Anomadic information environment is a heterogeneous assemblage of interconnected technological, and social, and organizational elements that enable the physical and social mobility of computing and communication services between organizational actors both within and across organizational borders. We analyze such environments based on their prevalent features of mobility, digital convergence, and mass scale, along with their mutual interdependencies. By using a framework that organizes research topics in nomadic information environments at the individual, team, organizational, and interorganizational levels and is comprised of both service and infrastructure development, we assess the opportunities and challenges for IS research. These deal with the design, use, adoption, and impacts of nomadic information environments. We conclude by discussing research challenges posed by nomadic information environments for information systems research skills and methods. These deal with the need to invent novel research methods and shift our research focus, the necessity to question the divide between the technical and the social, and the need to better integrate developmental and behavioral (empirical) research modes.

The emergence and convergence of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) are fundamentally transforming the use of technology, and in particular concerning the issues of mobility. The current debates on mobility, however, almost exclusively consist of functionalist analyses of how particular mobile technologies can alleviate geographical barriers for human activity. This paper reconsiders, from a theoretical perspective, the concept of mobility. We argue that mobility should not exclusively be linked to human corporeal travel. The concept also relates more broadly to the interaction people perform. In order to appreciate the relationship between mobility and human interaction, three interrelated dimensions are discussed — spatial, temporal, and contextual aspects of mobility. In order to characterize the social topology of ICT supported mobilized interaction, we suggest and discuss the adoption of a fluid metaphor. Based on these discussions, a case of a new mobile technology system introduced in a Japanese distribution service firm is discussed. 1.

Local mobility is a central aspect of collaborative work that is in need of close analysis. Between the face-to-face interaction of offices or control rooms and longdistance interaction facilitated through e.g. telephones, e-mail, the www or teleconferences lie a number of work-settings in which actors move about continuously in order to accomplish their work. They do so because they need to get access to knowledge, resources, persons and/or places. We analyze the integral nature of mobility to this kind of work practice from the ethnographic description of a hospital department, and the challenges that actors have to face to accomplish their work. Based on this ethnographic case, we propose a set of concepts for understanding local mobility as an intermediate field of distributed cooperation between centres of coordination and remote collaboration. Finally, we introduce the concept of `mobility work' as complementary to the concept of `articulation work'.

Loose coupling is a common way of organizing collaboration in work groups, but it has not been studied extensively in CSCW. In this paper, we consider the patterns of work that are seen in mobile groups that adopt a loosely coupled collaboration style. We report findings from interviews and fieldwork with teams of workers who deliver home healthcare services. In these teams, workers are mobile, widely dispersed, and autonomous, and team members communicate with each other only intermittently. Based on these findings, we identify and discuss four work patterns that occur in loosely coupled mobility: discretionary collaboration and effort thresholds, implicitly shared information, asynchronous communication and coordination, and barriers to synchrony. We consider the implications of these findings for the design of CSCW technologies.

A nomadic information environment is a heterogeneous assemblage of interconnected technological and organizational elements, which enables physical and social mobility of computing and communication services between organizational actors both within and across organizational borders. We analyze such environments based on their prevalent features of mobility, digital convergence, and mass scale. We describe essential features of each in more detail and characterize their mutual interdependencies. We build a framework, which identifies research issues in nomadic information environments at the individual, the team, the organizational, and inter-organizational levels, comprising both service and infrastructure development. We assess the opportunities and challenges for research into each area at the level of design, use and adoption, and impacts. We conclude by discussing challenges posed by nomadic information environments for information systems field to our research skills and methods. These deal with the need to invent novel research methods and shift research focus, the necessity to question the divide between the technical and the social, and the need to better integrate developmental and behavioral (empirical) research modes.

2003 I dedicate this thesis to my son, Shuntaro, who came into this world on December

Abstract. Supporting mobile collaborative work over wide areas is challenging due to the limitations and unreliability of wide area wireless networks. However, variations in patterns of collaboration require different levels of timeliness and synchrony, and place different demands on groupware and its supporting technologies. In this paper, we argue that groupware supported by wide area mobile networks strongly favors loosely-coupled work, where workers are autonomous and require a reduced level of communication. We examine the relationship between loosely-coupled group characteristics and wide area mobile groupware by considering one particular loosely coupled group—teams of home care workers. Over a two-year period, we analyzed home care work practices, and designed and field tested MoHoC, a mobile groupware application to support home care work. From this experience, we identified four characteristics of loosely-coupled groups that enable workers to accommodate the uncertainty of wide area mobile groupware: autonomy and the partitioning of work, clear ownership of data and artifacts, asynchronous awareness, and explicit asynchronous communication. 1

The paper presents results of a research project that has aimed at developing knowledge management architecture for mobile work domains. The architecture developed, called FieldWise, was based on fieldwork in two organisations and feedback from users of prototype systems. This paper describes the empirically grounded requirements of FieldWise, how these have been realised in the architecture, and how the architecture has been implemented in the news journalism domain. FieldWise adds to the field of CSCW by offering an empirically grounded architecture with a set of novel features that have not been previously reported in the literature. Keywords Mobile CSCW, Knowledge management, Organisational memory, Hand-held devices INTRODUCTION Recently, the issues of "knowledge management" [19, 1] and "mobility" [31, 6, 7] have received much attention in the CSCW literature. The interest in these issues is often motivated by the fact that work in many organisations is "knowledge intensive" an...

In this paper we propose a framework to combine Knowledge Management and context-aware and pervasive computing, emphasizing on synchronization and adaptation issues of workflow processes in mobile settings. The key aspect of the proposed framework is to enable adaptive, two-way interaction between contextaware systems and users in mobile settings. In contrast to existing concepts, we aim at capturing active feedback from users, which should contribute to the Organizational Memory, after being reviewed, evaluated and classified. Thus, users would not only act as consumers but also as suppliers of relevant information and knowledge to the system and other users. In addition, the concept includes existing approaches to adapt to, for instance, different Quality of Service levels in order to provide a maximum level of local autonomy. We suggest using the adaptation concept to also support adjustments to cross-cultural differences in perceiving and communicating information and knowledge. Our work is motivated by the need for a distributed, context-aware and pervasive computing framework to support maintenance and administration tasks related to the International Monitoring System (IMS) of the CTBTO PrepCom, an international organization located in Vienna, Austria.

NewsMate is a knowledge management system supporting distributed and mobile teams of journalists. The system addresses well-known problems of knowledge management systems by: (1) shifting focus from problems to task; (2) incorporating pointers to several sources, even external to the organisation; (3) supporting direct communication between people by articulating local conditions. This paper reports the system and the preliminary results of use experiences. Keywords: Mobile CSCW, Knowledge management, Organisational memory, Expertise management, News production 1. Introduction In this paper we offer a complementary approach to information technology (IT) support for knowledge management (KM) that is illustrated with the NewsMate prototype, a mobile KM system designed for radio journalists. Journalists repackage information to make understandable and interesting reports. In radio journalism the tempo is usually high and little time is available for preparations. Reporting is also ofte...