Assignment 2

Some years ago I was employed by a product survey company out of Port Washington, New York. My employers were responsible for gaining customer satisfaction data from consumer surveys . They provided “market information” on products and a services, which in turn was helped their clients understand were they fell in the market and how to best optimize their businesses practices, products, or procedures. My employer had many clients this generated much data that needed to be stored and held for analysis by Programmers and DBAs.

I was hired as one of their Senior Computer night/weekend shift Operators. We ran a 24/7 shop. I worked 3 days for 12 hour shifts. The Shifts were split up into two parts. The Day shift: They handled Programmers, data mart employees or anyone working in the company during regularly scheduled hours. They dealt with monitoring system operations, managing service requests in departments and general problem management. Nights and weekend shifts handle more production and system maintenance. Maintenance that needed to be done to 3 computing facilities: New York, Canada, Europe offices. Much got done on both shifts and the need to communicate these issues was imperative. In order to try to fix this disconnect many things were tried. Supervisors were straddled; operators were put on rotation schedules. Nothing seemed to work.

They decided to move from a paper journaling system. To an electronic one. Paper journaling worked for some time for the group. It was one less system to maintain. An operator could quickly scan weeks, or even months at a time, just by the flick of the wrist. They felt it made things easier to have a book for portability, that it gave the operator the ability to take it with them to different units in the room, thus enabling them to write down codes or faults from machinery.

Our problem with paper journaling was that it was not an asynchronous form of communications -- similar to instant messengering or talking on the phone. The way the shifts were structured, there was very little overlap. When you referred to the journal you either saw the scribblings of a crazed Day Shift operator that did not have the time to truly convey all the information to be properly understood. Or the musings of a Night Shift operator that was usually upset with the lack of communication from the Day Shift so they over simplified every problem or happening on their shift in order to “set the record straight” as to how they felt they needed to have the important information passed along in order to make their shift an easier one. Either way, important information was getting lost, people were frustrated and nothing was getting done to fix the underling problem. Our collaboration tools were not aiding us in our communication of needed information pertaining to the shifts.

In the Kraut reading, we learned that “In the work arena, groups are a major mechanism for organizations to tackle problems that are too large or complex for individuals to solve alone.” (Kraut, p12). Seeing that we were all individuals but still part of a group, communication was poor which hindered the group outcome.

From some of our readings we also learn that, “The subfield of human-computer interaction (HCI) known as computer supported cooperative work (CSCW) attempts to build tools that will help groups of people to more effectively accomplish their work,” (Kraut, p12). Bearing this in mind, management met and decided to go with an electronic journaling process.

Problem solved. Not so much…

Unlike today’s electronic ticket journal Data Bases such as Remedy or Filemaker, this program seemed to run like a word processor. They had a few fields one for the day the rest for information. This at least gave you one search criteria. However, it still lacked what today’s simple Data Base ticket journals have. Seeing that they purchased it from some “Joe Whitebox” company, the upgradability and personal standardization was limited.

From our readings we learn that “Besides production, groups also need to have the capability to work together in the future (group maintenance) and to support the needs of individuals within the group (member support) to be successful” (Hackman, 1987) The individual group members were not consulted. Alternate models were not considered. Documentation was not consistent.

Again the process failed. It was still a stand alone system that was unable to be backed up and instead of the portability that the book offered, it sat in an out of the way location in the room. Far from machinery. This became a dreaded process due to the fact that operators had to take the time out of their schedules to go and sit at a specific location to perform the same task they did in the paper journaling system. As a result, even more was missed between the shifts.

Bad communication, poor design.