Supporting Intra-Organizational Distributed Co-ordination at the Amsterdam Police Force

Informationand communication technologies (ICT) raise opportunities for computer supported communication, dispersed co-ordination and collaboration and make coordination intense organisational structures less expensive. However, an explorative case study at the Amsterdam Police Force confirm insights from prior research that deeply rooted organisational practices can 'make or break' distributed co-ordination and ICT utilisation. Adaptive Structuration Theory (AST) provided for a framework for these observations and guided interventions to improve distributed co-ordination. However, AST could not answer if and how the interplay of current practices and interventions would influence distributed co-ordination. For this purpose, we argue for using of a simulation game to create a richer picture of future systemic interactions in computer supported distributed co-ordination in this particular organisation; to investigate potential implementation problems of new ICT; and to create organisational awareness for opportunities and pitfalls in distributed co-ordination. Group The development of informationand communication technologies in the past 20 years has enabled us to co-ordinate and to collaborate in different ways. By using the new technologies, co-ordination, collaboration and the accomplishment of the work itself can become independent of time and place and can be carried out by distributed groups [30]. Traditionally, members of work groups consisted of members of the same organisation who often had their workplace physically at the same location. At present work group members work on different physical locations and each member is contributing to more than one work groups. Kinney & Panko [14] showed, that project work for a large part already is distributed work: “Over half the projects (in their study) had at least one member from another site, and many several, so project teams are already characterised by a good deal of d