Current Project Summary
This project aims to discover, abd support, previously hidden patterns of work organization (workflows) by taking a novel approach to the creation of work process visualizations of knowledge-intensive (KI) work. Specifically, this research supports the development of technologies to account for the knowledge work in organizations, particularly in instances where multiple parties need to coordinate distributed tasks. A key part of this project will be the creation of a tool that can model the events, tools, participants, and objectives associated with creating complex texts, generating rich representations that viewers can use to understand and plan their activities. This tool, for example, would allow stakeholders involved in the creation of organizational texts to understand what arrangements and resources were enrolled in the successful creation of past documents. Such knowledge would be invaluable for making productive sense of such high-stakes organizational productions as proposals.

Preliminary research in this area indicates that a robust modeling approach drawing from several data. Preliminary research in this area indicates that a robust modeling approach drawing from several data sources associated with a project has value for knowledge workers in organizations. These modeling techniques will be supplemented and improved during the project.

Project Background & History
In order to answer compelling questions about the ways mature KI organizations can be both successful over time and innovative – that is, both stable and agile in terms of carrying out KI work – we adopt a new analytic approach that combines qualitative data-gathering methods with both qualitative and quantitative analysis to produce dynamic, sortable work process models at two levels of granularity:Genre ecology models show how different types of information objects are called upon to coordinate and carry out knowledge work across an organization, illuminating the power of genres and combinations of forms to mediate key processes. Communication event diagrams zoom in to show projects as more-or-less routinized patterns of communication events, revealing process and content-oriented logics of practice responsible for making individuals and teams effective, well-coordinated and motivated.

Both modeling techniques rely on representations of communicative events – both written and spoken – to build a representation of work rather than relying exclusively on more conventional units found in workflow systems: tasks, decisions, and milestones. We believe the resulting models are much more thoroughly appropriate for representing KI work. Rather than prescribing normative practices, our modeling technique provides a self-mediational tool that allows KI workers to become more aware of stabilizations and innovations in their work processes. Traditional models that do not depict communication events tend to lack representations of the tacit knowledge that provides the “connective tissue” for formalized work practices.

In this three-year project, we will develop our modeling techniques through a series of field research studies of KI organizations with the aim of discovering, in phase one of the project, what patterns of work characterize success, team satisfaction, stability, and innovation in mature KI organizations. In phase 2, we will turn our attention to start-up KI organizations to see, first, if similar patterns of work are characteristic of success, satisfaction, innovation, etc. In phase 3, we will actively introduce strategies from the mature organizations made explicit in phase 1 to teams in the start-up organizations in order to determine if these these same work patterns can be leveraged to achieve similar results. We hope, in the process, to demystify the process of depicting knowledge work, rendering key KI strategies intelligible, interpretable, and transferable both within and across organizations.

To accomplish this ambitious goal, we will be developing a software tool to implement and extend our modeling technique. Our intention in developing the tool is to allow a wide range of users, including researchers and KI workers themselves, to enter data, to construct and manipulate visualizations of both ongoing and past work processes, and to interpret these data with varying degrees of rigor appropriate to the types of reasoning they may be doing about work. The tool will provide workers with ways to actively mediate and self-regulate knowledge work. At the same time it will create a platform for analyzing knowledge work that will allow researchers to address some of the most vexing questions about the nature and quality of communication in knowledge work. In the final year of our project, we hope to devote a substantial amount of time to testing the modeling tool with workers in both mature and start-up KI organizations, refining the ways projects can be tracked and visualized, and increasing the capacity of the tool to handle large amounts of project data in order to allow for more and more rigorous modeling.

Related Documents:

Hart-Davidson, Bill, Spinuzzi, C. J., & Zachry, M. (2006). Visualizing writing activity as knowledge work: Challenges and opportunities. Proceedings of the 24th ACM International Conference on Design of Communication. Association for Computing Machinery (Myrtle Beach, SC).

Hart-Davidson, W., Spinuzzi, C., & Zachry, M. (2004). Modeling knowledge work. Unpublished Whitepaper.

Hart-Davidson, W. (2002). Turning reflections into technology: Leveraging theory and research in the design of communication software. Proceedings of the International Professional Communication Conference (pp. 455-467). Portland, OR: IEEE.

Hart-Davidson, W. (2003). Seeing the project: Mapping patterns of intra-team communication events. In ACM SIGDOC 2003 Conference Proceedings (pp. 28-34). ACM, Inc., New York.