(Re-) Discovering CSCW
Lecture at EC Joint Research Centre, Ispra, Italy, Oct. 9th, 1992
Liam J.Bannon
Dept. of Computer Science
Copenhagen University, Denmark
bannon@diku.dk
This paper discusses the origins and development of a new field of scientific research and information technology application called Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, or "CSCW" as it is more commonly called. Confusions surrounding the focus of the field are discussed, and alternative definitions of the field outlined. A number of events happening concurrently in the workplace, in technology, the development process, and the organizational milieu are argued to have contributed to the growth of interest in CSCW issues. Some early experiences with CSCW systems are also discussed.
Interest in the area of workgroup computing, collaborative computing, groupware, cooperative work support, and similar sounding terms has increased significantly over the last several years. Despite this interest, there is still a lot of confusion about the exact focus of this area, commonly labelled "Computer Supported Cooperative Work", or CSCW, and the reasons for its sudden growth. This paper provides a short introduction to the area, recounting its development, definitions of the field, and also briefly examining certain systems that are discussed within the context of CSCW, and some experiences gained to date through use of these systems. A single paper can scarcely scratch the surface of this topic, and interested readers should investigate other sources for accounts of the field (see, e.g. Bannon, 1992, Bannon & Schmidt, 1989, Greif, 1988, Grudin, 1991, Hughes, Randall, & Shapiro, 1991, Johansen, 1988, Schmidt & Bannon, 1992, Wilson, 1991)
The paper is organized as follows. Section 1 gives a brief historical account of the development of the field. Section 2 then provides further detail on the numerous attempts to delineate the core concerns of this new field. Developments in several areas that have provided a suitable context for work in CSCW are mentioned in Section 3. Finally, some CSCW systems and the experiences gleaned from use of such systems are discussed in Section 5.
1. A Short History
The term CSCW was coined by the computer scientists Irene Greif of MIT (now at Lotus) and Paul Cashman of Digital in the early eighties. They organized a workshop concerning the development of computer systems that would support people in their work activities. It was in trying to describe what the focus of the workshop was that Cashman and Greif came up with the term Computer-Supported Cooperative Work to describe their object of interest. The birth of the "movement" can thus be dated to this small Invited Workshop (34 people) at Endicott House, Masachussetts, in August, 1984. It brought together a number of people from somewhat disparate areas, e.g., office information systems, hypertext, and computer-mediated communication to name a few. In terms of names, it included people like Doug Engelbart, who had in the 1960's pioneered interactive computing and team support in his NLS/AUGMENT system, Clarence "Skip" Ellis, then at Xerox PARC, well-known in the office automation area, Tom Malone, at MIT, who was developing his ideas on organizational interfaces, Randy Trigg, author of one of the first Ph.D. theses on hypertext (TEXTNET), Carl Hewitt, working on conceptions of office information systems as open systems, Murray Turoff, developer of the New Jersey Institute of Technology's EIES computer conferencing system, and others. Although most of these individuals were already well known within specific research areas, they had not been brought together before to discuss common concerns of developing software to support distributed ensembles of people in their work.
The first open conference with the title Computer-Supported Cooperative Work was organized in December 1986 in Austin, Texas. It brought together around 300 people from a variety of backgrounds, artificial intelligence, human-computer interaction, office information systems, computer science, psychologists and anthropologists, and was to all accounts a great success. Participants heard about 30 papers on such diverse topics as : experiences in introducing computer conferencing systems; experiences with computerized meeting rooms; design and use of electronic mail filtering tools; design and use of shared calendar systems; problems of collaborative hypertext and many other topics. Interest in the field has continued to grow, with an even larger conference on the topic held in 1988 in Portland, Oregon. There were about 485 participants, mainly from US industry, at this Conference, which had a somewhat different flavor to it, in terms of the selected papers. There was an interesting shift towards concern with the nature of the design process, with a number of papers, especially the Scandinavian ones, addressing the issue of user involvement in design as a prerequisite for quality design. At the same time there was some complaints from software groups because they wanted more papers and demonstrations of actual working CSCW systems.
The enthusiasm for the topic continued, however, with the first European conference on the topic held soon afterwards in September 1989 in Gatwick, England. Despite the short lead time between the conception of the conference and its realization, this European conference did succeed in helping to bring together European researchers in the area and the papers presented, though of mixed quality, did contain some interesting material. (A selection of the papers presented appears in J. Bowers and S. Benford (Eds.), 1991) . Once again, although the conference did serve a purpose in bringing together people of different backgrounds, the quite different "world views" of the participants was also apparent, with a separation between those groups focussed on modelling and design of office communication systems and those interested in developing a richer understanding of cooperative work practices. Not only were the goals different, but the language and methods used were also quite distinct, leaving some neophytes quite confused as to the "core issues" of the CSCW field.
