., (1983). Office Procedures as Practical Action: Models of Work and System Design.

No context found.

Suchman, L. A. (1983): `Office Procedures as Practical Action: Models of Work and System Design', TOIS, vol. 1, no. 4, 1983, pp. 320-328.

No context found.

L. Suchman, "Office Procedure as practical Action: Models of work and System Design", ACM Transactions on OIS Vol. 1/4, pp. 320-328.

No context found.

Suchman, L. A. Office Procedures as Practical Action: Models of Work and System Design. ACM Transactions on Office Information Systems 1, 4 (1983) 320-328.

No context found.

Suchman, L.A., Office Procedures as Practical Action: Models of Work and System Design. ACM Transactions on Office Information Systems, 1983. 1(4): p. 320-328.

No context found.

Suchman, L.A. Office Procedures as Practical Action: Models of Work and System Design. Transactions on Office Information Systems. 1,4 (1983), 320-328.

No context found.

Suchman, Lucy A.: "Office Procedures as Practical Action: Models of Work and System Design," ACM Transactions on Office Information Systems, vol. 1, no. 4, October 1983, pp. 320-328.

First 50 documents

Online articles have much greater impact   More about CiteSeer.IST   Add search form to your site   Submit documents   Feedback  

CiteSeer.IST - Copyright Penn State and NEC