Making infrastructure visible for nomadic work

In this study we revisit Weiser’s (1991) [5] vision of seamlessly integrated computing. We focus on nomadic workers who rely extensively on mobile technologies to conduct work. Using Star and Ruhleder’s (1996) [10] properties of infrastructure, we discuss how nonroutine users of infrastructure face particular challenges. We conducted an ethnographic investigation of nomadic workers in a large distributed organization. We examined strategies that they use to assemble their mobile office, to seek resources, and to synchronize with others across time zones. We discuss how their strategies are challenged by their lack of local knowledge of infrastructure. Our results suggest that until the field of pervasive computing can attain Weiser’s vision, the very users of ubiquitous computing need infrastructure to be visible. We discuss the implications for a design to support nomadic work.     

Lightening grey literature: Making the invisible visible

Technical reports are an important and unique source of engineering information. This has been recognised in the US where federal technical reports are freely available via the Internet. UK reports are hard to identify, locate and obtain. Within the context of new initiatives promoting cross‐sectoral partnership and collaboration, the Research Support Libraries Programme (RSLP) and British Library Co‐operation and Partnership Programme (BLCCP) have funded the MAGiC project. MAGiC aims to provide the UK engineering community with a greater awareness of, and access to, key collections of technical reports by: mapping UK report collections; developing a methodology for prioritising digitisation of reports; providing an entry point to search and browse widely distributed resources; developing a core electronic archive of engineering report literature; evaluating the feasibility of creating a commercial service based on the supply of electronic documents. An exposition of work in progress is given with a projection of how the demonstrator service will operate. A call for help with the project in locating report collections within academia, industry, and government, and contact details, are given.     

Applications: putting the visible human to work

A variety of projects are underway to develop applications and products based on the data sets in the National Library of Medicine's Visible Human project and in the Voxel Man atlas project (see ibid., p.7-9). Several of them are presented, as well as updates on other medical graphics applications; they include the following: 3D volumetric rendering of human colon via CT scans; Interactive Volume Browser on the World Wide Web; and Voxel System for holographic viewing of medical applications     

Making the ordinary visible in microblogs

Microblogging is a “Mobile Web 2.0” service category that enables brief blog-like postings from mobile terminals and PCs to the World Wide Web. To shed light on microblogging as a communication genre, we report on multiple analyses of data from the first 10 months of a service called Jaiku. The main finding is that microblogging centers on selective, I-centered disclosure of current activities and experiences, making daily experiences visible for others. The high frequency of brief and mundane status updates, like “working,” may be a second-order effect resulting from posting becoming a routine executed to keep the audience interested. The results highlight the importance of reciprocal activity and feedback in users’ motivation to invest in this activity.     

Making visible the invisible: understanding the nuances of computer-supported cooperative work on informal elderly caregiving in Southern Cone families

Personal and Ubiquitous Computing - The design of computer-supported caregiving technology has generally not acknowledged the complexity and heterogeneity of the informal care provision to older...     

Designing with ethnography: making work visible

The paper reviews some aspects of a research project in which ethnographic studies of air traffic controllers at work were used to inform the design of an electronic flight strip. In particular, it emphasises the important role of ethnography in gaining an insight into the fine grained and often ‘invisible’ aspects of work which are essential to its accomplishment and which must be taken account of in the design process. The paper also reviews some of the practical lessons of interdisciplinary working and the role, along with some limitations, that ethnographic studies can play in the system design process.     

Digital work and organisational transformation: Emergent Digital/Human work configurations in modern organisations