Despite these worries, overall interest in the area continued to grow sharply. The 3rd North American CSCW Conference was held in 1990 in Los Angeles, attracting around 560 delegates, with over 40 from Japan, a massive increase on the previous Portland Conference. Japanese presentations were also well represented in the technical sessions, indicating that the arrival of Japanese products in this area will not be long in coming. Well over half the delegates came from outside academia. The Second European CSCW Conference was held in Amsterdam in Sept. 1991, with a full attendance of 200 people, and was received positively. Some rapprochement between the technical and social perspectives could be discerned in a number of the papers. The next North American conference is in November, 1992 in Toronto, and in 1993 the European CSCW Conference will be held in Milano, Italy. Besides the major CSCW conferences mentioned here, there have been a number of CSCW-related conferences and workshops on collaboration technology, group decision support systems and multi-user systems both in Europe and North America in recent years. Several journals now include CSCW in their list of topics, and a new journal published by Kluwer is solely devoted to the topic -- CSCW - Computer Supported Cooperative Work. Thus, CSCW certainly has become a recognized area of interest, with a growing number of interested researchers and the support of many software manufacturers and developers, despite the confusion at times about what characterizes the new field. Let us now look at some of these attempts to define the field.
2. Defining CSCW
Despite the interest in the new field, evident above, understanding what CSCW is all about turns out to be a somewhat difficult task. There is still no commonly accepted definition of CSCW (Wilson, 1991). Indeed, whether CSCW can be viewed as a new field of research in its own right has been questioned by some. Bannon et al. (1988) noted how CSCW might be viewed as simply an "umbrella term" that allowed people from a variety of different disciplines, with partially overlapping concerns, to come together and discuss issues, without any common ground as to the concept of CSCW, other than the very loose idea that it was somehow about the use of computers to support activities of people working together. In a somewhat similar vein, Rob Kling has spoken of CSCW as an "arena" where different groups vie for the attention of participants, rather than a coherent focused field. Arguing against the claim that CSCW is a new field, Hughes et al. (1991) view CSCW rather as a paradigm shift in the way we think of designing computer support systems. This position has similarities to the views of Suchman (1989), who describes CSCW as "....the design of computer-based technologies with explicit concern for the socially organized practices of their intended users."
Another conception of what the field is about can be discerned among those who focus on the computer support of "groups" as the hallmark of the field. This has given rise to the term "groupware" to distinguish the computer products marketed in this area. Irene Greif, one of the originators of the term CSCW, has provided a more restrictive description of the new field, defining it as "an identifiable research field focused on the role of the computer in group work" (Greif, 1988). This focus on the support of groups per se has been critiqued by others. Greenberg (1991) attempts to evade definitional problems by using both terms in the title of a recent edited collection in the area, stating that groupware describes the development of software for groups, and CSCW is the research area concerned with the nature of work practices etc., on which groupware builds.
Bannon & Schmidt (1989) define CSCW as "an endeavour to understand the nature and characteristics of cooperative work with the objective of designing adequate computer-based technologies". Here the emphasis is on understanding cooperative work as a distinctive form of work, and on supporting these cooperative work forms with appropriate technology. This broadens the scope of the field considerably beyond that of computer support for groups. This definition is echoed in that of Lyytinen (cited in Robinson,1990), who argues: "CSCW is neither solely a tool or technology business, not just a new way to study computer impact on the work place. Instead, in CSCW, equal emphasis is put on the distinctive qualities of co-operative work processes, and on questions of design: how to mould computer technology to fit into and support these work processes."
While cognizant of the arguments made by those who view CSCW as "merely" a paradigm shift, the position taken in this paper is that CSCW can be seen as a new research field involved in exploring a wide range of issues concerning cooperative work arrangements and its support via information technology. A focus on cooperative work arrangements and their computer support is what makes the area "new". While earlier work in the "office automation" field has at times concerned itself with such issues, the new field should not be seen as simply an extension to office information systems (OIS), as CSCW entails both a wider remit as regards the different settings in which it is appropriate to study cooperative work arrangements, as well as a more explicit focus on the support requirements of cooperative work than is seen in the OIS field. Thus studies in areas such as computer-aided design (CAD), computer-integrated manufacturing (CIM), computer-aided software engineering (CASE), etc., are all relevant to the CSCW field to the extent that they study the use of computers to support cooperative work in different domains. Such a view of the field opens it up to a wider mix of disciplines than simply computing and software engineers, encompassing cognitive and social psychologists, work sociologists and anthropologists, and many others.
