Exploring the transformations of interaction in mobile work contexts

The usage of work related mobile services is often very complex, affected by a multitude of intertwined factors including the technological, environmental and human. Understanding how to model the complexity of mobile work and particularly its mobile interaction would be beneficial in ensuring the success of mobile services in user’s longterm, goal-oriented usage. Previous attempts to evaluate success factors in mobile business services have concentrated on rigid analytical tools modeling users and tasks and mainly focusing on understanding routine work tasks and standard information exchange between different users. However, this covers only a narrow field of mobile work and it is argued here that existing analytical tools do not sufficiently consider factors arising from different levels of mobility and the temporariness and non-routine tasks of mobile work. In this paper we present a process oriented approach, 'MoBiS Map, derived from Actor-Network theory, to describe the complex network of interactions and the transformation of interactions. We argue that our approach is a useful analytical tool when the focus is on examining the transformation of interactions that takes place when mobile work services are implemented. This is a methodological paper aiming to better understand the transformation of mobile interactions, and therefore to support development of mobile business services.