Supporting Unstructured Work Activities in Emergent Work Processes

When existing information systems and organizational procedures lacks to support work needs, people engage in informal networks of relations and make use of their tacit knowledge promoting this way the emergence of unstructured work activities. To improve the consistency and effectiveness of such practices we propose a model and a prototype to assist collaboration needs in such scenarios. Our contribution defends the need of the construction of a shared awareness to improve situation understanding and collaboration. Supported on the Reason’s Swiss Cheese model for accidents we propose the use of a collaborative constructed artifact: Situation Matrixes (SM), to relate the different situation dimensions. The information needs in the existing contexts of action where the situation unfolds, will be supplied by different views over the (sub)set of matrixes.

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