Christian Dörner

Supporting expertise awareness: finding out what others know

This paper presents an innovative approach to solve the problem of missing transparency of competencies within virtual organizations. We based our work on empirical studies to cope with the problem of competence finding in distributed organizations. Former studies have shown that central storage of expertise profiles is inappropriate due to missing flexibility and high costs of maintenance. The focus of our approach is to support peripheral awareness to become aware of the available competences in organizations. Our approach runs along two lines: making expertise-related communication visible for all members of an organization and visualizing competence-indicating events in collaboration infrastructures. We verified this approach by the evaluation of a prototypical implementation.

End-user development: new challenges for service oriented architectures

Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) evolved as an important architectural concept in software engineering. Although the services of an SOA are loosely coupled and reusable, there have been few considerations of SOA in terms of End User Development (EUD). In this paper we will analyze the potential of SOA for the development of adaptable systems and propose challenges, which have to be solved to reach this goal. Our analysis is based on empirical studies and on requirements for EUD systems, taken from earlier research. If SOAs are extended with structures for in-use-modifications (even beyond software technologies), it will be possible to design a new generation of user-adaptable systems.

Fostering user-developer collaboration with infrastructure probes

In this paper we present a new variation of cultural probes, called Infrastructure Probes (IP). IPs can be seen as an additional ethnographic method to get a deeper understanding of the users working context and thus help to improve the collaboration between users and developers regarding requirements elicitation. They consist of a screenshot tool, a digital camera, Post-its, forms, an IT diary and a writing pad, allowing end users to observe and document their use of the IT infrastructure in question with special emphasis on problematic situations. The results of a first evaluation of the concept show that IPs could supplement traditional ethnographic methods to give researchers as well as software engineers a deeper insight into the working habits of users, but could also be a means for users to document and exchange technology usages. For a reflection of the IP concept we conducted feedback workshops together with the participants of the evaluation. The feedback resulted in an improved version which is currently already under evaluation.

Drawing services: towards a paper-based interface for end-user service orchestration

One of the challenges end-users face in order to maintain and enhance their IT infrastructures is the simplicity and ease of use of the configuration/design-time interfaces. In this paper we describe our approach of using existing technologies for paper-based interfaces to allow end-users to orchestrate services in a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). We gathered first experiences with paper-based interfaces for IT configuration by developing an end-user-developable paper-based remote interface for interactive TV applications. Further we conducted a workshop to evaluate how end-user can orchestrate services. Here, we discuss the usefulness of a paper-based interface for the orchestration of services, from an end-user perspective and how the experiences from our prototype and the workshop can inform the design of a paper-based orchestration prototype for SOA.

Tangible and Screen-Based Interfaces for End-User Workflow Modeling

Bridging the gap between business needs and IT solutions is a major challenge in service-oriented computing, and recent research emphasizes the importance of including end users in service-based application development. An analysis of two different approaches - tangible and screen-based versions of tools - demonstrates how users can participate in the development of technical workflow models based on their perception of business processes.

Softwareanpassungspraxis von kleinen und mittelständischen Unternehmen

ZusammenfassungDie Dynamiken der weltweiten Absatzmärkte wirken sich direkt auf Anforderungen an IT-Systeme in Unternehmen aus und erfordern zunehmend flexiblere Softwaresysteme. Bislang werden unseres Erachtens insbesondere die speziellen Bedürfnisse kleiner und mittelständischer Unternehmen (KMU) noch nicht ausreichend berücksichtigt. Eine zum Thema Anpassbarkeit durchgeführte Interviewstudie in fünf kleinen und mittelständischen Unternehmen brachte Erkenntnisse über deren Anpassungspraxis. Die Anwender passen ihre Software an, soweit es ihnen möglich ist, fordern jedoch zusätzliche, weiter gehende Anpassungsmöglichkeiten, um neben Anpassungen an der Benutzeroberfläche auch funktionale Probleme und Interoperabilitätsprobleme lösen zu können. Die Systeme müssen daher um geeignete Mechanismen erweitert werden, die auf diesen Bedarf zugeschnitten sind und Anpassungen von miteinander interagierenden Systemen ermöglichen.