Workplace technologies are more central to working in organisations than ever before. These technologies began as instrumental aids to support office work of individuals but have since also become the basis for social interactions and community building in organisations and more recently become able to perform managerial roles with the use of advanced AI capabilities. Our call for papers to this special issue invited original studies to go further and advance our thinking on the strategic implications of this layered evolution of workplace technologies on work and the structure of organisations. In this introduction, we synthesise the main themes from the special issue, and also ongoing dialogues with the growing community at the regular AIS / IFIP 9.1 workshop on the Changing Nature of Work. A key observation is that the work involved in configuring emergent Digital/Human configurations, is vastly under-reported and poorly understood. Paradoxically, this configuring work is the most demanding and critical in the shaping of modern organisations. We suggest that this type of largely invisible work requires engagement beyond the level of execution or even the meaning of work, it requires intervening with third order effects that get to the core of what an organisation is. We highlight the challenges for organisations in dealing with third order change, particularly because these effects are beyond existing frames of reference and require more dynamic and supple responses based on the values, purpose and intent dominant in the organisation – we describe this as structural digital work. Leaders that are unable or unwilling to engage with effects at this level, and this type of work, will miss identifying core opportunities and risks associated with digital transformation in organisations. We also reflect on the value of current theories and methods used to research this important and emergent phenomenon.     

Making RAD work for your project

For several good business reasons, rapid application development has become increasingly popular. In general, RAD gives you earlier product payback and more payback time before the pace of technology makes your product obsolete. For software product sales, RAD also helps you debut a product earlier in a market window, which lets the product capture more market share, revenues, and profits. To gain maximum benefit from RAD, however, you must choose the RAD form that best suits your project. The article presents the various forms of RAD available and give advice on which to choose     

Making CM work for software development

Configuration management (CM) is an old engineering concept that developers are adapting for software development. Given software's increasing complexity, the need for a transition from the mechanical world to digital products is clear: CM helps manage and smoothly integrate change into a complex system. Managing all change is an extremely broad umbrella and needs a clear delineation     

Making Java work for microcontroller applications

The authors investigate complete system development using a Java machine aimed at FPGA devices. A new design strategy targets a single FPGA chip, within which the dedicated Java microcontroller-FemtoJava-is synthesized     

Making the reuse business work

Software reuse technology is ready now. In fact, enough companies have demonstrated substantial improvement-often as much as 90% reuse-to assure that it can be achieved. If we take 15% as an approximation of the current rate of “passive” reuse that individual engineers achieve anyway, and 90% as the figure that more than a few organizations are achieving, that is a gain of six times. With this level of reuse, the overall cost savings are dramatic. Moreover, these organizations are achieving comparable gains in development time. They are getting a system into operation in months instead of years. The third great component of software system development (after cost of development and time to market) is quality. Quality implies a host of factors, many of which are hard to quantify or, at least, have not been quantified by most organizations. However, participants in successful reuse invariably believe that quality, however they define it, has improved. Certainly, freedom from defects, flexibility and robustness in the face of system evolution are important aspects of quality to many organizations     

Exploring organisational competences in Human Factors and UX project work: managing careers,project tactics and organisational strategy

Organisational competence in Human Factors and UX (user experience) has not been looked at before despite its relevance to project success. We define organisational competence as the collective competence of the individuals, bringing together their complementary abilities to deliver an outcome that is typically more than the sum of its parts. Twenty-two UX and Human Factors practitioners were interviewed about their project work in two contrasting domains: web design and safety-critical systems to explore organisational competences. Through doing a FRAM analysis, 29 functions and 6 main areas of competences were identified: the central project process; the process of learning about the problem; maintaining and developing client relations; staff development; evolving practices; and the management of documentation for audit and quality control. These dynamic and situated competences form a web of interactions. Managing competences is essential for project success. Implications for managing careers, project tactics and organisational strategy are discussed.

Practitioner Summary: Organisational competences impact how routine and non-routine project work is performed, but these have received little attention in the literature. Six key areas of competences in Human Factors and UX project work were identified from practitioner interviews. Managing combinations of adaptive competences is important for developing careers, project tactics and organisational strategies.     

