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We present a case study of a project to introduce a new organization-wide, integrated information system within the UK healthcare sector that we conducted as part of a wider, socio-technical exploration of factors influencing the dependability of computer-based systems. We report in detail on the problems of working with and evolving a standardized classification of work procedures that is central to the organizational purpose of the new IT system, and the responses of both users and of the project team to these problems. These have important implications for the usability of computer-based systems and for the dependability of the information they contain. Drawing insights from sociological studies of classification and standardization, we reflect upon the lessons for the development and implementation of computer-based systems designed to serve as "common information spaces." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interactive information systems must not only encode information internally but must also produce externally visible representations, which may be inscribed into various forms, including visual and paper artifacts. In looking at visual information, many investigators have noted the relationship between representational forms and practice; maps, for example, provide resources for particular forms of interpretation and computation, highlight certain features and omit others, reflect power relationships between competing groups, etc. One particularly interesting aspect of digital media, though, is the ease with which they can be translated into multiple coordinated and concurrent visual representations. In our studies of medical work, we have found that the issues of visual representation are a key element of how work practices are coordinated. Different views help to stitch together diverse work practices surrounding a particular task or a particular patient. This is particularly true with respect to the temporal aspects of work, which have been relatively underexamined in conventional studies of the cooperative use of electronic information systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As both technologies and organizations undergo dramatic changes in form and function, organizational researchers are increasingly turning to concepts of innovation, emergence, and improvisation to help explain the new ways of organizing and using technology evident in practice. With a similar intent, I propose an extension to the structurational perspective on technology that develops a practice lens to examine how people, as they interact with a technology in their ongoing practices, enact structures that shape their emergent and situated use of that technology. Viewing the use of technology as a process of enactment enables a deeper understanding of the constitutive role of social practices in the use and change of technologies in the workplace. After developing this lens, I offer an example of its use in research, and then suggest some implications for the study of technology in organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In large organizations, people often take part in processes in which they have no prior experience. In such situations a common problem is figuring out how to begin, and a common solution is the simple expedient of talking to others who have more expertise. However, in large distributed organizations, this expedient is often not so simple. In this chapter, we describe two applications—Babble, and its Web-based successor, Loops—which people have turned to this end. We discuss the design of the systems, with particular attention to the ways in which they make people and their activities visible and thus available to one another, and illustrate how people make use of this availability in seeking expertise. We conclude with a discussion of the ways in which the functionality of such systems can aid people in drawing upon one another for assistance and expertise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Troubleshooting large computer systems is often highly collaborative. Because these systems consist of complex infrastructures with many interdependent components, expertise is spread across people and organizations. Those who administer such systems are faced with cognitive and social challenges, including the establishment of common ground and coordination of attention, as they troubleshoot in collaboration with peers, technical support, and software application developers. To investigate these aspects of administration work, we take a distributed cognition approach to interpreting a specific instance of problem-solving in administering a Web-based system, examining the movement of representational states across media in a single system administrator's environment. We also apply the idea of language use as a joint activity to understand how discourse attributes affect what is accomplished collaboratively. Our analysis focuses on information flow among participants and other sources and how these affect what information is attended to, transmitted, and used. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research examines how representational gestures (Kita 2000), made by scientists during collaborative discussion in a biochemistry lab, are used in formulating scientific theory. By analyzing digital video of lab meetings and interviews, we find that representational gestures are frequently used to reference, modify, and embody portions of existing material structure such as models, diagrams, and graphs. Representational gestures appear to play a significant role in how scientists both conceptualize and communicate theories. We believe that representational gestures operate as instantiations of essential spatio-dynamic features that are not efficiently conveyed in other modalities, like language and graphical representations, and, as such, are essential resources for shaping theoretical understandings when used in collaborative, face-to-face activity. Gestures may also serve to align cognitive processes in a "community of practice" (Lave 1991) and can package theoretical conjectures into a single semiotic form that can be used symbolically to evoke a rich, shared conceptual history. We use a theoretical framework provided by distributed cognition and embodied cognition to examine jointly shared representational gestures as cognitive artifacts produced and modified by the biochemistry lab community during the practice of theory construction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper calls for a respecification of IT systems design and development practice as co-realization. Co-realization is an orientation to technology production that develops out of a principled synthesis of ethnomethodology and participatory design. It moves the locus of design and development activities into workplace settings where technologies will be used. Through examples drawn from case studies of IT projects, we show how co-realization, with its stress on design-in-use and the longitudinal involvement by IT professionals in the "lived work" of users, helps to create uniquely adequate, accountable solutions to the problems of IT-organizational integration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This chapter discusses, as an example of a resource in use, the Zephyr Help Instance as used at MIT. The Zephyr Help Instance is a chat-like system that allows users to ask questions and other users to answer. The Zephyr Help Instance has the social and technical affordances for continued use as socio-technical system in its environment of use and has become a resource for its users. This chapter highlights many of the structures and interactions necessary for the adoption of a system to serve as a sustained and dependable resource in people's environment. To continue providing help, the Help Instance requires, like any sociality, a common-enough understanding of the space's purpose, a shared understanding of the key roles (i.e., questioners and answerers), some norms about acceptable and preferred behavior, and a positive adaptation to the organizational culture. In other words, in order to continue as a social place, there must be a negotiated social order. The Zephyr Help Instance is a simple but successful and effective example of this. The way these social mechanisms work together and reinforce one another allows Zephyr to function appropriately for its users-to become a resource for them. As well, in the Zephyr system's technical capabilities for new instances (for policing of the topics), the system speed (for background attending), the public messages (for rewarding and recruiting answerers), as well as, paradoxically, the lack of memory and the poor display options (for background attending) provide technical affordances for these social mechanisms. We found that the Help Instance's users have made creative use of system affordances to organize and regulate their electronic social space. Users were able to seize upon the system features for their own social purposes. The Zephyr Help Instance became a resource in the users' world, allowing them to create and maintain a socially useful and usable system over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this chapter, we describe the genesis and use of an artifact that became a resource for a wide range of activities. We discuss how the creation and use of the rush cheat sheet (RCS) and its associated representations at the Dallas-Ft. Worth TRACON (Tower Radar Approach Control) brought together information and expert knowledge across organizational boundaries. Multi-organizational information became synthesized in a composite that could be used as a resource uniquely by the contributing organizations, as well as by different roles within each organization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]