Understanding what CSCW is about through examining the composition of the community is another illuminating approach. Within the field of CSCW, loosely construed, a number of different groupings have been discerned by commentators. Howard (1988) coined the term "strict constructionists" to describe those in the field focused on the development of computer systems to support group work, who tend to use themselves as objects of analysis in the provision of support tools. These people, mainly implementers, are interested in building tools - widgets, and they see the area of CSCW as a possible leverage point for creating novel applications. Most of these people equate the CSCW field with Groupware, as they focus on new software applications. Howard (1988) has labelled those who make up the remainder of the CSCW field, the larger part, as "loose constructionists," a heterogeneous collection of people, some of whom are drawn to the area by their dissatisfaction with current uses of technology to support work processes, others because they see in this area a chance for communities who traditionally have not had a voice in the design of computer systems to have one. Some wish to make the design of computing systems more democratic, so that the resulting systems will actually support cooperative form of working, rather than hinder it - where the word ‘cooperative’ has a positive value associated with it, connected with workplace democracy. Part of the rationale here is that for work to be truly ‘cooperative,’ in their sense, one should design systems in a cooperative manner, and ways of achieving this therefore need to be investigated, and developed. The focus is on alternatives to traditional systems and systems design, alternative ways of doing design, of involving users, etc.(see, e.g., Greenbaum & Kyng, 1991).
It is the involvement of what has come to be called the Scandinavian school of systems developers in CSCW - for example, in the 1988 CSCW Conference - that has lead some people to equate the CSCW area with participative design (PD) practices. While certainly various forms of user involvement are important to the development of successful CSCW systems, use of such techniques or ideas does not automatically signify any focus on CSCW as defined here. Certainly, the software development process itself can be seen as a form of cooperative work which is supported by computers, and thus is an interesting domain for CSCW studies, but labelling papers on participatory design techniques in general as CSCW studies does not add insight to either field of endeavour. Indeed, many participative design practices e.g., Future Workshops, Wall Charting, etc., are noticeable by the complete absence of computers in supporting the ongoing work of the group. The issues of CSCW and Participative Design are thus seen as quite separable, if not orthogonal.
That the nature of the CSCW field has been, and continues to be, the subject of debate as we have shown here is not necessarily problematic. In any area of science, the definition of the field - its core concerns and its boundaries - is best viewed as "contested terrain", even more so as the field struggles to find a unique identity, so it can set itself apart from its progenitors. The simple fact that there is dispute is symptomatic of a healthy debate about the underlying issues of computer support, the nature of work, the role of groups in organizations, etc., which should be clarified over time. We now examine some of the explanations offered as to why the emerging field of CSCW has attracted such a variety of disciplinary groups and commercial interests.
3.0 The attraction of CSCW
Explanations abound as to why the field has come into focus at this stage in the development of information systems. These accounts come from a variety of different organizational and disciplinary perspectives. Examining these accounts in and of themselves provides us with an interesting insight into some of the different perspectives and players in the CSCW field. The following just touches on a few of these viewpoints and arguments.
In a recent paper, Grudin (1991) argues that the CSCW area can be seen as an arena where two different development traditions, that of Information Systems (IS) and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) converge. He sees the CSCW focus on groups as intermediate between the traditional focus of HCI on individuals and of IS on the whole organization. Similarly, he views the development process for Groupware as requiring a melding of the dominant forms of development work in the other two fields - the contract tradition of IS and the product development tradition of the HCI field.
There are a number of changes occurring, e.g. in the field of information systems practice, in the environment of organizations, in technology itself, and in people's expectations concerning computer systems, which I believe have contributed to the emergence of, and interest in, this CSCW phenomenon. Let us look at some of these changes in a little more detail.
Information Systems Practice
The earlier IS goal of "automating the office" has been discarded on both practical and theoretical grounds. Information-flow diagrams of office activities do not, in any literal sense, specify how work actually is accomplished - handling "routine" discrepancies, bending the "fixed" rules, contextualizing aspects of the work, etc. This does not mean that they are without any merit, but it does mean that they cannot be assumed to "capture" office work, and serve as an adequate base for automating office activities. The idea of an office being a place where people perform a set of well-structured tasks according to prescribed procedures has given way to a view of the office as a social community where work is accomplished through the locally situated activities and interactions of office members. Ethnographic studies of office environments have carefully documented aspects of this rich interactive world, constructed by the participants (Gerson and Star, 1986, Suchman, 1983, Wynn, 1979).
