Looking at the ‘O’ of VOs –
organisational aspects of
collaboration
School of Informatics, Edinburgh University
NCESS, Manchester
Mark Hartswood, Rob Procter, Roger Slack,
Alex Voss
Aim of talk
• Socio-technical perspective taken from a
number of case studies:
– Examine the interrelations between the dynamics of
collaborations and the technologies designed to
support them
• General messages:
– Promote sensitivity to the sorts of practical
activities/concerns entailed in collaboration in order to
support them adequately
– Examine how trust might be fostered between
participants in virtual organisations
Sociality of collaboration
• A VO is still an organisation with all the practical, worldly
contingencies that this implies
• Examine two case studies where technology has been
introduced to mediate collaborative work
– Medical records system to support community mental health
work
– GRID infrastructure to support screening mammography
(eDiaMoND)
• In both we have been concerned at looking at the messy
details of organisational collaborative practices,
focussing on:
– how people organise their work,
– how they make their work visible and
– How trust relations are fostered between participants
NHS Rural Case Study
Background
• Record system introduced to support work of Adult and
Care of the Elderly Community Mental Health Teams
(CMHT)
• Teams concerned with the community based
assessment, care and treatment of people with mental
health problems
• Work undertaken by interdisciplinary teams
(Occupational therapy, CMHT nurses, social workers,
support workers)
Typical Care Episode
• Referral (e.g. from a GP)
• Prioritisation and case allocation
• Assessment
• Care plan put in place
• Care programme initiated
• Discharge
Teamwork
• Teamwork – consensual decision-making.
– Almost continual discussion ‘office talk’ about
clients and possible approaches
– Policy of conducting joint assessments
– Cases discussed in team meetings, different
professional perspectives, and other
information, can be brought to bear
– Trajectory of decision-making
Making provisional formulations
• One community mental health nurse was
observed to erase a section of an assessment
form written in pencil. Other parts were written in
pen
• When asked said that she had put some ideas
down concerning how the patient would be
managed – but knew that some of these would
be revised when the case was discussed at the
team meeting
• Started re-writing the section in pen
Informality and team work
• Close examination of these practices revealed:
– Decisions reached by consensus
– Care decisions are ‘worked up’ over time
– Collaboration takes place not only on the basis of
sharing already accomplished judgments and
decisions, but in their formation
– Paper records supported ‘provisional versions’
– The Care Database supported sharing of simple
‘factual’ information and completed assessments but
not joint authorship of documents that might initially
have a provisional status.
eDiaMoND Case Study
Background
•
To build a next generation grid enabled prototype to demonstrate the
potential benefits of a national infrastructure to support digital
mammography
•
To investigate benefits of digital mammography through applications to
support:
–
Screening/diagnosis
–
Computer Aided Training
–
Epidemiology
•
The outcome that we are interested in here is how distributed reading might
be supported to balance availability of expertise and workload across the
country
•
Benefits from examining closely how reading is undertaken
Reading Practice
Sociality of reading
• Easy to presume that reading is a ‘solitary’
activity, but our studies show
– How reading in pairs allows readers to
calibrate their decision-making against that of
colleagues
– How readers establish a sense of trust in their
colleagues and in the mammograms they are
charged with interpreting.
Problematising distributed reading
• Mammograms shorn of their biographical
context…
• …as are the decisions made by the readers.
• E.g. Alliance Medical –
“It is also understood that some scans were carried
out on breast cancer patients, although the service
was not supposed to cover such cases. Some
radiologists have insisted on re-checking all the scans
because they are worried about the quality of the
reporting”.
Guardian 27th Feb, 2005.
Lessons for VOs
• Collaboration:
– Danger of taking a simplistic view of what is entailed
by collaborations of various sorts
– Can focus on the end points of collaborative work,
rather than the practicalities of collaboration itself
– Technologies to support collaboration (e.g.
groupware) are typically orthogonal to integration
technologies and infrastructures
– Challenges, for example, of supporting provisionality
and what this entails (signalling provisionality, limiting
circulation and so on)
Lessons for VOs
• Trust
– Danger of Trust being equated solely with finding
appropriate authentication / authorisation
mechanisms
– We find that trust is often an everyday, ongoing
practical matter that draws upon the visibility and
accountability of everyday practices
– VO’s typically entail mediated collaboration of one
sort or another (i.e. participants are not co-located)
– Think of ways of allowing for, or building in, the sorts
of visibility arrangements, informality, etc appropriate
for supporting trusted relations.
Summary
Contracts
Infrastructure
Authorisation / authentication
Business transactions
Messy informal
practices
Finally
• We might see the work of VOs as being
organised around clearly defined transactions
that are part of business cases
• But would want to point to detailed interactions
that have a more complex relationship with
'business cases'.
• …this is not to say they are completely different
but may be what is actually required to make a
transaction ‘work’ – i.e. be trustable and useful.
Spare slides to follow
•
in relation to that one might also say that much
existing work is organised around transactional
exchanges where each exchange is a clearly
identified (part of) a 'business case'. In contrast
to this we are talking about detailed interactions
that have a more complex relationship with
'business cases'. This is not to say they are
completely different but may be what is actually
required to make a 'transaction' happen.
What we want to do
• There is a considerable amount of
‘invisible’ (Shapin) or ‘seen but unnoticed’
(Garfinkel) work that goes into making a
VO work
• We want to look at some case-study
examples and to draw out some lessons
with regard to the organisation of VOs
• The aim is to unpack the O in VO
It all depends on where you look
• Looking at the abstracts for this workshop
it becomes apparent that VOs and the grid
mean different things to different persons
• The grid as
– An enabler for data infrastructures
– A means of working collaboratively
– A means of harnessing substantial computing
power
• VOs as
– Agile collaborations
– Networks of trust
– Means of sharing common infrastructures
–...
–...