Jeanette Blomberg

Reflections on 25 Years of Ethnography in CSCW

In this article we focus attention on ethnography’s place in CSCW by reflecting on how ethnography in the context of CSCW has contributed to our understanding of the sociality and materiality of work and by exploring how the notion of the ‘field site’ as a construct in ethnography provides new ways of conceptualizing ‘work’ that extends beyond the workplace. We argue that the well known challenges of drawing design implications from ethnographic research have led to useful strategies for tightly coupling ethnography and design. We also offer some thoughts on recent controversies over what constitutes useful and proper ethnographic research in the context of CSCW. Finally, we argue that as the temporal and spatial horizons of inquiry have expanded, along with new domains of collaborative activity, ethnography continues to provide invaluable perspectives.

Service innovation and design

This panel introduces the CHI community to a growing area of innovation and business development that leverages new technology platforms, namely service design. This topic is explored through a series of case studies of service design in a diverse set of industries and contexts from healthcare delivery to internet -based services.

Studying Infrastructuring Ethnographically

This paper is motivated by a methodological interest in how to investigate information infrastructures as an empirical, real-world phenomenon. We argue that research on information infrastructures should not be captive to the prevalent method choice of small-scale and short-term studies. Instead research should address the challenges of empirically studying the heterogeneous, extended and complex phenomena of infrastructuring with an emphasis on the necessarily emerging and open-ended processual qualities of information infrastructures. While existing literature identifies issues that make the study of infrastructuring demanding, few propose ways of addressing these challenges. In this paper we review characteristics of information infrastructures identified in the literature that present challenges for their empirical study. We look to current research in the social sciences, particularly anthropology and science and technology studies (STS) that focus on how to study complex and extended phenomena ethnographically, to provide insight into the study of infrastructuring. Specifically, we reflect on infrastructuring as an object of ethnographic inquiry by building on the notion of “constructing the field.” Recent developments in how to conceptualize the ethnographic field are tied both to longstanding traditions and novel developments in anthropology and STS for studying extended and complex phenomena. Through a discussion of how dimensions of information infrastructures have been addressed practically, methodologically, and theoretically we aim to link the notion of constructing the ethnographic field with views on infrastructuring as a particular kind of object of inquiry. Thus we aim to provide an ethnographically sensitive and methodologically oriented “opening” for an alternative ontology for studying infrastructuring ethnographically.

Forecasting Workloads in Multi-step, Multi-route Business Processes

This paper presents a technique developed to forecast workloads in a business process. Business processes such as the process of engaging on a service contract consist of multiple steps that are not necessarily sequential. There can also be multiple routes that work can take in transition. In order to forecast workloads at different steps of such business processes, one needs to predict dynamic movements of process instances within the system as well as the arrival of new instances from outside. By analyzing transition log data, we construct a Markov chain, which models the movement of process instances across different steps of the business process. Our approach takes into account the fact that an instances prior trajectory may affect its future transitions. Via numerical studies, we demonstrate the overall performance of the proposed forecasting method. We also investigate how the performance of the forecasting method changes as various characteristics of the business process change. The proposed technique is general, and can be applied to a large class of business processes.

Forecasting Service Profitability

This paper describes ways to connect ledger cost behavior of a service delivery project with cost estimations derived at the time of contractual agreement. The purpose of this connection is to improve the management of the service life cycle, providing long range forecasting of the profitability of various service offerings. We emphasize cost, but our methods apply also to revenue, and consequently to profit. In a perfect financial world the connection between the cost estimate and the actual costs would be maintained in a tight feedback loop. The complex real world of multi-year and multi-country service delivery projects requires accommodation of (1) historical changes in accounting practices and (2) missing data. We describe the content of a cost case, the content of the ledger, and methods for forecasting profitability of parts of delivery projects using both the cost case and historical ledger experience of other similar projects. This paper reports a work in progress. We limit discussion of accuracy measurements to one benchmark, and we discuss potential improvements we have not yet implemented.

A Service Practice Approach

In the practice of designing and engineering business systems, work is often defined and represented by a series of activities comprised of discrete tasks performed in a prescribed sequence, within a particular timeframe and set in the context of a particular technology. These elements are often reduced to a set of controlled system inputs and outputs, ignoring the complex interactions that need to be supported in highly collaborative work systems endemic of service systems . It is our position that designing and engineering service -based systems requires a new approach to understanding the interactions between the people, information technology and activities needed to enable services. We have approached service system design from the perspective of investigating and understanding work practices as the basis for system innovation . As such, our focus is on understanding what people actually do in practice, including their use of information, tools, methods and the relationships amongst these elements. This paper describes a practice-based approach for investigating work in service organizations. We argue for a need to understand work from the practice perspective, describe our practice-based approach, present a new way to represent work using practice diagrams, provide a case study as an example of our approach and make recommendations for future research.

The implications of enterprise-wide pipeline management tools for organizational relations and exchanges

This paper explores the impact of enterprise-wide processes and technologies on group relations and exchanges. We examine the use of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools in sales pipeline management. Through an ethnographic study of globally-distributed sales teams we show that the way enterprise-wide tools are integrated into daily practices impacts organizational relations and exchange. We pay particular attention to information exchange as a vehicle for building, leveraging and deterring organizational relations. Our analysis suggests that different approaches to using standardized tools and processes have variable impact on team relations. We provide support for the argument that technologies should be designed and deployed in accordance with an understanding of the contexts of use and in consideration for their impact on organizational relations.

Towards an Anthropology of Services

ABSTRACT This paper proposes an anthropology of services with implications for service science and design. Contemporary services are often presented as a rupture with previous economic regimes such as manufacturing, a discontinuity that allows services to be conceptualized as a professional domain. We argue instead that services have long characterized the human condition and that they are always embedded in local contexts. An anthropology of services explicates these social contexts to develop more varied and grounded approaches to service encounters, notions of co-production and co-creation, value propositions and service systems. Paradoxically, an anthropology of services draws attention to the conceptual and methodological messiness of service worlds and in doing so it contributes to expanding our understanding of the variety of services, the limits to their conceptualization as objects of design and the possibilities for intervening in and around them to contribute to human betterment.

Mapping and visualizing service provider and client interactions: the case for participation

The interactions between service providers and their clients (touchpoints) define the service experience for clients and providers alike. In the context of IT outsourcing services, where one company contracts with another for IT services, these interactions are frequent and occur across an increasingly globally distributed delivery organization. The scope and complexity of these interactions provide a challenge for managing the service experience in that it is difficult for members of the delivery team to be aware of the wide range of interactions taking place with clients. This project is focused on designing ways to enable delivery teams to create awareness of their touchpoints with clients and to make changes to improve the overall client experience.

A Case Based Approach to Serve Information Needs in Knowledge Intensive Processes

Case workers who are involved in knowledge intensive business processes have critical information needs.When dealing with a case, they often need to check how similar cases were handled and what best practices, methods and tools proved useful. In this paper, we present our Solution Information Management SIM system developed to assist case workers by retrieving and offering targeted and contextual content recommendations to them. In particular, we present a novel method for intelligently weighing different fields in a case when they are used as context to derive recommendations. Experimental results indicate that our approach can yield recommendations that are approximately 15 more precise than those obtained through a baseline approach where the fields in the context have equal weights. SIM is being actively used by case workers in a large IT services company.