Recently, IS researchers have accepted the need to understand more fully the practices of people at work, in order to build more appropriate supportive technology. The shift in emphasis can be seen in the change in terminology from "automating" the office to "supporting" office workers with "office information systems" where computer systems are seen as support systems for the human workers, rather than as replacements for them (see, for example, Fikes and Henderson, 1981, Woo and Lochovsky, 1986, Hewitt, 1986). CSCW, through its emphasis on the support aspects of the technology, and with its interdisciplinary community, including ethnographers and others who focus on work practices, has attracted interest from many researchers in IS who see the need for further understanding of workplace practices as a key aspect of improving the quality of IS designs.
The Search for New Software Application Markets
CSCW has attracted interest from commercial software developers as it is seen as a possible growth area for new software applications - groupware, in terms of supporting group activities rather than individual activities. While some early groupware products e.g. shared calendaring systems ( see below) have enjoyed mixed success, developers are still optimistic. Interestingly, it has been noted by Greif among others, that in the long run, the differentiation of a segment of the software product market in terms of "groupware" may not make much sense, as all software will be groupware, i.e. to the extent that any particular software application will have the required features to support group use when appropriate. For the moment however, there is a massive increase in the marketing hype for software specifically focussed on group support.
The Organizational Environment
The increasingly turbulent environment in which business operates has lead to the need for better ways of organizing and coordinating work activities, with more ad hoc task groups and the need for flexible communication structures, in the search for increasing responsiveness, competitiveness, etc. In the area of production systems we see an emphasis on computer-integrated manufacturing (CIM) and just-in-time(JiT) methods, and various other techniques to reduce stock inventory. Computers are being connected both intra and inter- organizationally to assist in this co-ordination process. Many organization strategists believe that successful corporations of the future will be those that manage to make the "networked" organization a reality, and see CSCW activities as addressing aspects of this crucial issue, in emphasizing collaboration and coordination activities and their support via flexible information systems.
Technology
Tied in with market forces requiring greater coordination and general "connectivity" of computer systems there have been significant developments within the technological arena allowing for infrastructural computer networking. The idea of the isolated PC in the office is becoming an image of the past, with the advent of various forms of local area networking (LAN) that allow for shared resources. Networks support greater connectivity between people, locally and with more wide-area networks (WANs), globally. Other technical developments in the areas of interoperability, security, transparency, and distributed systems will support the needs of organizations for greater responsiveness and flexibility. Again, a number of these problems are being tackled in innovative ways within the CSCW arena, through the linking of work requirements with technological development in specific areas.
People's Expectations
There is an increasing demand from computer users themselves for more flexible and tailorable user interfaces and additional functionality that would allow people to accomplish their work more efficiently and effectively. While the HCI area has contributed to the design of better interfaces to computer systems, problems remain, particularly concerning incompatibilities between systems, and the inability of many applications to support multiple users effectively. Given that more and more work is being mediated by computer systems, the gaps and inabilities of these systems to support people in their working practices, e.g., where workers in a team need to share and jointly manipulate information, becomes a source of frustration. Again, this has resulted in pressure being put on software and hardware houses to support greater inter-connection between PCs and available applications that would allow for sharing of applications, multi-user access to facilities, and greater integration of applications at the use level. There is a need for augmenting possibilities for interaction by using the computer to help coordinate activities and support joint problem-solving, for example by providing shared workspaces where people can dynamically create objects and modify them, and shared tools for annotating and writing documents. These concerns are explicitly addressed in the CSCW community, thus making user representatives very interested in the area, as it may provide more useful and usable tools for the workforce.
At another level, people are becoming more knowledgeable about technology and wish to have a say in how their work practices are going to be changed by new technology. They wish to proactively affect the design, and take part in prototype evaluations. In a complemetary development, a number of system developers also wish to support this process of user involvement and are searching for ways in which to support it. They see CSCW as a possible avenue for greater cooperation with workers in the design of future systems (Bødker et al., 1988), through the development of better computer-based tools in this cooperative design and work process. While issues of user involvement and cooperative design should not be seen as the cornerstone of CSCW, as noted earlier, it is the case that many practitioners of these techniques are visible in the CSCW community, which has lead to an increased interest in the area from a number of sectors anxious to improve design methods and results - representing both developers and users.
