Giorgio De Michelis

Situating conversations within the language/action perspective: the Milan conversation model

The debate on the language/action perspective has been receiving attention in the CSCW field for almost ten years. In this paper, we recall the most relevant issues raised during this debate, and propose a new exploitation of the language/action perspective by considering it from the viewpoint of understanding the complexity of communication within work processes and the situatedness of work practices. On this basis, we have defined a new conversation model, the Milan Conversation Model, and we are designing a new conversation handler to implement it.

A three-faceted view of information systems

Dealing with change is one of the most fundamental challenges facing information systems professionals today. Business process restructuring, shifting alliances and new competitors, deregulation and globalization, legacy system migration and new technology adoption, are but a few of the economical, organizational, and technological forces contributing to the pervasiveness of change in today’s IT environment. Flexible and adaptable information systems can be powerful enablers for organizational and business innovations, whereas rigid, inflexible systems are serious obstacles to organizational effectiveness and success.

Superposed Automata Nets

The capability of representing in an highly communicable way the concurrency among autonomous subsystems is frequently crucial in real systems modelling, whichever the nature of the system can be.

Contexts, work processes, and workspaces

In this paper a framework for the conceptual modelling of organizational contexts is provided and it is embodied into an extension of the TOSCA organizational handbook.The context of a work process is relevant since the effectiveness of the cooperation among its actors is highly dependent on their awareness of it. It requires, on the one hand, that the context is made available in terms of visibility and/or transparency; on the other, that at any time a selection is made so that only what is relevant to the context is provided, leaving the rest in the background. With respect to the first requirement a model of the organizational context is needed, so that all the information regarding its dimensions can be linked together. With respect to the second requirement, a work process model provides some guidelines for designing a system offering a selective access to the context of a work process. The workspace metaphor is a good paradigm to make that information ready at hand, since it is the natural framework within which people do their work.

Rethinking CSCW systems: the architecture of MILANO

After eleven years, CSCW is a well recognized research field which has generated, among other things, some new theoretical findings on work practices and cooperation and some new systems that are successfully applied by several organizations. The evaluation of successful applications from the point of view of the above recalled CSCW theories indicates some requirements (openness, continuity, contextualization and language-action integration) that the new generation of CSCW systems should satisfy. The prototype of the MILANO system is a working example of how those requirements can be met and of the challenges a full development of the CSCW potential poses to system designers and developers.

Computer Support for Cooperative Work: Computers Between Users and Social Complexity

In this paper I consider work processes as complex customer-performer relations. From this point of view I identify the cooperation network carrying on a work process and analyse the cooperation forms of its members. I show how cooperative work is primarily characterized by the complexity of the inter-actions constituting it, and how it is possible to measure the transaction costs of a work process generated by its complexity.

A prototype of an integrated coordination support system

UTUCS is a system for supporting a group of people (an office, a team, etc.) interconnected through a communication network in handling conversations carried on through different communication media. It has been developed with the aim of providing a good coordination support system that pairs the best computer-based tool a group may have in any situation (dispersed versus non dispersed, synchronous versus non synchronous) with the ability to switch from one to another, maintaining integrated and linked the information it creates. As UTUCS is a general system devoted to integrating conversations independently of the communication media exploited, it has been designed in such a way that it can be enhanced by developing a module for any communication medium that can be effectively supported by a computer network. Up to now the Electronic Mail module, the Face to Face Couple Colloquies module, and the Face to Face Group Meetings module have been implemented.

On The Synchronic Structure of Transition Systems

Net Theory was introduced in the early sixties by Carl Adam Petri [1] as a form of general system theory based on the notion of concurrency. Net Theory has been widely developed during these years, becoming very popular as a framework for the analysis and specification of concurrent systems. Among the basic notions of the theory, stands the synchronic structure of a system. It characterizes dependencies between sets of its events in terms of a distance measuring their degree of synchronization. In this paper we show that a natural generalization of regions introduced by Ehrenfeucht and Rozenberg exactly corresponds to synchronic distances and that this notion of region can be used to axiomatise a class of transition systems corresponding to bounded place/transition nets without loops.

Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Petri Nets

Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) has brought to the attention of computer professionals the role computer applications may play supporting collaboration, coordination and communication among people cooperating in a common task. In particular, people acting in accordance with a structured workflow, as a procedure or as a project plan, can be supported by a class of systems called workflow management systems, not only to play their role in it, but also to increase their awareness of the situation in which they are acting so that they can make better decisions when needed and overcome breakdowns finding new (exceptional) paths. Workflow management systems, in fact, facilitate the description, modeling, analysis, enactment, and coordination of (the) structured (component of) work processes. These systems assist and mediate communication, interaction, understanding, and synchronization among collaborating people and processes within organizations.

Work processes, organizational structures and cooperation supports: Managing complexity

Abstract In this paper the service paradigm is used to analyze and characterize work processes and their complexity. A work process, from this point of view, is characterized by the communicative relations binding its participants and embedding their performances. The complexity of work processes is then related to organizational design issues, to the empowerment of professional skills and to the computer support systems capable of helping people to manage the complexity of their work effectively. The approach to change management that underlies this paper renovates the Socio-technical System Design Methods, allowing them to fully exploit the potential of existing Information and Communication Technology.