Looking at the ‘O’ of VOs – organisational aspects of collaboration

1. Looking at the ‘O’ of VOs – organisational aspects of collaboration School of Informatics, Edinburgh University NCESS, Manchester Mark Hartswood, Rob Procter, Roger Slack, Alex Voss

2. Aim of talk • Socio-technical perspective taken from a number of case studies: • Examine the interrelations between the dynamics of collaborations and the technologies designed to support them • General messages: • Promote sensitivity to the sorts of practical activities/concerns entailed in collaboration in order to support them adequately • Examine how trust might be fostered between participants in virtual organisations

3. Sociality of collaboration • A VO is still an organisation with all the practical, worldly contingencies that this implies • Examine two case studies where technology has been introduced to mediate collaborative work • Medical records system to support community mental health work • GRID infrastructure to support screening mammography (eDiaMoND) • In both we have been concerned at looking at the messy details of organisational collaborative practices, focussing on: • how people organise their work, • how they make their work visible and • How trust relations are fostered between participants

4. NHS Rural Case StudyBackground • Record system introduced to support work of Adult and Care of the Elderly Community Mental Health Teams (CMHT) • Teams concerned with the community based assessment, care and treatment of people with mental health problems • Work undertaken by interdisciplinary teams (Occupational therapy, CMHT nurses, social workers, support workers)

5. Typical Care Episode • Referral (e.g. from a GP) • Prioritisation and case allocation • Assessment • Care plan put in place • Care programme initiated • Discharge

6. Teamwork • Teamwork – consensual decision-making. • Almost continual discussion ‘office talk’ about clients and possible approaches • Policy of conducting joint assessments • Cases discussed in team meetings, different professional perspectives, and other information, can be brought to bear • Trajectory of decision-making

7. Making provisional formulations • One community mental health nurse was observed to erase a section of an assessment form written in pencil. Other parts were written in pen • When asked said that she had put some ideas down concerning how the patient would be managed – but knew that some of these would be revised when the case was discussed at the team meeting • Started re-writing the section in pen

8. Informality and team work • Close examination of these practices revealed: • Decisions reached by consensus • Care decisions are ‘worked up’ over time • Collaboration takes place not only on the basis of sharing already accomplished judgments and decisions, but in their formation • Paper records supported ‘provisional versions’ • The Care Database supported sharing of simple ‘factual’ information and completed assessments but not joint authorship of documents that might initially have a provisional status.

9. eDiaMoND Case Study Background • To build a next generation grid enabled prototype to demonstrate the potential benefits of a national infrastructure to support digital mammography • To investigate benefits of digital mammography through applications to support: • Screening/diagnosis • Computer Aided Training • Epidemiology • The outcome that we are interested in here is how distributed reading might be supported to balance availability of expertise and workload across the country • Benefits from examining closely how reading is undertaken

10. Reading Practice

11. Sociality of reading • Easy to presume that reading is a ‘solitary’ activity, but our studies show • How reading in pairs allows readers to calibrate their decision-making against that of colleagues • How readers establish a sense of trust in their colleagues and in the mammograms they are charged with interpreting.

13. Problematising distributed reading • Mammograms shorn of their biographical context… • …as are the decisions made by the readers. • E.g. Alliance Medical – “It is also understood that some scans were carried out on breast cancer patients, although the service was not supposed to cover such cases. Some radiologists have insisted on re-checking all the scans because they are worried about the quality of the reporting”. Guardian 27th Feb, 2005.

14. Lessons for VOs • Collaboration: • Danger of taking a simplistic view of what is entailed by collaborations of various sorts • Can focus on the end points of collaborative work, rather than the practicalities of collaboration itself • Technologies to support collaboration (e.g. groupware) are typically orthogonal to integration technologies and infrastructures • Challenges, for example, of supporting provisionality and what this entails (signalling provisionality, limiting circulation and so on)

15. Lessons for VOs • Trust • Danger of Trust being equated solely with finding appropriate authentication / authorisation mechanisms • We find that trust is often an everyday, ongoing practical matter that draws upon the visibility and accountability of everyday practices • VO’s typically entail mediated collaboration of one sort or another (i.e. participants are not co-located) • Think of ways of allowing for, or building in, the sorts of visibility arrangements, informality, etc appropriate for supporting trusted relations.

16. Summary Contracts Infrastructure Authorisation / authentication Business transactions Messy informal practices

17. Finally • We might see the work of VOs as being organised around clearly defined transactions that are part of business cases • But would want to point to detailed interactions that have a more complex relationship with 'business cases'. • …this is not to say they are completely different but may be what is actually required to make a transaction ‘work’ – i.e. be trustable and useful.

18. Spare slides to follow • in relation to that one might also say that much existing work is organised around transactional exchanges where each exchange is a clearly identified (part of) a 'business case'. In contrast to this we are talking about detailed interactions that have a more complex relationship with 'business cases'. This is not to say they are completely different but may be what is actually required to make a 'transaction' happen.

19. What we want to do • There is a considerable amount of ‘invisible’ (Shapin) or ‘seen but unnoticed’ (Garfinkel) work that goes into making a VO work • We want to look at some case-study examples and to draw out some lessons with regard to the organisation of VOs • The aim is to unpack the O in VO

20. It all depends on where you look

21. Looking at the abstracts for this workshop it becomes apparent that VOs and the grid mean different things to different persons • The grid as • An enabler for data infrastructures • A means of working collaboratively • A means of harnessing substantial computing power

22. VOs as • Agile collaborations • Networks of trust • Means of sharing common infrastructures • . . . • . . .