The requirement of ecological validity in HCI
The relevance of much laboratory HCI work to actual work practice has been questioned (Thomas & Kellogg, 1988). CSCW has attracted interest from a number of academic research groups who are concerned with the use of more qualitative methods and field study techniques in order to make HCI work more ecologically valid. Given the focus in CSCW on the requirements of the work, and thus the need to study the work domain closely, field studies become of central importance. This shift in emphasis has also allowed for the participation of groups heretofore more on the fringe of HCI, for example, sociologists and anthropologists, who have been able to find a supportive atmosphere for their empirical studies of work settings in CSCW (see Bannon, 1992).
This brief outline of issues is simply indicative of some of the contributory factors that have exerted pressure for change in the design, development and use process concerning information systems in organizations. The argument is not that any such set of factors "caused" CSCW to emerge, but rather, that concerns such as these ( and a host of others besides) made people open to new ways of discussing and conceptualizing issues concerning the design and use of information systems in organizations. Once the area was named and a number of people with interdisciplinary interests wrote papers and became "members" , the area was launched. Subsequently, the debate about exactly what is "new" about the field could get underway (as we saw above). For of course, in some sense, CSCW is not "new". Computers have always supported, or perhaps disrupted, collaborative work activities, from the earliest days of mainframe computer system applications, but one could argue that the above changes have heightened the awareness of system developers to the need to support the increasing variety of cooperative work arrangements that can be found in modern organizations. Taken loosely, this simply means that it is being recognized that in most work situations the accomplishment of work involves multiple individuals, together with their computer-based tools, and that many inefficiencies in work practice stem from inadequate computer-based support for the smooth interleaving and coordination of tasks across people and machines.
Thus far the paper has been concerned with giving some background to the emergence of the CSCW field. In Section 4, we turn to briefly discuss some CSCW applications and evaluations.
4. Early Experiences with CSCW Systems
One can make a rough distinction between those systems developed in research environments - primarily as learning tools, from those systems that were conceived and developed as commercial groupware products, although some systems do cross this divide. The useful collection of papers in Greif (1988) includes several CSCW systems. These systems are primarily developed within the research domain. From the research side we mention briefly here DEC's XCP, a very early prototype work management coordination system, the MIT Information Lens Project, an electronic mail filtering mechanism (which has since spawned several commercial applications), and the Xerox PARC CoLab Project, a computerized meeting room environment. We also discuss, on a generic level, shared calendaring and general-purpose electronic mail systems, as they raise interesting issues regarding CSCW. On the commercial side, we briefly describe The Coordinator, and ForComment. New research systems and commercial products are being announced continually (e.g. Timbuktu, Aspects, BeyondMail,..), but our purpose here is simply to give some examples of systems which have been developed and which have had some form, however minimal, of evaluation. The purpose here is to learn some lessons from the successes and failures of aspects of these systems, for future use.
XCP
This was a very early project management or coordination tool developed at DEC that was designed to assist an organization in implementing and maintaining its procedures. According to its authors: "Two of its objectives are to shoulder the burden of managing the organizational complexity and to ensure that necessary communication occurs." (Sluizer & Cashman, 1984). It was to assist in carrying out formal work procedures through defining different roles and obligations in a high-level protocol which was then used in the work situation to coordinate and manage people's activities. The initial protocols developed were for the software problem reporting area. Early experiences with the XCP prototype indicated that a major difficulty was in developing and then "debugging" the formal protocols which were the basis for the system being able to coordinate work activities. It would appear that XCP assumes that what people do in many work settings is to follow procedures. No wonder the authors note the difficulty involved in developing and "debugging" the formal protocol. The generalization of such an approach to a wide range of office situations seems unrealistic. It appears to exclude the dimension of "task articulation", which is a key issue related to the work that must be done by people in their specific work situation in order to make the system work (see Schmidt & Bannon, 1992).
Xerox PARC CoLab
This project involved building a computerized meeting environment to support small (2 to 6 people) face-to-face meetings. A special room was constructed containing several workstations connected on a local area network. A number of software tools were developed to allow users to jointly work on documents and share the same views on these documents (WYSIWIS - What You See Is What I See). The project has now ended. Stefik et al. (1987) describe the design goals of the project and some of the software tools. This system has been the subject of an interesting evaluation project (Tatar, Foster, & Bobrow 1991), which presents a very thorough analysis of problems in use of the original system, and their cause, together with recommendations for improving the design of one of the tools. The major problems of users had to do with the visibility of certain operations and with problems in reference. Studies showed that people at times had problems in interpreting others comments when their views of the shared world did not match. So, for example, if people resized or moved the shared window on the system, peoples references to spatial locations might not always be appropriate for the other participants. This caused considerable disruption to the work of the group. The focus of work on this project would appear to have been more on examining the technical issues involved in developing software for the real-time computer support of groups than on an understanding of how people could or would use such a system in everyday work activities.
