Designing Coordination Systems for Distributed Teamwork

Contemporary working environments are increasingly complex, volatile and physically distributed. Coordinating work in such environments is therefore becoming a major challenge as the traditional focus on efficient schedules is shifting to include other factors such as rapid reaction to market changes. This paper argues that effective coordination support should be based on a two-level coordination model supported by agent-based implementation infrastructure. Operational coordination processes take place at the inter-level, while the meta-level is concerned with managing the inter-level coordination processes by considering dynamically changing goals and factors. This division is at the heart of our novel approach to work coordination presented here. A case study of distributed telecom repair teams is used to illustrate the approach.