Motivated by the long-standing concern in CSCW with the state of digital coordination technologies and the ensuing accumulated empirical evidence of how the shortcomings of coordination technologies are handled in practice, this paper presents four examples of coordination technologies and coordinative artifacts that show how workers cope with their shortcomings through workarounds and hacks: CAD systems in architectural practice; the medical record in a cardiology clinic and the problem of ICD data; the IMDS database in the car industry; and the problems of making MRP systems work for the purpose of local planning. Concluding with the question what is required to support workers in their cooperative effort to ‘make coordination systems work’, the notion of computer support for ‘peer-to-peer plan management’ is introduced.

Abstract This is a study of the cooperative work of making steel in a contemporary steel plant. The study is, first of all, a study of the coordinative practices of a cooperative ensemble of operators controlling a time-critical transformation process, while spatially dispersed at different work stations across the plant, working under quite different and varying local constraints and requirements, with only rudimentary means of ongoing communication. Their individual and local contributions to the overall effort must be minutely synchronized to meet the strict temporal requirements of the operation as a whole. These challenges notwithstanding, the operators manage to act concertedly to produce quality steel and to do so routinely. The question is, how do they manage to do that? As the workers in the setting generally are not able to coordinate their cooperative effort discursively, it is analytically both feasible and necessary to foreground and identify the knowledge of metallurgy of steel and of the plant that enables them, as they go about their own local activities, to apprehend the problems and intentions of their colleagues as reflected in the changing state of the technical processes. The underlying thesis of the study is that in order to answer the general question of how workers engaged in cooperative work are able to heed the activities of their colleagues, and to do so routinely, we are well advised to ‘take the concept of practice seriously’.

Gaussian Process Models (GPMs) are Bayesian machine learning models that have been widely applied in the domain of pattern recognition due to their ability to infer from unreliable, noisy, or highly idiosyncratic data. Retrieving a complex GPM describing the data's inherent statistical patterns, such as trends, seasonalities, and periodicities, is a key requirement for various pattern recognition tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for efficient large-scale GPM retrieval: the Concatenated Composite Covariance Search (3CS) algorithm. By making use of multiple local kernel searches on dynamically partitioned data, the 3CS algorithm is able to overcome the performance limitations of state-of-the-art GPM retrieval algorithms and to efficiently retrieve GPMs for large-scale data up to three orders of magnitude as fast as state-of-the-art algorithms.

One of the key-enabling technologies in our digital information era is the Internet of Things (IoT). It provides a multitude of data technologies and analysis methodologies in order to connect internet-enabled devices and to collect, exchange, and analyze data snippets and information assets. It is forecasted that the majority of real-time data will be generated from devices interconnected within the Internet of Things. In order to be able to manage and access IoT data efficiently, we propose to make use of ptolemaic indexing. This domain-agnostic approach is applicable to many data-intensive IoT environments including a wide range of data types and (dis)similarity measures. In this paper, we provide an introduction to metric and ptolemaic indexing and evaluate their performance on different large-scale IoT datasets. The results of our performance evaluation indicate the high potential of our proposal for indexing and searching large-scale IoT data efficiently.

Complex, multivariate data streams frequently comprise subjacent behavioral patterns, which are subsumable by a process of statistical structure discovery. Revealing these hidden patterns from raw data is a major challenge in abstracting information and thus for new opportunities of efficient data analysis at scale. State-of-the-art approaches, such as CKS and ABCD, leverage statistical data models and Gaussian Processes in order to abstract from raw data and to describe their major data characteristics by means of kernel-decomposed covariance functions. The process of identifying the most appropriate covariance function is a performance bottleneck due to its super-quadratic computation time complexity for model selection and evaluation. In this paper, we thus propose a new approach for the computation of large-scale statistical data models. To this end, we propose to bound the complexity of the statistical data model and develop a sequential agglomerative approach to reduce the computational load of the required evaluative calculations. Our performance analysis indicates that our proposal is able to outperform state-of-the-art kernel search algorithms such as CKS and ABCD with respect to the qualities of efficiency and accuracy.

We examine an important part of the medical record that has not been studied extensively: physicians’ clinical notes. These notes constitute an explanatory medical narrative that documents the patient’s illness trajectory by combining each physician’s notes into a common text. Although several prior CSCW studies have addressed the role of the medical record in patient care, they have not dealt specifically with the role, structure, and content of these notes. In this article, we present a detailed analysis of a set of physicians’ clinical notes recording the acute hospitalization and subsequent treatment of a patient with chronic heart disease. We show that clinical notes are highly structured and conventionalized texts that promote conciseness while at the same time allowing physicians to express themselves in a precise and nuanced way. Based on this analysis, we argue that physicians’ clinical notes form the core of the medical record. They serve both as a ‘tool for thinking’ for the individual physician, enabling him or her to make sense of the patient’s past history and current condition, and as a coordinative artifact used by physicians, nurses, and other health care professionals. We conclude by discussing the implications of this research for the design of Electronic Medical Record (EMR) systems.

This work presents experiences with the adopting of a workflow management system in a large financial institution. We describe the gradual evolution of a traditional work process, from manual to computational regulation of coordination. The study shows that computational workflows may increase labor productivity remarkably and in general have significant economic benefits, but also that to make current workflow technologies yield such results requires unorthodox twists and tweaks in the workflow design to allow for worker control and process overview. The paper argues that workflow technology is now at a stage where the contribution of CSCW is obviously needed.

Based on a comparative study of cooperative work practices at two oncology clinics, the paper shows that work practices across these otherwise comparable settings vary significantly. Asking, how can ethnographic studies of local work practices then provide a dependable basis for design, the paper discusses how we may conceive of the relationship between ethnographic studies and systems development and suggests that a way out of the dilemma might be found in developing an analysis of the 'higher-order' practices of endless combination and recombination of artifacts, formats, notations, etc. that are found across such sites.

In their cooperative effort, architects depend critically on elaborate coordinative practices and artifacts. The paper presents, on the basis of an in-depth study of architectural work, an analysis of these practices and artifacts and shows that they are multilaterally interrelated and form complexes of interrelated practices and artifacts which we have dubbed 'ordering systems'. In doing so, the paper outlines a conceptual framework for investigating and conceiving of such practices.

Many manufacturing enterprises are now trying to introduce various forms of flexible work organizations on the shop floor. However, existing computer-based production planning and control systems pose severe obstacles for autonomous working groups and other kinds of shop floor control to become reality. The research reported in this paper is predicated on the belief that the CSCW approach could offer a strategy for dealing with this problem. The paper describes the field work and its constructive outcome: a system that assists shop-floor teams in dealing with the complexities of day-to-day production planning by supporting intelligent and responsible workers in their situated coordination activities on the shop floor.

The received understanding of the status of formal organizational constructs in cooperative work is problematic.The paper shows that the empirical evidence is not as strong as we may have believed and that there is evidence from other studies that contradicts what we may have taken for granted for years.This indicates that the role of formal constructs is more differentiated than generally taken for granted.They not only serve as 'maps' but also as 'scripts'.

This paper examines the relationship between cooperative work and the wider organizational context. The purpose of the exploration is not to contribute to organizational theory in general, but to critique the transaction cost approach to organizational theory from the point of view of cooperative work. The paper posits that the formal conception of organization—organization conceived of in terms of “common ownership”—is inadequate as a conceptual foundation for embedding CSCW systems in a wider organizational context. The design of CSCW systems for real-world application must move beyond the bounds of organizational forms conceived of in terms of “common ownership.”