Transforming work: collaboration, learning, and design
Communications of the ACM
A room of your own: what would it take to help remote groups work as well as collocated groups?
CHI 98 Cconference Summary on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Layers of Silence, Arenas of Voice: The Ecology ofVisible and Invisible Work
Computer Supported Cooperative Work - Special issue: a web on the wind: the structure of invisible work
Social translucence: an approach to designing systems that support social processes
ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI) - Special issue on human-computer interaction in the new millennium, Part 1
Human-Computer Interaction
Form digitization in BPO: from outsourcing to crowdsourcing?
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Proceedings of the 17th ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work & social computing
Hi-index | 0.01 |
In this paper we compare two departments of a public administration body carrying out similar work. In one department two sections, telephony and processing, are collocated whereas in the other they are not. We demonstrate the costs of distribution, in particular how the strictly enforced division of labour and limited visibility onto the workflow of the other section causes problems when dealing with normal, natural exceptions. The setting is one of seemingly routine bureaucratic work rather than high-skilled cooperative work, thus the impact of distribution might be considered rather surprising. We argue that a key requirement for any solution is to enable practitioners on the 'shop floor' the freedom to find elegant solutions to problems.