SELECTIVE ETHNOGRAPHIC ANALYSIS Qualitative Modeling For Work Place Ethnography

In order to harness the value of workplace ethnography, it is becoming more and more apparent that we need a way to incorporate ethnographic data into work system analysis and design efforts. One of the biggest problems we face in this regard is making the best use of the insights that ethnography brings to a design process. Traditionally ethnography takes a lot of time, is done mostly in isolation, and the insights are mostly presented in a written and/or verbal way. In design projects we often don't have time to wait for the results of a long-term field study. Even if we do, using those results effectively is problematic. Knowledge acquisition has some of the same problems (time and use) that we see with ethnography. For many years people in the Expert Systems community spoke of the "knowledge acquisition bottleneck." We could say the same for ethnography: How can we best address the "ethnography bottleneck?"