Publication: IBM Systems Journal
Publication Date: 01-OCT-06
Delivery: Immediate Online Access
Author: Geyer, Werner ; Muller, Michael J. ; Moore, Martin Thomas ; Wilcox, Eric ; Cheng, Li-Te ; Brownholtz, Beth ; Hill, Charles ; Millen, David R.
Article Excerpt
INTRODUCTION
Activity Explorer (AE), a part of the IBM Workplace * product family, (1) introduced the concept of activity-centric collaboration to the market. The basic idea behind activity-centric collaboration is simple: Reorganize collaboration to reflect the work being done rather than the technologies that support the work. An activity can be defined as a logical unit of work that incorporates all the tools, people, and resources needed to get a job done. Just a few examples of activities are: preparing an executive meeting, planning a conference, closing a sale, planning and executing the conversion of multiple bank branches to new computing systems, and writing or responding to a request for proposal.
This paper provides an overview of the multiyear research behind AE and activity-centric collaboration. It describes the journey from research prototype to product. We summarize the concepts, findings, and outcomes of this successful research-to-product experience and present some new results of follow-up research on alert management, partial sharing, and design explorations.
The idea for AE emerged from our research on new "instant collaboration" techniques in the context of our Reinventing E-mail project. (2-4) The problem of e-mail overload (5) was a major trigger for our work on activity-centric collaboration. Research indicated that people use e-mail not only to communicate, but to manage various types of work activities. (6,7) These types of work activities are not well supported by e-mail because--for activities that extend over long periods of time or over large numbers of participants--it rapidly becomes unmanageable. (5) There is very little support for a structured and rich collaboration within e-mail. At the other extreme, structured shared workspaces provide better support for making sense of large bodies of messages and files. However, they are relatively labor-intensive to initiate and manage over time, which makes them cumbersome and ill-suited for use on small-scale or short-term collaborations. The AE implementation of activity-centric collaboration bridges this gap between informal ad hoc communications and highly structured workspaces, and can help people move their work activities out of the inbox, while still being able to maintain the ligh-tweight character and flexibility of e-mail.
In the next section, we define activity-centric collaboration from a broader perspective and explain its benefits and values to business users. In the section "Activity Explorer," we provide an overview of the concrete AE user interface by illustrating how AE can be used to collaborate in an activity, and we describe the underlying, initial design rationale of AE. In the section "Activities infrastructure research," we describe the architectural model for AE and place it in the broader space of activity-centric collaboration applications. From a systems perspective, AE is only one instance of an activity-centric collaboration client. Using the same activities back-end, different client user experiences can be built.
We deployed AE multiple times during our research over the past three years, which gave us the opportunity to collect valuable data. In the section "Empirical and design research," we present the most intriguing results from our work, illustrating how our research influenced design and development. Field work, participatory analysis, usability evaluations, customer reviews, and design explorations deeply informed our research with the real work that we hoped to support. This helped us verify and refine our concepts and gain useful insight for future product versions.
Our project was one of several research explorations of the concept of activity management, which is concerned with providing a rich and diverse set of resources to teams and individuals as they plan, execute, and reuse work. Our project has engaged in a dialogue with the Unified Activity Management (UAM) project, which has emphasized a task-oriented approach to activity management. (8-11) Together, AE and UAM have deeply informed the next version of the IBM Notes * client and the IBM vision for activity-centric collaboration. In the section "Designing the future: Next-generation AE," we discuss how AE concepts are evolving in the next product generation, currently under development. One of the goals of this project is to provide an extensible and flexible programming model that allows building customized user experiences. Another goal is to deliver a new, lightweight, and general-purpose activity-management client that supports the collaborative capabilities of AE ad hoc activities, but also incorporates the latest work on patterns, that is, templates for repetitive activities from the UAM research project. (8-10)
ACTIVITY-CENTRIC COLLABORATION
Collaboration technologies can be arranged on a continuum of specificity (12) as indicated in Figure 1. At the left side of the spectrum are ad hoc communication tools that support informal, unstructured work. At the right side are technologies that support formal, structured business processes. To simplify the discussion, we categorize technologies on the continuum into three boxes with shared workspace systems in the center.