The MIT Information Lens Project
The Information Lens system (Malone et al., 1987) has been the subject of a number of research reports and the ideas behind it have now been incorporated into several commercial products. The system is designed to support people in managing their electronic mail. It has at times been referred to as an "intelligent" information sharing system. The filtering available in Information Lens is designed to screen users from "junk" mail and "filter in" other messages of interest, even if not directly addressed to specific users, thus extending the information sources available to individuals. It provides capabilities for organizing mail based on various aspects of the incoming message. It allows users to make message templates of various forms and have rules (of an IF-THEN-ELSE variety) that act selectively on these "semi-structured" messages. If the sender has selected a colloquium form for the mail message, and a message form of type: colloquium has been defined by the group, then the sender can be provided with support for composing the message through a partially filled ("semi-structured") message template, and the receivers can make rules that utilize the information that a message is a colloquium announcement to file it appropriately. One can see how this could be quite useful to help put some structure on the myriad of different forms of email communication which at present are insufficiently disambiguated. It helps the sender to structure messages appropriately, and can serve a reminder function for what information is necessary for certain announcements (eg. to remember to specify the location of a meeting) as well as helping the receiver to sort incoming mail appropriately, rather than, as at present, have all kinds of messages mixed together in the incoming mail file.
The other concept discussed in the Information Lens work is that of the "anyone server" where users can send out a message to an undefined body of users, the subset of users being those who have defined rules that match the properties of the message sent out. The idea is that this would allow people to encounter others with similar interests within an organization, say, without necessarily knowing the other person directly.This facility has not been implemented in some versions of the system. In an empirical investigation of the use of the Information Lens system, Mackay et al (1989) summarized their findings as follows: People without significant computer experience can create and use rules; Useful rules can be created based on the fields present in all messages without special message templates; People use rules both to prioritize messages before reading them and to sort messages into folders after reading; and people use delete rules primarily to filter out messages from low-priority distribution lists and not to delete personal messages to themselves. Mackay (1990) also shows the wide variability in patterns of use of the system, though overall there seems little doubt that prototype systems (after some iteration) are being used effectively in work situations.
Undoubtedly some of the ideas embodied (over time, evolving through use) in Information Lens have proved useful in practice. So it seems that people can makeup rules that are useful, but it this does not imply that they can be encapsulated into an "agent" and allowed to be triggered automatically. For instance, one key point noted by Mackay (1990) was how people tended to make up rulesets but then run them manually, ie the people themselves determined when to run the ruleset, in particular occasions of use, rather than have it done automatically, according to some pre-specified formula. This supports the notion that it is very difficult for people ahead of time to specify clearly the conditions under which certain rules should be run. Luckily, the technology allowed for the user to manually "trigger" the rulesets, although this was not part of the initial idea of how the system would be used. The extent to which the results of the case study support the wider visions of some of the supporters of Information Lens is thus still open to debate.
More recent work at MIT extended some of these ideas well beyond simply message handling - the Object Lens system ( Lai, Malone & Yu, 1988) - and this has evolved into a what they term a radically tailorable system for developing a large set of cooperative work applications - OVAL (Objects, Views, Agents, and Links). Evaluations of this system are just beginning (Malone, Lai and Fry, 1992).
Shared Calendaring & Meeting Scheduling Systems
There are a number of research-oriented and product-oriented CSCW systems that incorporate an electronic calendar system which can be utilised by meeting scheduling software to provide an automatic meeting scheduling capability. At present meeting scheduling is a difficult and very time-consuming process, and the rationale was that software to handle it automatically could make significant improvements in office productivity. While the idea appears very simple, the practice has shown otherwise, as noted in the case study work of Ehrlich, 1987, and in Bullen & Bennett, 1990, and discussed extensively in Grudin, 1989. To summarize his arguments, for one thing, electronic diaries cannot replace paper diaries, as they are not portable, nor do they give the same flexibility and utility possible through use of post-it notes, signs from different coloured pens, clippings, etc., often found in physical diaries. Another problem is that basically all of the people on the system must commit to using the system, i.e. to updating their diaries, before the system can really be used. If only half the group do it, nobody can rely on the system. Yet it is not at all clear what the benefits are to some members in keeping their electronic diaries updated, as the main benefits accrue to senior managers who call meetings (and/or their secretaries). The tradeoff between the work required and the benefits accrued are not equitable. Even if every one commits to do this, there are still problems about giving up control of one's " free" time. As Grudin cogently argues, free time is not really free. Managers may be willing to have their time scheduled for a meeting with their superior automatically, but not the reverse. It all depends on what the situation is, if somebody is willing to schedule a meeting with certain people. Just as we saw with the Information Lens, people wish to have control of the situation, and thus will often wish to change priorities depending on the situation and their personal context. What would appear to be a relatively trivial affair, meeting scheduling, in practice can involve quite complex, and rapidly changing decision rules that cannot be clearly defined in advance of the actual situation. Ehrlich notes that in cases where electronic calendars are used heavily, the role of secretaries in screening meetings is often crucial to making the system work, so that the meeting scheduling involves negotiation between people and is not automatic. These experiences should make us aware, if we are not already, of how apparent technological fixes to what are primarily social and organizational problems can come unstuck.
