How to put cooperative work in context: Analysis and design requirements

Work is a situated activity. Being effective in work activities requires awareness of the Organizational context (OC) where it is situated. In this paper we discuss three issues related to the above claim: • awareness requires both transparency and visibility of the OC. Moreover it requires that the representation of the OC, through which visibility and transparency are achieved, has some learning capabilities; • lack of awareness is a major factor affecting the transaction costs of work activities; • any Computer Support to Cooperative Work needs to embody an OC representation. These three issues are discussed from the point of view of the work process model the authors are developing. The work process model gives precise guidelines to distinguish within the OC of a work process three different types of knowledge (namely the outer, inner and individual OC) and to outline how they can be represented. A short section is dedicated to how the OC adaptor TOSCA can used as a basis for the representation of the OC of a work process.