[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]
At the left of Figure 1, ad hoc collaboration systems such as e-mail and chat are lightweight and flexible and provide good dynamic support for short-term communication needs. (13,14) Collaboration is usually managed and controlled by end users. This is certainly one of the reasons why these tools are so popular and why they are used for all sorts of collaborative activities. (15) However, for those collaborations that extend over longer periods of time or involve a larger numbers of participants, these media quickly become unmanageable. (5) Users are flooded with collaboration artifacts, and making sense of so many of them becomes more and more difficult.
In the middle of Figure 1, structured shared workspaces provide better support for making sense of large bodies of messages and files. (16,17) They typically support sophisticated access control and role models, both of which help to manage large team projects. Many of these systems provide rich support for structured collaboration, such as document or task management. However, these environments are relatively labor intensive to initiate, which discourages people from using them for small-scale or short-term collaborations. They are more difficult to manage because access control is more complex. These systems also add to the problem of manually managing and monitoring an ever-increasing number of scattered online places (e.g., see Reference 18).
At the right of Figure 1, business process technologies, such as supply chain management (SCM) and customer relationship management (CRM) systems, are highly optimized to support repetitive business tasks. The collaborative business process is fully represented, and a business process engine helps to execute the process. These systems achieve high efficiency; that is, they complete a high number of collaborative processes in a short time with little human interaction. However, because they are rigid, exceptions typically are not handled well. (12) Users have to retreat to ad hoc tools to resolve exceptions. This, however, can be quite difficult because business process applications are silos, meaning they are not well integrated with other collaboration technologies. Worse, users sometimes have to invent false entities (e.g., fictitious work items or fictitious workers) in order to achieve efficient execution of the human aspects of the work that are over-specified by a formal workflow model. (19) These systems are not well-suited to handle processes that differ slightly from execution to execution because the system needs to be reconfigured whenever a business process changes, which imposes high cost.
In reality, a single collaborative activity is often managed with multiple collaboration tools and technologies at different levels of formality. These can include e-mail, chat, wikis (a type of web site that allows users to easily add, remove, or otherwise edit all content), discussion databases, listservs, document management systems, workflow systems, and ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) systems. This diversity means that people must monitor and participate in multiple shared venues, spreading their attention and their effort across multiple media. Even if they succeed at this context management task, they still face the difficulty of having to determine the scale of any new collaborative activity in order to select the best medium. A wrong determination results in having to move resources from one media environment to another, which can be difficult because of the many inconsistencies and incompatibilities among the various technologies. For example, a brief conversation that begins as a chat may need to be transferred to e-mail in order to more efficiently include a larger number of participants or make the communication more convenient for participants in different time zones. If the number of people or shared resources continues to increase, then e-mail may become a chaotic venue, and it will become necessary to transfer the resources again into a structured discussion space or a document management system.
The technical goal of activity-centric collaboration is to bridge these gaps of rigidity and tool boundaries by horizontally integrating different collaboration tools and technologies through the concept of a work activity. The intent is not to provide yet another collaboration tool. It is to provide a technology that can organize collaboration so that it reflects the work being done, rather than the tools that support the work. In addition to organizational and work efficiency, activity-centric collaboration can improve organization and work quality by reducing the extra work needed to assemble relevant resources and by providing a single structure within which all records of an activity may be collectively located and, if necessary, collectively accessed by the original members of the activity or by others who need the information generated by that activity. The intent is for an activity representation to contain all the resources, tools, and people required to get the work done. The representation for an activity needs to be simple yet flexible enough to accommodate different levels of rigidity, which often are not known in advance.
