Looking at the ‘O’ of VOs – organisational aspects of

collaborationSchool of Informatics, Edinburgh University

NCESS, ManchesterMark 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 StudyBackground

• 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

Infrastructure

Contracts

Authorisation / authentication

Business transactions

Messy informalpractices

Messy informalpractices

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 – . . .– . . .