Modelling Offices Through Discourse Analysis: The SAMPO Approach

Successful office communications are vital for the effective working of organisations. There is, however, no agreement about how they should be studied or understood in analysing offices in office information system design. Instead, the majority of proposed methods for office information system design leave these aspects implicit and largely unexplored. In this paper, we propose framing office communications in terms of speech acts and conversations. These two concepts which are pertinent to the analysis of office communications are explored in some detail, resulting in the contention that discourse analysis can be used as an effective means for studying office communications in office system design. A modelling approach based on discourse analysis, termed SAMPO, is presented. Its application is explained through the use of a small case example.