Electronic Mail
To some people, electronic mail is seen as the clearest example of a groupware application that has made a significant impact in the work place. Having the ability to send messages electronically to people connected either via a local area network or a widearea network around the world has undoubtedly given new opportunities for forms of remote collaboration undreamt of in the past. Even within a particular department, where people can communicate face-to-face, electronic mail can offer additional possibilites for communication and collaboration (see Bannon, 1986 for some discussion). Some argue that e-mail is actually the only CSCW application that has been accepted and clearly been a success in the marketplace (see discussion in Grudin, 1991).
I will not go through the large literature about the use of email, since we should note that effects of technology are always mediated by a social process, so it is difficult to discuss more generic "effects" of any technology, without an understanding of the particular context of use (Orlikowski, forthcoming). However, given its rapid dissemination and use in business settings, there is no doubt that it has been accepted within the business community. The potential of the technology for creating informal and possibly anarchistic groupings of people in organizations has been noted, and occasionally documented, but overall there seems to be an acceptance of the medium across the board, as any disadavantages are currently perceived as being outweighed by the advantages. Bullen & Bennett (1990) in their large interview study of a variety of groupware tools in organizations, found that the basic electronic messaging capability available on all these systems was seen as far and away the most valuable feature. Indeed , they go further and note; "..given the choices existing in information technology tools today, the people we studied used what we are calling "message functions" almost exclusively" (Bullen & Bennett, 1990).
The Coordinator System
This commercially available system is one of the most talked about CSCW applications due to its articulation of a well-developed theory of "language as action" that has exerted considerable influence in the research community (Winograd, 1986). It also has strong advocates in the commercial world who find that use of the system has increased their productivity enormously. The actual system can be simply described as a fancy electronic-mail-cum-project-management system. The system is built on the belief that human action is based on conversations, primarily conversations of a particular form, for action. Thus people using the system do not simply send mail, but make requests, or promises, or offer or decline to perform certain activities. (The system does allow for "free-form" responses, but this choice indicates abdication of the underlying framework on which it is built). Within this framework, the system then keeps track of the commitments made by individuals. Bullen & Bennett (1990) note how the ability to link messages in some electronic messaging systems (e.g. in Higgins, The Coordinator, All-in-One..) was found in practice to be a very useful facility. Through its concept of a "conversation", The Coordinator supports this linking quite explicitly. At the same time, there is quite bitter dispute between different groups as to its explicit design goal, which is to change the way people in organizations think and act. Whether speech act theory is an adequate theoretical framework on which to erect a computer-mediated communication system is open to question (Bowers and Churcher, 1988) but, as Robinson, 1990, notes, the main complaint against the system in use has been that it seems to exclude negotiation. Great care is required in the construction of group tools in order to ensure that the system does not embody untenable assumptions about the nature of group communication and group activity. The conflicting case study reports of its use (Johnson et al, 1986, Bikson et al., 1988, Grantham and Carasik, 1988, Bullen & Bennett, 1990) can be reconciled, at least partially, if one notes that it seems to work well in organizations with a rather rigid, traditional hierarchical management style, and be unacceptable in more fluid, loosley coupled organizations. But there is a lot more at issue here. What is required now, however, is closer analysis of actual uses of the system, as the extant case studies are limited in a number of ways, which makes it difficult to interpret their findings unambiguously.
ForComment
This commercial product is a group authoring tool available for PCs and local area networks. One takes in text into the system and then can add comments to the text, coded by author name, date, etc. Comments of several people can be merged. While the range of functionality is limited, within its one sphere it has been deemed quite useful by the marketplace. In order to use ForComment one has to explicitly import material from another word processing system into this system. While this is not exactly a difficult step, it still does not make sense from the user's point of view and Bullen & Bennett (1990) note that it generated a lot of annoyance with the system, which was found to be otherwise very useful. This illustrates a general problem concerning the integration of isolated tools into the general software environment of the user, a crucial problem that needs to be addressed by CSCW developers.
