Studies of Collaborative Processes in Boundary-Spanning Design
Dr. Susan Gasson, Associate Professor Emerita
I study the design, use, and impacts of digital technologies for boundary-spanning collaboration. My studies employ grounded theory, ethnography, and qualitative/mixed methods to investigate IT systems design. Design gives form to the technologies we use. The design methods and management approaches employed, the privileging of knowledge and expertise in defining user operations, and the ability to support the work and needs of stakeholders and IT system users are all important constraints on achieving a human-centered design outcome.
1. Design Emergence
How can we design organizational information systems to support emergent goals, adaptive business processes, and effective collaboration? Collaborative design incorporates a “requisite variety” of solutions, where the sum of team efforts is greater than individual contributions. The ability to share and collectively refine a technology solution that is shaped to the specific context of use requires that we treat organizational problems as “wicked problems,” that span knowledge domain and expertise boundaries. Learn More
2. Collaboration Spaces for Knowledge Sharing
Organizational best practice is learned through collaboration. Expert practitioners share their knowledge in a variety of ways: through engaging in joint practice with less knowledgeable colleagues; via narratives that provide proxy experiences for vicarious learning; via mentorship relationships that included guided practice and feedback; and through the establishment of standardized forms and procedures that transfer or translate knowledge across group boundaries. As IT platforms increasingly replace face-to-face relationships between people in distributed organizations, we need to design online collaboration spaces that incentivize effective knowledge-sharing. Learn More
3. Human-centered design
My research investigates both the process and the product of human-centered design. While user-centered design focuses on the forms and affordances of systems of information and communication technology (ICT) for specific groups or types of users, human-centered design investigates how to support the purposeful activities that various groups of users engage in through the design of ICT systems. The human-centered designer is a faciltator as much as a technology designer, using ethnographic and systemic analysis to surface diverse purposes-of-use, explore the desired system-of-work-processes, and design ICT systems technology to achieve those purposes. Learn More
Use of the Grounded Theory Method
The Grounded Theory Method is used to generate substantive theories that are "grounded" in evidence obtained from systematic data collection and analysis. Over time (and multiple studies), these theory-elements build into a larger, formal theory that can be considered applicable to similar contexts and situations to those studied. Building theory from the ground up is complicated and often denigrated as lacking in evidence - mainly because the term is sometimes applied to less systematic approaches. My work covers how to use GTM in qualitative studies, to ensure rigor and to generate useful theory! Learn More
Soft Systems Methodology (SSM)
The Use of SSM To Analyze Change Requirements for Human-Activity Systems
Soft Systems Methodology (SSM) provides a philosophy and a set of techniques for investigating an unstructured problem situation. SSM is an approach to the investigation of the problems that may or may not require computer-based system support as part of its solution. In this sense, SSM could be described as an approach to system requirements analysis, rather than a systems design approach.
Unlike most systems requirements analysis techniques (e.g. UML, entity-relationship modeling or data-flow diagrams), which focus on how the computer system should operate, SSM focuses on the system of work – the “human activity system” that requires computer system support. SSM asks the fundamental question that should (but usually does not) precede system requirements analysis:
“Why do we want a computer system and what role will it perform, in supporting people and organizational work?”
SSM questions what operations the system should perform and, more importantly, why. The approach provides a “soft” investigation (into what the system should do) which can be used to precede the “hard” investigation (into how the system should do it). This analysis does not produce either a set of information system requirements or an information system design. Instead, SSM produces a set of feasible and locally (culturally) acceptable actions which can be taken to improve the problem situation. These actions may be used to produce a set of information systems requirements, as they explore the requirements for change in more detail than IT requirements methods. But it is more helpful to see them as a set of organizational process improvements, where a process is a set of organizational tasks performed purposefully by a human actor or actors. Learn More (link to personal website).