We investigated ways to automatically analyze movement and verbal behavior of teams of soldiers engaged in simulated military missions. Analysis of location data revealed that soldiers' locations were consistent with 3 stationary patterns and 2 movement patterns. Analysis of their dialogue detected statistical regularities. An automated text classifier was developed that employed these regularities to code dialogue utterances. These analyses demonstrate the feasibility of interpreting collaborative activity automatically and constructing models of team context for teams of soldiers engaged in trained activities.

We describe facets of specialized software applications developed to support a large collaborative engineering program. Although many of the applications were bespoke efforts, designed to the requirements of users, virtually all major applications have an unofficial spreadsheet or database backing up the official application. These tools invariably play a critical but unofficial role in the day-to-day work, acting as more than just as a work-around, while the official applications are used primarily for mandated record keeping and auditing purposes. Surprisingly, there is often management approval for these unofficial applications, but at the same time, desire to elimination these applications and only use the official applications. We discuss the implications of this finding for future collaborative applications and long-term record keeping.

In this paper, we draw on theory about social worlds to analyze how different organizational contexts affect groupware adoption. We report on a study of the adoption of data conferencing in a large distributed organization. Our data show that the diffusion process, which was driven by the users, was a result of communication and transformation of the technology across different social worlds. We also discovered that membership in multiple social worlds in an organization creates a tension for the potential adopter who is in a distributed team. To function effectively, team members must uniformly adopt the technology, yet some may face resistance at their organizational homes. Our case study showed that adoption was affected by organizational sites having conflicting views of the value of collaboration, different amounts and needs for resources, and different acceptance of technology standards. Potential technology adopters on distributed teams are faced with conflicting loyalties, constraints, and requirements between their distributed collaborations and organizational homes.

Information retrieval is generally considered an individual activity, and information retrieval research and tools reflect this view. As digitally mediated communication and information sharing increase, collaborative information retrieval merits greater attention and support. We describe field studies of information gathering in two design teams that had very different products, disciplinary backgrounds, and tools. We found striking similarities in the kinds of information they sought and the methods used to get it. For example, each team sought information about design constraints from external sources. A common strategy was to propose ideas and request feedback, rather than to ask directly for recommendations. Some differences in information seeking and sharing reflected differences in work contexts. Our findings suggest some ways that existing team collaboration tools could support collaborative information retrieval more effectively.

In this paper, we address the design issues of a collaborative workspace system, called TeamSpace, that supports geographically distributed teams by managing shared work processes and maintaining shared artifacts in a project. TeamSpace attempts to integrate both synchronous and asynchronous types of team interaction into a task-oriented environment. Since meetings are an integral part of teamwork, our current work focuses on supporting virtual meetings as part of a larger collaborative work process. We present an initial TeamSpace prototype that supports asynchronous meeting management seamlessly integrated with capture and access of synchronous distributed meetings. The captured synchronous data is integrated with other related information in TeamSpace, enabling users to efficiently gain knowledge of both current and past team activities.

Achieving a common set of collaboration tools is a significant challenge for people working together in a geographically distributed enterprise. It requires coordinated technology adoption across geographic distance and organizational boundaries. In this paper, we report on the diffusion of a data conferencing technology in a large distributed enterprise. Two years ago we studied the early adopters; now the technology is widespread. We conducted a company-wide survey and found that it is generally the users, and not management, who are the driving force in diffusing the technology across distance. We discuss the organizational conditions that led to the diffusion, how barriers have changed, and emerging work practices as a result of the diffusion.

We analyze how physically collocated teams work together now and what services they require to work together across distances, focusing on real time interactions because those interactions justify collocating teams today.We explain how Integrated Product Teams 0PT.s) are organized in system development programs and how their physical collocation facilitates communication, collaboration, and coordination within the team.Interactions witbin IPTs take two forms: scheduled meetings and opportunistic interactions.Scenarios of scheduled IPT meetings help motivate and identify requirements for supporting distributed meetings.Opportunistic interactions are far more common than scheduled meetings, and more difficult to observe and analyze because they are not scheduled or predictable.

Goals and content: To provide an organized and entertaining overview of the world fo CSCW for newcomers to the field. We will offer a framework for understanding CSCW as a research domain, a management opportunity, and a business challenge. We will analyze some of the great successes and great disasters in CSCW.

Goals and content: This tutorial draws on the experiences of the participants and instructors with groupware and workflow technologies, and with CSCW issues and methods, to construct an informed picture of what is happening and possible.

The development of human-computer interfaces was studied in two large software product development organizations. Researchers joined development projects for approximately one month and participated in interface design while concurrently interviewing other project participants and employees, recording activity in meetings and on electronic networks, and otherwise observing the process. The two organizations differed in their approaches to development, and, in each case, the approach differed in practice from the model supported by the organizational structure. Development practices blocked the successful application of accepted principles of interface design. The obstacles to effective design that results from people noticing and being affected by interface changes, and a lack of communication among those sharing responsibility for different aspects of the interface.

Article Free Access Share on Designing usable systems under real-world constraints: a practitioners forum Authors: Robert M. Mulligan View Profile , Mary Dieli View Profile , Jakob Nielsen View Profile , Steven Poltrock View Profile , Daniel Rosenberg View Profile , Susan Erlich Rudman View Profile Authors Info & Claims CHI '92: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing SystemsJune 1992 Pages 149–152https://doi.org/10.1145/142750.142777Online:01 June 1992Publication History 7citation529DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations7Total Downloads529Last 12 Months11Last 6 weeks7 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteeReaderPDF

This report describes some of the results of a survey constructed to address the multidisciplinary, collaborative nature of user interface design as it is practiced in large software development organizations today. Survey forms were prepared for Software Engineers, Human Factors Engineers, Industrial Design Engineers, Technical Writers, Training Developers, and Marketing representatives. The survey was filled out by over 200 designers from multiple sites within 7 large companies. Previous interview studies of user interface design have relied on far smaller samples taken primarily from single organizations, and have focused on the individual designer's perspective, primarily that of programmers or software engineers. While surveys have limitations as information-gathering tools, the findings in this report suggest specific places where organizational change or tool development might improve the coordination or communication among the different professionals and managers who contribute to interface design in large company settings.

Case studies of two software development organizations suggest that common practices of these organizations pose obstacles to innovation. Although software development organizations have good reasons to be conservative and resist innovation, they recognize the importance of innovations to the competitiveness of their products. But organizations experienced at development of regularly scheduled releases are not well suited to development of innovations. In this research investigators worked with the user interface teams in two organizations while interviewing people throughout the organizations. Both organizations developed prototypes, but only small design changes were prototyped and tested early in development. Innovative changes were evaluated late, when resistance to iteration was great. User interface designs and prototypes were often not shown to users. Mechanisms for coordinating development were another conservative influence. Both organizations successfully overcame these obstacles by departing from established practices.

Creating and debugging knowledge-based systems, such as expert systems, requires easy access to rules and facts in a vast, loosely-connected system. Three graphic representations were devised for a system development tool that integrates forward chaining, backward chaining, and full truth maintenance. In one representation, possible interactions among rules, determined by syntactically parsing the rules, are displayed as a directed graph. In a second representation, actual interactions among facts and rules are displayed dynamically. The third representation is a fish-eye view of the knowledge base that explains why a fact was asserted. In addition, the text of rules and facts is displayed in editing windows.