Support Tasks = Data + Action + Context.
5.2 Related Work
The problem of building models of work contexts, processes, local practices and situations of problem-solving in human organisations has been approached by a variety of authors using
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different techniques, languages and formalisms (Malone et al., 1999; Akman, 2000; Clancey, 2002; Goldkuhl and Röstlinger, 2006; Haake et al., 2009; Szymanski and Jack, 2011; Böttcher and Fähnrich, 2011). Most of these work have been published in a wide range of research communities, including HCI, IS, context modelling, health informatics, intelligent work environments and service systems modelling. The works can be roughly categorised into three broad groups, namely approaches that model context based on the notion of activity system (Kaenampornpan and O’Neil, 2005; Kofod-Petersen and Cassens, 2006; Geyer et al., 2006; Bardram, 2009), approaches that incorporate the notion of SAW for context-aware system behaviour (Tadda and Salerno, 2010), and systems that seek to extend the formal workflow models by incorporating aspects of social and cultural contexts of work (Agostini and Prinz, 1996; Bucur et al., 2006; Goldkuhl and Röstlinger, 2006; Allert and Richter, 2008; Szymanski and Jack, 2011; Brézillon, 2011). Recently, hybrid approaches have been proposed (Feng et al., 2009).
In his work on the Brahms system, (Clancey, 2002) models human work activities as “workframes”. Workframes are related to Marvin Minksky's concept of "frames" (1974) in AI, Schank and Abelson’s “scripts” in cognitive science, Barker’s “behavioural settings” in ecological psychology and Suchman's situated actions (1987), which derive heavily from sociological concepts as well as Csikszentmihalyi’s “flow experience” model (1990). The primary concern in Clancey's approach is to simulate human behaivour as it occurs "naturally" in work environments (Clancey, 2006), and thereby to model the stereotyped actions in a given setting. However, because “workframes” need to be created manually, the model does not sufficiently account for the actual dynamics of how actions and operations unfold, e.g. during learning and knowledge adaptation in problem-solving and decision support.
Similar to Clancey’s “workframes” is the concept of “worklets” (Adams, 2007). The focus in "worklets" was to move workflow technologies beyond the "production line" paradigm and enable them to account for the wider range of real time exceptions in a work environment. The approach derives from the theoretical foundation of Activity Theory to provide an extensible repertoire of self-contained selection and exception-handling processes for workflows (Adams et al., 2003). However, by mirroring the notion of workflows without deeper empirical studies, the approach fails to adequately account for the situated and socially
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mediated nature of work practices (Szymanski and Whalen, 2011; Allert and Richter, 2008; Clancey, 2006; Suchman, 1987).
Equally driven by activity theory's conceptualisation of human behaviour, (Christensen and Bardram, 2002) explore support for work processes that are “radically different from the ones known from office work”. Their system, which was designed for the healthcare domain, seeks to efficiently organize and provide context information about current patients and their required services. Although the system has proven useful and is supported by a pervasive computing infrastructure together with domain-specific services, it relies on pre-defined activities already entered into the database and, as a result, fails to address two issues. Firstly, it lacks the capability to handle spontaneous and improvisational activities that are an inherent feature of modern work environments. Secondly, it lacks the ability for proactive support since users need to interact with the systems in an entirely query driven mode. The concern in the authors’ works was primarily to design for the social, temporal, and spatial awareness of workplaces and work activities based on the paradigm of “activity-centered computing” (Bardram, 2009; Bardram and Hansen, 2010).
Approaches that seek to extend formal workflow models largely argue that despite the attractiveness of workflow-based technologies (Fischer, 2007) in guiding work and aiding "organisational accounting", (Bowers et al., 1995), their existing forms render them too inflexible to account for contingent aspects of work (Grinter, 2000; Robinson, 1993; Suchman, 1987). One of the emergent trends has focused on redefining "the workspace" in order to uncover inherent contextual complexities of work (Suchman, 1995; Kurtz and Snowden, 2003), accommodate for "naturally" occurring interactions and practices (Brézillon, 2007; Clancey, 2006) and increase the amount of control that users have over work processes (Fitzpatrick, 1998; Dourish, 2004; Goldkuhl and Röstlinger, 2006). Other research efforts have focused on extending the basic structure of the activity theory framework in order to more deeply analyse the relationship between social and technical entities in a work environment (e.g. Kofod-Petersen and Cassens, 2006), and operationalise the historical aspect of CHT into a context model that accounts for both user- and system-driven adaptability at runtime (Kaenampornpan and O’Neil, 2005). As result, a number of activity-aware context models and systems have been proposed in the literature. Examples of these include the
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task/practice model (Brézillon, 2007, 2011), the ADEPT system (Reichert et al., 2005), the Adapte approach (Harrison et al., 2010) as well as context-aware work environments and activity-centric collaboration spaces, e.g. the ECOSPACE (Sari et al., 2008) and Activity Explorer (Geyer et al., 2006).
However, the challenge of applying practice-based models of work processes to enable context-aware decision support in a distributed work settings remains to be fully investigated. Existing models seek to extend the SAW theory (Tadda and Salerno, 2010), integrate SAW theory with context models (Feng et al., 2009; Kofod-Petersen and Aamodt, 2009; Nwiabu et al., 2011) or apply the notion of morphing to simulate changes in task requirement and adapt knowledge artefacts to different problem contexts (Hussain and Abidi, 2009). A recent publication that relates to the approach adopted in this work by focusing on knowledge translation between clinicians for decision support based on emerging Web technologies appears in (Stewart and Abidi, 2012), but differs from our work since it does not address, from a practice-centred perspective, the relevance of context of work in adapting knowledge for CDS. A distinguishing feature of our work, therefore, is the focus on practice, rather than activity, as the logical "workspace" that incorporates not only the tools, people, and resources needed to get a job done, but also the reasons for selecting certain tools and resources in relation to local work contexts and circumstances. Work practices, (Clancey, 2006), consist of much more than inferences applied to facts and heuristics, and denote the culturally and historically informed setting into which new technologies are deployed (Gautier et al., 2009). Designing CDSSs around a computation concept of work practice offers a new paradigm with the potential to enable deep-seated understanding of the dynamics of human work and people- centred approach to work support.