Putting it all together: Requirements for a CSCW platform

CSCW systems have generally failed to meet the requirements of users in actual cooperative work settings, primarily due to constraints imposed by current platform architectures that do not adequately support the fluent transitions between formal and informal interaction or the inextricable interweaving of individual and cooperative work that characterizes everyday work practice. Based on a sociological conceptualization of cooperative work, the paper outlines the requirements for a CSCW platform that is characterized by a clear division of labour between CSCW applications that incorporate domain-specific mechanisms of interaction and a CSCW platform providing a set of generic techniques of communication accessible to CSCW and singleuser applications alike. In spite of its recent inception, CSCW has come a long way. An array of very promising technologies is being developed and explored. As yet, however, only a handful of software products have proved to be commercially viable. In fact, CSCW systems have generally failed to meet the requirements of users in actual cooperative work settings. They do not adequately support the fluent transitions between formal and informal interaction or the inextricable interweaving of individual and cooperative work that characterizes everyday work practice. To a large extent, this deficiency can be attributed to fundamental conceptual problems in the ‘architecture’ of current platforms. It is becoming increasingly clear that current operating systems are inadequate as platforms for CSCW systems. Actually, the very issue of what should be conceived of as CSCW applications as opposed to facilities of a CSCW operating system is wide open. What is the allocation of CSCW functions between the operating system and applications or between CSCW and non-CSCW facilities? The operating systems of workstation platforms have been some 20 years in the making and the current allocation of function between operating system and applications is the result of an evolutionary process. In the course of time, system developers repeatedly realized that they were replicating code and that it would be more efficient to include certain functions in the operating system for several applications to use. Simultaneously, users experienced the hassles and traumas of working with self-contained applications that did not support the fluent shift between tasks and, hence, did not deliver the expected productivity gains. Slowly a wide arSchmidt and Rodden Putting it all together 2 ray of functions were perceived to be generic and they were then assigned to the operating system. The CSCW field has not experienced 20 years of evolutionary development, of course. But in view of the radical way in which CSCW facilities intervene in how people work together and the potentially disruptive effects such systems therefore may have, it is unlikely that users will accept decades of trial-anderror experiments. We simply have to do better than that for CSCW systems to be acceptable. In the following, we will examine the relationship between formal and informal activities as well as cooperative and individual activities in cooperative work and, based on that, outline the requirements for a CSCW platform. Cooperative work and articulation work Work is always immediately social in the sense that the object and the subject, the ends and the means, the motives and the needs, the implements and the competencies, are socially mediated. Moreover, the very work process often involves multiple people that are mutually dependent in their work and therefore are required to cooperate in order to get the work done (Schmidt, 1991b). The notion of mutual dependence in work does not refer to the interdependence that arises simply having to share the same resource. They certainly have to coordinate their activities but to each of them the existence of the others is a mere nuisance and the less their own work is affected by others the better. The time-sharing facilities of operating systems for mainframe computers cater for just that by making the presence of other users imperceptible. Being mutually dependent in work means that ‘A’ relies positively on the quality and timeliness of ‘B’s work and vice versa and should primarily be conceived of as a positive, though by no means necessarily harmonious, interdependence. Because of this interdependence, cooperating workers have to articulate (divide, allocate, coordinate, schedule, mesh, interrelate, etc.) their distributed individual activities (Strauss, 1985; Gerson and Star, 1986). Thus, by entering into cooperative work relations, the participants must engage in activities that are, in a sense, extraneous to the activities that contribute directly to fashioning the product or service and meeting the needs. That is, compared with individual work, cooperative work implies an overhead cost in terms of labor, resources, time, etc. The obvious justification for incurring this overhead cost and thus the reason for the emergence of cooperative work formations is, of course, that workers could not accomplish the task in question if they were to do it individually (Schmidt, 1990). In order to be able to articulate the distributed activities of a cooperative work arrangement, the participants need access to appropriate means of communication. What is appropriate naturally depends on the specific characteristics of the cooperative work arrangement. In this context, the popular two-dimensional taxonomy of CSCW facilities (e.g., Johansen, 1988, p. 44) is is not very helpful: Schmidt and Rodden Putting it all together