Procedures for Office Analysis: a Critical Review

Abstract:     
Because office automation has not fulfilled its promise of making work more productive andsatisfying, researchers have developed techniques for specifying better requirements for officeautomation and support. Four such office analysis techniques have been publicly proposed, differingin how much of the complete analysis-to-prescription cycle they cover, what aspects they analyze,and how they bound the "office." Review of these analysis processes points to three key issues:1. Office analysis is weak on prescribing specific support/automationproducts;2. we do not know how to evaluate different analysis techniques; and3. we have not yet specified the criteria by which we would decide whichtechnique is good.In answer to these issues, we suggest that extensions of some promising schemes forprescribing specific products be explored; that techniques be compared using an efficient "transcriptexperiment" approach; and that the criteria for acceptability for an analysis method be that itsdescriptions be reliable and valid, and that its prescriptions be valuable to the workers in thereorganized, computer-supported office.

Number of Pages in PDF File: 18

working papers series