This survey characterizes an emerging research area, sometimes called coordination theory, that focuses on the interdisciplinary study of coordination. Research in this area uses and extends ideas about coordination from disciplines such as computer science, organization theory, operations research, economics, linguistics, and psychology. A key insight of the framework presented here is that coordination can be seen as the process of managing dependencies among activities. Further progress, therefore, should be possible by characterizing different kinds of dependencies and identifying the coordination processes that can be used to manage them. A variety of processes are analyzed from this perspective, and commonalities across disciplines are identified. Processes analyzed include those for managing shared resources, producer/consumer relationships, simultaneity constraints, and tank/subtask dependencies. Section 3 summarizes ways of applying a coordination perspective in three different domains: (1) understanding the effects of information technology on human organizations and markets, (2) designing cooperative work tools, and (3) designing distributed and parallel computer systems. In the final section, elements of a research

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It is possible to design cooperative work tools based only on "common sense " and good intuitions. But the history of technology is replete with examples of good theories greatly aiding the development of useful technology. Where, then, might we look for theories to help us design computer-supported cooperative work tools? In this paper, we will describe one possible perspective-the interdisciplinary study of coordination-that focuses, in part, on how people work together now and how they might do so differently with new information technologies. In one sense, there is little that is new about the study of coordination. Many different disciplines--including computer science, sociology, political science, management science, systems theory, economics, linguistics, and psychology--have all dealt, in one way or another, with fundamental questions about coordination. Furthermore, several previous writers have suggested that theories about coordination are likely to be important for designing cooperative work tools (e.g., Holt8], (Wino86]). We hope to suggest here, however, that the potential for fruitful interdisciplinary connections concerning coordination is much greater than has as yet been widely

The correct and timely creation of systems for coordination of group work depends on the ability to express, analyze, and experiment with protocols for managing multiple work threads. We present an evolution of the Trellis model that provides a formal basis for prototyping the coordination structure of a collaboration system. In Trellis, group interaction protocols are represented separately from the interface processes use them for coordination. Since these protocols are interpreted (rather than being compiled into applications), group interactions can be changed as a collaborative task progresses. Changes can be made either by a person editing the protocol specification "on the fly" or by a silent "observation" process that participates in an application solely to perform behavioral adaptations. Trellis uniquely mixes hypermedia browsing with collaboration support. We term this combination a hyperprogram, and we say that a hyperprogram integrates the description of a collaborative t...

In this paper, a formal basis for multimedia collaborations is proposed. The formal basis establishes a precise mathematical framework for supporting a wide spectrum of structured collaborative tasks, ranging from simple meetings and conferences to classrooms and examinations, and from corporate negotiations, work flow tasks, and team design endeavors to courtroom hearings. We mechanize three levels of abstraction: streams at the lowest level, for media communication, sessions at the next level, which represent collections of semantically related media streams, and conferences, which represent temporally related sequences of sessions. The mathematical framework has been mechanized in Prototype Verification System (PVS) from SRI International. The mechanization allows us to experiment with different formal models, and reason about properties of multimedia collaborations efficiently. The mechanized framework supports unification of both interactive and non-interactive collaborations, so...

Managers must understand, influence, and redesign organizational processes to improve business performance. In this paper we present a technique for documenting a business process. The technique has six steps: defining process boundaries, collecting data, determining actors and resources, determining activities, determining dependencies and model verification. While similar to other processmapping techniques, our approach is novel in incorporating ideas from coordination theory, thus the attention to dependencies. As a result, the technique is useful both for documenting a process and suggesting ways in which the process could be redesigned. We present an extended illustration with the hope that the technique can be used by readers of this article.

The correct and timely creation of systems for coordination of group work depends on the ability to express, analyze, and experiment with protocols for managing multiple work threads. We present an evolution of the Trellis model that provides a formal basis for prototyping the coordination structure of a collaboration system. Like its predecessor, the new Trellis model has the nicely exploitable duality of being both graph formalism and parallel automaton. The automaton semantics provide dynamic information about the interactions of agents in a collaboration; the graph structure forms the basis for the static link structure of a hyperdocument. We give several analysis techniques for the model, and demonstrate its use by expressing the interaction structure of some common forms of collaborative system.

Characteristic of the LAP approach is that communication is considered as a way of coordinating behavior. However, little has been said so far about how communication supports coordination, and how it relates to other coordination mechanisms. The objective of this paper is to clarify the relationship between coordination and communication. It contains an overview of the literature on coordination and describes how communication as it is conceived in LAP relates to the “standard” coordination and integration mechanisms. We conclude that this relation is becoming very tight in modern organizations and also indicate what this could mean for LAP.

a handbook of organizational processes

The Trellis project is investigating the structure and semantics of hypertextually-described interaction [SF89a, SF94]. As the work has developed over a number of years, we have broadened our scope from the study of hyperdocuments to encompass hyperprograms. A hyperprogram associates user-manipulatable information (the hypertext) with user-directed execution behavior (the process). Consequently a hyperprogram can be said to integrate task with information. Generalizing, the hyperprogram's execution behavior can be defined by the collective actions of a group of entities, not only the direction of a single user. Such actions can be generated by, and can coordinate the activities of, a collection of human users, computer-based processes, and indeed reflect and are driven by the intentions of the hyperprogram's author. The structural characteristics of a hyperdocument permit the specification and documentation of a concurrent protocol an