Workgroups' propensity to comply with safety rules: the influence of micro-macro organisational factors

This article is about workgroup carefulness or propensity to comply with safety rules and various organisational factors that may impact on this behaviour. Empirical data concern 1061 workgroups drawn from a random sample of 97 manufacturing plants. A model combining micro and macro organisational factors is developed and tested by a multilevel analysis. Micro level factors refer to variables measuring work processes and hazards, workgroup cohesiveness and cooperation, supervisor's experience and approach to safety management, while macro level factors consist in variables measuring top management commitment in occupational safety and socio-economic characteristics of firms. Results support the hypothesis that micro organisational factors are the primary determinants of the propensity to safety compliance behaviour, with social relationships variables at the shopfloor level being the best predictors. Results also suggest that the fabric of these social relationships can be substantially influenced by managerial actions in developing a participative approach in the supervisory management of safety and a commitment of senior managers to develop the safety program and joint regulation mechanisms.     

Evaluation of control methods for drilling operations with unexpected gas influx

This paper presents an evaluation of various control methods to be used during drilling operations where an unexpected gas influx occurs. In the event of an unexpected gas influx the current industry procedure is to control the pressure in the well manually. The drilling industry term for this manual procedure is well control. The focus of the paper is threefold. Firstly, to design an automatic sequence which is similar to the existing manual procedure. Secondly, to evaluate three different control algorithms for pressure control during an unexpected gas influx, and thirdly, to evaluate control parameter tuning needed when implementing different control algorithms.The control methods have been evaluated on various drilling scenarios with unexpected gas influx, referred to as a kick. After a kick of reservoir gas has entered the well, automatic control of the well control choke and rig pump is applied to compensate for pressure fluctuations while circulating out the gas. A PI controller is designed to stabilize the well pressure by controlling the well control choke, an internal model controller (IMC) controls the pressure by manipulating the choke and the rig pump flowrate, and a model predictive controller (MPC) uses coordinated control of the choke and the pump flowrate to stabilize the well pressure. The model based controllers use a simple first order model of the well. Simulations are performed using a detailed flow model of the well to test the controller performance and robustness. Several cases with different amounts of gas influx are investigated.The simulations show that it is feasible to control the pressure using automatic control of the choke valve and pump during an unexpected gas influx by use of all the presented control methods. The control methods are robust against changes in process conditions and disturbances, as they are able to handle several pressure levels and gas volumes without requiring re-tuning. However, since the pressure dynamics in the well are influenced when gas is entering the well, the model based controllers could probably be further improved if the models were updated after the gas influx occurred.The results indicate that adaption of the automatic sequence to the current manual procedure is applicable. However, to avoid a reduction in downhole pressure when stopping the pump and shutting in the well, the automatic sequence may be further improved beyond what is feasible with manual operation.     

Breaking the ice: a work domain analysis of icebreaker operations

Cognition, Technology & Work - Icebreakers are special-purpose ships designed to operate in different ice-covered waters, either independently or during assistance of weaker ships. In the...     

Making IT outsourcing work for smaller enterprises

Small and midsize enterprises - those with fewer than 100 employees - make up 95 percent of all US companies, and they collectively employ more than a third of the country's workforce. For companies of this size - and for regional and branch offices of large companies - deciding whether to outsource IT services can be a daunting task. Does IT outsourcing make sense for smaller firms? Done wisely, it can lower costs, focus in-house staff and eliminate wasted capacity.     

Boolean operations for 3D simulation of CNC machining of drilling tools

This paper addresses the simulation of drilling tools CNC machining. It describes a novel approach for the computation of the boundary representation of the machined tools. Machining consists of a sequence of boolean operations of difference between the tool and the grinding wheels through time. The proposed method performs the dynamic boolean operations on cross sections of the tool and it reconstructs the 3Dmodel by tiling between the cross sections. The method is based on classical computational geometry algorithms such as intersection tests, hull computations, 2D boolean operations and surface tiling. This approach is efficient and it provides user control on the resolution of the operations.     

Cooperative work in mission operations: Analysis and implications for computer support

This paper describes cooperative work in real-time flight operations in the SAMPEX Mission Operations Room at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. This domain is an example of distributed supervisory control, where a team of human operators supervises a dynamic, complex, highly automated system. Such operational environments differ in important ways from artifact-centered collaboration (e.g., collaborative drawing, writing, design). This paper explores those differences and also articulates the need for activity management tools for dynamic control environments. Candidate models from the human-machine systems engineering literature are proposed to provide the underlying structure for such tools.