Extending Groupware Task Analysis: Adding Further Dimensions to Analysis of Cooperative Work

The importance of systems that support coordination, collaboration and decision making between and within different working groups is increasing dramatically, especially in the area of office automation. CSCW is the paradigm providing these facilities in an organization-wide environment. The early stages of systems design are very important to the success of such systems. In this paper we discuss the general structure of interactive systems to-bedesigned and their place in organizational environments. Components and interaction interfaces of this cooperative work arrangement (at system and organizational levels) as well as interrelations between different components are made explicit. For this, a business process and workflow model is adapted to describe organizational factors and dynamic behavior. The improved Groupware Task Analysis (GTA) approach provides the ability to represent different kinds of processes thereby giving the designer a better overview of the task world. Furthermore, it contains concepts for modeling organizational factors like higher-level business goals, formal and informal communication, and authority structures to describe overall dependencies and relations. It also allows representing dynamic behavior as it includes time aspects and event occurrences. So, the extended GTA provides holistic design consideration from an organizationwide point of view thereby allowing multiple views as needed in the design of Groupware.