DR AF T Back to the future . Interfacing the history of the organisation

This position paper outlines a model of shared information in organisations, and proposes an interface to access and manipulate its elements. The model views the organisation’s information resources through the relations between the people in it. Thus, it is a framework to describe the distribution of work across people, artefacts, space, time, and tasks. An integrated architecture for organisational memory and collaborative computing can build on this model. I intend it as an alternative to traditional knowledge engineering and workflow approaches, and argue that these popular approaches can inspire design of systems with reduced transparency of the organisation’s information resources and inflexible work support. The proposed model embeds the media and tools to support cooperation in a general software architecture and integrates them with the tools that people use in their work, thus yielding a flexible and transparent access to the shared information space.

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