We believe that activity-centric collaboration can deliver several benefits to business users:
* By integrating diverse tools, activity-centric collaboration can increase the integrity of information around critical business activities, leading to enhanced coordination among human and machine actors, reduced costs associated with information retrieval and analysis across tool boundaries, and improved ability to audit activity histories.
* By inserting collaborative tools into the context of process applications, activity-centric collaboration can enable richer modes of collaboration in these applications, thereby extending their management aegis beyond strongly formal situations.
* By inserting simple activity management into ad hoc collaboration environments, activity-centric collaboration can help users manage their everyday, human-driven communication stream with little or no increased effort.
* By making it easy to bring a variety of tools and best practices to a problem, activity-centric collaboration can empower users to collaborate more freely and better match their collaboration methods to the job.
* By enabling users to capture and disseminate best practices as activity patterns, activity-centric collaboration can enable a new collaborative approach to process improvement.
ACTIVITY EXPLORER
AE currently runs as a separate application within the IBM Workplace Client. This section describes AE in the IBM Workplace Client 2.6 (AE 2.6). Note that the nonproduct research prototype of AE has only a slightly different design and feature set. These differences will be noted in the text as pertinent.
User experience
In AE, an activity is modeled as a set of related, shared objects representing a task or project. The set of related objects is structured as a hierarchical thread, called an activity thread, representing the context of the task at hand. Users create new activity threads by creating root objects from any type of content or communication. Users add items to an activity thread by posting either a response or a resource addition to its parent object. Activity threads combine different types of objects, memberships, and alerts. AE initially supports the sharing of five object types: message, chat transcript, file, folder, and annotated screen capture. The AE research prototype also supports task objects.
Activity structure and membership are managed by several user interface components (Figure 2). The Activity List tab (A) shows a multicolumn inbox-like activity list. It supports multiple views on activities and can be sorted and filtered. New activities always bubble up on top of this list per default. The Activity Tree view (B) shows an overall tree structure of all user activities and can be used in a fashion much like Microsoft Windows ** Explorer. Selecting a shared object in the list view or tree view populates a read-only details pane (C). The Activity Thread view (D) maps a shared object as a node in a tree representing an entire activity thread. The Activity Thread and the Activity List and Tree views are synchronized by object selection. Additionally, users interact with objects or members displayed in these views through right-click context menus. Representative icons are highlighted green to cue users of shared object access and member presence.
[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]
The following scenario illustrates how shared objects, as building blocks for activities, can be used to collaborate in an activity that starts from a document. This scenario highlights only core features; for a more complete description of AE capabilities, see Reference 20. Figure 2 is a snapshot of an activity in progress, shown from the perspective of one of the actors (Celine). The activity thread is built dynamically as the actors collaborate.
Scenario
Celine is a designer. She works with Susan on a print promotion flyer for Delta Pacific Bank. Ming is their project manager. The first review meeting with Delta Pacific is approaching. Celine has crafted a draft of the flyer and would like Susan's feedback. Celine glances at her Instant Contacts for Susan's name and sees that Susan is currently offline. From her desktop, Celine drags the draft image file onto Susan's name, starting a new activity thread named "Delta Pacific Promotion" (1). The file is now shared and shows up as a new activity in Celine's activity list (2). Celine right clicks on the file object to add a message asking Susan for her comments (3).
A few hours later, Susan returns to her desktop. In the system tray, Susan is alerted to the new activity by an alert message (whenever an object is changed--including the addition of a child object--all people who have access privileges on that object receive an alert message about the change). Clicking on the alert, she is taken to the activity thread. She opens the message and, while she is reading it, Celine can see that Susan is looking at the message because the shared object is lit green (3). Celine seizes the opportunity to expedite their progress; she right clicks on the initial message and adds a chat to this activity (4). A chat window pops up on Susan's desktop and they chat (5). Celine refers to a detail in the image file; for clarity she wants to show Susan what she would like changed. By right clicking on the chat object, Celine creates a shared snapshot object (6). A transparent window allows Celine to take a snapshot of any region of...
NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.
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