Lotus Notes
This commercial product has generated an enormous amount of interest since it was first announced (Marshak, 1990). While difficult to describe succinctly, it can be seen as providing a platform for developing a number of applications to support communication and information sharing in an organization. One interesting feature of this system is how it was targeted initially at senior information systems managers in companies, with a view to having them install Notes on a wide scale within their organization. Licences were bundled so that a minimum of over 250 licences had to be bought at once. While this marketing decision has now been rescinded, it does point to the attempt by Lotus to garner upper-level management support for their product, as well as the need for some infrastructural investment company-wide in support services for the product. A number of companies have taken the strategic decision to purchase such systems corporate-wide, and even globally. Whether such a technology push will lead to successful adoption of such systems is open to question. Studies are just beginning to document what happens in specific settings when this technology is introduced (Orlikowski, 1992). Her research has pointed out a number of problems in the implementation strategy adopted by this particular firm, which was a "brute force approach", with little education of users about the utility of Notes for their daily work. She also notes the discrepancy between the organizational culture evident in the firm - a competitive, individualistic environment, and the purported intent of Notes to foster "sharing" of information among people in the organization. Rather than revolutionizing the work environment Orlikowski describes how the system was being used to build applications supporting individual, not group productivity, and mechanizing existing work flows, rather than developing new work arrangements. It should be noted here that this field study took place during the initial 6 months of implementation of the Notes system in the organization, so it is possible that over time changes will take place, and new work practices will evolve. What the account does tell us, however, is that we need to be careful in assuming that simply installing the technology will produce far-reaching changes in the organization. We also need to be aware that, because Notes is such a general purpose environment, it will be difficult to discuss general aspects concerning the success or failure of Notes, as much will depend on the quality of the local programming applications built on top of the Notes substrate.
Ventana GroupSystems
This commercial product is a spinoff from the work of Jay Nunamaker and colleagues of the University of Arizona. IBM's TeamFocus product is a related spinoff. The system consists of a number of different tools that are intended to assist in aspects of the group decision-making process. There is support for brainstorming activity, for ranking alternative choices and voting on them, for preserving anonymity, etc. Focus has been on the support of co-located realtime teams, but the technology can be adapted for use in remote situations or for non-realtime use. Versions of the system have been the subject of a large number of articles (see Nunamaker, Dennis, Valacich, Vogel, & George, 1991). There have been numerous studies conducted on the system, both in lab and, more recently, field settings. There have been reports of massive increases in productivity based on much shorter lead times for getting decisions made in large groups through use of the system. It can be difficult to assess the validity of these claims, as often the comparison is made between "time taken to reach a decision with the system" versus "people's estimate of how long it would take to take the decision without the specific technology". Such figures are difficult to verify. More generally, there is the question of what kinds of meeting are such systems appropriate for? In situations where the group agrees on the general framework of important factors in the decision-making process, then the system may speed up the process, but in situations where the major topic of the meeting is arguing about the very grounds for making the decision, it does not seem that the rather simple model of decision-making embodied in the system would be appropriate. As the commercialization of the product continues, it will be of interest to observe further evaluations of the system in different contexts of use.
DOMINO Office Procedure System
This prototype procedure system is interesting as it has been extensively described in the literature and more recently evaluated informally by some of the design team (Kreifelts, T. et al., 1991). The system makes a number of assumptions about the nature of office work, and provides "support" for a number of work activities. A working prototype has been developed and in use in a research organization, where initial studies of its use have been performed. The initial system model had been the subject of some criticism concerning its view on work activities, but what is interesting is to see what actually happens when in use. The small internal study of Kreifelts and colleagues shows that, indeed, the system was seen as problematic on the grounds of not allowing for sufficient flexibility, for example allowing necessary informal communication, for lack of integration with other tools - for example electronic mail and spreadsheets. etc... The point is not that such systems have no future, but that we must take seriously the findings that people do not simply "follow procedures" in an office, and thus office support must be very tailorable and flexible if it is to be of practical use to the people doing the work.
6.0 Concluding Remarks
This paper has provided some background to the area of CSCW, showing how it has developed, and why it has attracted the interest of a variety of groups and organizations. While debate about exactly what is "new" in the field continues, there is no doubt that the area has succeeded in attracting and holding an interesting interdisciplinary community together over the last few years, from both technical and social disciplines. The task that lies ahead is whether these different interests and research traditions can be melded together in order to produce software systems that truly support cooperative work.
References
Wilson, P. (1991) Computer Supported Cooperative Work: An Introduction. Oxford, Intellect Books.