Fieldwork Case Study - Respecifying the Design Space

Proceedings - Seventh IEEE International Conference on E-Commerce Technology Workshops, CEC 2005 Workshops, 2005

The notion of Total Cost of O w nership has become a particular focus of interest across a w ide range of commercial and academic communities in recent years, because of the w ay it enlarges the understanding of w hat the real cost of technology amounts to, beside purchase cost. The dominant conception of TCO derives from a model created by G artner Group that considers ' hard' and 'soft' costs that are distributed across three prime categories: acquisition costs, control costs; and operational costs. In order to measure those, the so far proposed TCO metrics tend to be based upon conventional, abstract categories of cost as defined by accounting and management literatures. These categories rarely attend to what might be understood as a cost in the thick of the everyday w ork of the actual members of an organisation that such categories are applied to. Our ow n research presented in this paper augments the field primarily by focusing upon break-fix costs, but also by relating these to the w ider issues in TCO . The goal within this has been to not just take costs for granted but rather to try to understand what something like ' break-fix' amounts to in organisational life. This has been pursued by looking at the details of how costs arise and are reasoned about in actual w orking practice. From this w e have then sought to understand w hat current barriers exist to the implementation of a successful break-fix strategy and what kinds of technologies might be designed to facilitate that success.

ECSCW 2007, 2007

The service provider-customer relationship, although not perhaps considered a typical collaborative relationship, is clearly collaborative work. However, such work is constrained by the very (service) nature of the relationship. Customer-service provider interaction can be characterised as interaction at the boundaries of organisations, each of which is likely to have their own workflows and orientations. Many service organisations attempt to facilitate this interaction by configuring their customers, using standardised forms or applications. In this way they bring the customers workflow into line with their own. In this paper we describe field work examining one particular service relationship; that between print shops and their customers. A notable feature of print shop-customer relationships is that customers prepare the material that the print shop then prints. This makes the standardization of workflows difficult, particularly within the service relationship. Technologies exist which aim to automate and standardize the workflow from customers to print shops. However, they have, up to now, largely failed to live up to their promise, leaving print shops to adopt ad hoc solutions. This paper describes the hidden work that the print shops do to make the service relationship work.

Reflections: The SoL Journal, 2002

This paper presents a detailed account of a knowledge-sharing system in practice. The Eureka system leverages the practical know-how and inventions of frontline employees, with the goal of helping the entire organization learn from their experience. This system and its enabling technology were developed through several iterations using a distinctive socio-technical methodology. Eureka is now deployed worldwide in a large corporation's service organization. We provide a précis of the methodology, and summarize the challenges faced in bringing such a change into the corporation.

Proceedings of the 2006 20th anniversary conference on Computer supported cooperative work - CSCW '06, 2006

This paper argues that the design of remote help-giving systems should be grounded in the methods (articulation work) through which help-givers and help-seekers coordinate their problem solving activities through social interaction and cooperative work. Using examples from ethnographic studies of both immediate and remote help-giving, the paper explicates the common characteristic methods involved in seeking, producing and engaging with expert advice and then outlines how emerging technologies might best be used to support such articulation work in the design and development of computer support systems for remote troubleshooting of devices with embedded computing capabilities.

ECSCW 2005, 2005

When working remotely with physical objects obvious problems of reference arise because of the lack of a mutually shared object. Systems aiming to support such work tend to be based on understandings of face-to-face interaction and frequently use video. However, video introduces new interactional problems. This paper describes a field study of remote interaction around objects that is telephone-centred, namely in a call centre for troubleshooting office devices. We describe how breakdowns in mutual orientation stem from three main problematics: 1) The inadequate fidelity of operators' support resources; 2) The lack of mutual access to indicative resources; 3) operators' lack of direct access to customers' actions and orientation. From this analysis, we have developed a design proposal for supporting such work. Rather than using video, we propose that utilising a linked problem representation would address these problems. To this end we describe our proposal for a bidirectional remote visualisation of the troubleshooting problem.

Proceedings of the Ninth Conference on European Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 2005

When working remotely with physical objects obvious problems of reference arise because of the lack of a mutually shared object. Systems aiming to support such work tend to be based on understandings of face-to-face interaction and frequently use video. However, video introduces new interactional problems. This paper describes a field study of remote interaction around objects that is telephone-centred, namely in a call centre for troubleshooting office devices. We describe how breakdowns in mutual orientation stem from three main problematics: 1) The inadequate fidelity of operators' support resources; 2) The lack of mutual access to indicative resources; 3) operators' lack of direct access to customers' actions and orientation. From this analysis, we have developed a design proposal for supporting such work. Rather than using video, we propose that utilising a linked problem representation would address these problems. To this end we describe our proposal for a bidirectional remote visualisation of the troubleshooting problem.

In recent years industry increasingly employ control systems using distribution by means of a large number of control units linked by high-speed communication networks. A condition for such systems to work is that units are compatible with each other and the system of units is compatible with the plant and with the other control systems existing in a plant. Verifying such compatibility conditions is a difficult problem since units can have software version discrepancies, installation problems or equipment failure. Thus it is today common to spend large amounts of money on support, for diagnoses and recovery purposes. The support operation relies on the information gathered during the diagnostic operation and it relies on interpreting this data such that a precise fault diagnosis and fault recovery can be achieved. The data collected for diagnostics contains the sequence of relevant events and system state information from the customer site, for the purpose of later analysis and troubleshooting. Problems, especially software related, encountered while running the system at the customer site are not uncommon and require being resolved rapidly, to reduce customer losses. The support engineers who diagnose and resolve these problems need to be efficient and experienced.

2005

Reflections, 2002

A n organization's most valuable knowledge -its essential intellectual capital-is not limited to the information in of cial document repositories and databases, such as scienti c formulae, ''hard'' research data, computer codes, codi ed procedures, nancial gures, customer records, and the like. It also includes the largely undocumented ideas, insights, and know-how of its members (see, for example, .