Current Research
Micro-Modeling
A Framework for Maximizing the Efficiency of Collaborative Tools in Service Delivery Organizations
My current work encompasses methodologies and design techniques for collaborative tools that can be used by knowledge workers in service delivery organizations. Of particular interest are organizations such as internal software development teams that support one or more business units and can be seen as service organizations in and of themselves. Though related work with industrial collaborators, we have witnessed how the skilled and diverse nature of the work and volatile business environments leads to difficulty transferring experience and knowledge from one project to the next and maintaining a predictable level of performance.
To address this, I am investigating design techniques that can be assembled into collaborative tools that afford both personal productivity and systemic organizational improvement. It is fairly well accepted that performance in an organization is dependent on both formal structures, including rules and processes, and informal structures, such as social networks. This is particularly noticeable in the internal software development organizations that our group has worked with over the past few years. However, to date most computer based tools that have made their way into the enterprise have been designed to enhance either the formal or informal organizational structures but not both simultaneously. This divide is most clearly illustrated by the stark contrast between the business process management paradigm, which is rooted in strict control, and that of groupware and cooperative tools, which have largely favored mediating unrestricted personal interaction. I believe there is an opportunity to ground a new breed of cooperative tools at the intersection of the formal and informal. An opportunity which is especially relevant to service organizations because it represents a point in time where organizational learning is not only occurring but knowledge is being externalized or internalized by the organization or its people.
As part of my dissertation work, I am engaged in formulating and evaluating a novel design framework for the construction of collaborative tools that systematically leverage informal organizational features to continuously evolve and regress formal organizational representations. This framework includes a Personal Information Management (PIM) style interface for distributed end-user modeling of individual interaction and evolution over time and a set of methods for heuristically reconciling these individual models with higher-level organizational models. By analogy, one can imagine a suggestion box and a reviewer responsible for determining the best suggestions at any given point in time. In the proposed framework the suggestions placed in the box are the content of each worker's PIM tool, such as a specially designed calendar application, and the reviewer is the collection of heuristics that can be used to rank features of each suggestion. A key distinction between purely data centric, or mining, approaches to this work is that under this framework the interface is designed in such as way to allow for and encourage elicitation and modification of the ranking heuristics collectively by the end users, forming a fluid and dynamic ranking algorithm.
The proposed framework builds upon previous work theoretically grounded in models of activity centric computing and its corresponding roots in activity and constructivist learning theories. To date, a general description of the framework has been published and a reference implementation is being constructed which will serve as the basis for several additional publications with a strong empirical foundation. I hope to demonstrate that the framework is able to achieve a useful balance between optimality through the eyes of individual workers and optimality through the eyes of a group or organization as a whole. Although challenging, I believe an evaluation and thorough characterization through both lenses is of critical practical importance given the growing range of technologies enterprises have at their disposal today. Hence, I also hope to gain some generalizable insights throughout the course of my research that can be applied to any computerized cooperative tool and its ability or inability to meet individual and organizational needs in a mutually productive and balanced fashion.
Publications
See my Curriculum Vitae
