The context refers to the surrounding environment where collaboration takes place. Context comprises the collaborative objective(s), the social, technical and environmental subsystems that influence coordination needs. The analytical focus category in Table 2.11 emphasises the importance of monitoring the environment, regarding activities,
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goals and the nature of dependencies in determining the coordination mechanisms to be employed. This denotes that an organisation cannot be studied in isolation from its environment. The geographical area, where the proximity of actors plays a role, along with other factors, which include the rules, social and technical components, can constrain coordination. How an organisation works may be influenced by factors from outside the organisation. As the level of uncertainty in the environment increases, an organisation may be subject to additional risks. By reflecting on the collaborative activity context, which also considers the immediate surrounding environment context can be considered at macro and micro levels as shown in Table 4.1. CSCW design recommendations in Chapter 3 stress the need to understand the cooperative context, in order to define coordination mechanisms effectively, in consort with the requisites for considering dependencies, as discussed in the subsequent section.
4.3.1 Dependencies
As Table 4.1 illustrates, different types of dependencies should be considered to account adequately for coordination. The nature of dependencies includes those between actors, and between activities. By employing a process view the dependencies between activities is made explicit to aid in the selection of an appropriate coordination mechanism. The management of interdependencies between activities performed should be tied towards achieving an objective, while explicitly showing the relation between the participant and the process. The relationships between elements in a collaborative activity must strive continuously to be in balance and synchronised by monitoring contradictions that may arise. By taking cognisance of working relationships, the communication and decision- making of the role-players in practice dependencies can be revealed. The importance of knowing the level of coupling (tight or weak) in order to determine the nature of the mechanisms and their support is also highlighted in Table 2.11.
4.3.2 Actors
Actors are entities responsible for initiating or performing an activity, often referred to as subjects, role-players, participants, and performers or addresses, along with the community, which represents an entity responsible for performing an activity. Humans or autonomous agents, whether individual or collective, can fill the role of an actor. The function of actors as active or passive participants needs to be determined, in conjunction with their relationship to each other, their means of communication, information and knowledge sharing, as well as networking. Different kinds of actors are represented in Table 2.11, which are classified here as playing a passive role, considered as a resource to be allocated to activities or active roles for that communicates with the capability to make decisions and negotiate. The communication reflects a coordination
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device between participants, thereby providing patterns with regard to how collaboration may be achieved.
4.3.3 Tools
The means of work, coordination or communication, usually achieved with distinct, assorted types of tools, which may be physical, intellectual or abstract, should be considered in context. The capacity in which a tool is defined is relative. From the research standpoint the computer is simply another tool, which aids in mediating the interaction of humans and their environment. Tools can take many forms, from mental models to physical artefacts. Although not all theories and concepts in Table 2.11 consider tools explicitly in a mediating capacity, they recognise coordination as an information processing activity, which may be facilitated with information technology. Lessons in Table 2.11 indicate that a tool can be employed by actors to perform actions that can transform a resource. Furthermore, a community through its participants, can operate on an object, mediated by a tool, to perform a determined action. In practice, mediation tools are manifested in different forms, in a given a need context which needs to be considered to determine their effectiveness.
4.3.4 Activities
An activity reflects the actions performed in the real world. Typically, an activity may be decomposed into smaller parts, termed sub-activities, subtasks, or actions, and can be related to other activities. In this research context a sub-activity is the most basic unit, which can be combined with others to form a more complex component, in a process toward achieving a goal. BPM practices provide techniques for representing relations between activities in processes, including flow charts and goal-based models. Prominent are process-based models, which make explicit the dependencies (relations) between activities by specifying their control flow. As the distinction between the action and sub- activity presented in Table 2.11 is unclear, in this research capacity they are equally described as sub-activities.
4.3.5 Resources
Resources, for instance information, a document or an object, may be defined as something that is exploited, manufactured or transformed by an activity. An information resource can exist or be made available, in an electronic form containing, for instance, what to do. It serves as the input or output of an activity, to help define the flow of work. Object- or artefact-based coordination forms the basis for defining the connexion between activities. As shown in Table 4.1 what is considered resource depends on context, from human actors as passive resources, to reducing environmental
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interdependence and uncertainty, a view that sees collaborating partners as resources to each other.
The existing variables offer special advantages, relative to the similarities and differences they project, which are leveraged to propose the requirement elicitation analytic variables reviewed in the next section.