The
growing acceptance of the need to incorporate an understanding of
the work into the design and development process has resulted in
a concern with the integration of studies of work into this process.
At the core of this integration is a concern with how work and work
settings can best be represented as part of the design process.
This paper seeks to complement this focus on the development of
different notations and mechanisms to represent work by understanding
the nature and role of representations in work.
In
this paper we consider representation as a practical everyday activity
that is undertaken in order to support work in a High Street Bank.
In particular, we focus on the way in which management information
metrics are drawn upon to construct a representation of the work
for those involved in it. This is complemented by a consideration
of the development of process maps that provide abstract representations
of the work of the Bank. Both these examples illustrate the need
to consider representations as practical everyday accomplishments
that are designed in practice in the workplace. We conclude the
paper by briefly outlining some of the implications for the future
design of systems to support work.
Introduction
The
systems design community has seen increased attention on understanding
the social in the design and development of systems to support everyday
work to the point where it is no longer a contentious issue. With the
recognition of the fundamentally situated nature of computer systems
(Suchman, 1987) the majority of research in this area has seen a shift
to an understanding the nature of the environment in which computer
systems are to be placed. Essentially, researchers have embraced a variety
of techniques, methods and theories from the social sciences to develop
an understanding of the nature of work and convey this to developers.
The
approaches that have contributed to this trend have included developments
based on social science theories such as 'grounded theory' (Fitzpatrick,
1996), activity theory (Kutti, 1992) and distributed cognition (Ross,
1995). These have been complemented by ethnographic approaches that
seek to present a rich description of the work as an everyday activity
(Blythin, 1997). While often offering different stances in terms of
philosophy and methodology these endeavours share a desire to convey
an understanding of the nature of the setting to those involved in the
development and construction of supporting systems.
It is
clear that representations are central to any consideration of the design
and development of systems to support work. A number of researchers
have considered the role of representation in the design process in
terms of the need for alternative representations to communicate system
requirements to system developers (Fischer 1997; Carrol 1994). Often
this is characterised as an issue of communication across a divide between
the social and the technical and many of these techniques focus on the
development of techniques to support this communication. This has led
to some considerable debate about the role of frameworks, notations
and prototypes in conveying an understanding of the social within areas
such as CSCW and Requirements Engineering (Hughes 1997)
In this
paper we seek to complement this focus on the development of representations
to convey the social setting to developers by seeking to understand
the way in which representations are actually constructed and used in
work settings. Rather than present the development of particular notations
or techniques (as we have done in the past (Hughes, 1995)) we consider
how representations emerge and are used in practice by examining the
practical accomplishment of some ‘representational’ activities
in everyday work in a High Street bank. This focus on the role of representation
within the ‘real time, real work’ of the bank aims to uncover
the way in which representations are used as an everyday resource to
support work as well as a means of representing and conveying the nature
of the work taking place.
One
reason for this shift of focus in understanding representation is the
simple observation that systems to support work often embody representations
of work as a means of supporting it. These representations vary considerably
in form and include representations such as process models (Colbert
1997), organisational structures (Blyth 1993) and are often reflected
in more system elements such as access roles and permission levels (Colouris
1998). More recent representations have even included virtual representations
of the work setting itself (Benford 1997) to be used as a medium for
cooperative work.
The
representations of work embodied in these technological artefacts provide
a significant resource in supporting the coordination and cooperation
essential to undertaking the work at hand. Consequently, we would argue
that the facilities offered to access and use these representations
are as significant as the form of these representations. In order to
develop these facilities we need to understand how representations are
actually used in work settings and how they are used to support work.
We wish to complement the considerable debate that has taken place about
different forms of representation by examining the relationship between
the representation of work and the nature of the work that takes place.
In doing so we argue that representations are closely interwoven with
work and are often achieved in practice rather than existing independently
to the work setting.
In this
paper we start by considering the nature of representations and how
representation can be considered as an everyday activity undertaken
as part of everyday work practice. We then focus on two examples of
‘representational’ activities drawn from the work of the
bank. The first considers how existing metric information held as a
series of numbers in a spreadsheet is drawn upon to construct a representation
of the work of the bank for those involved in managing that work. The
second example considers how an existing process model notation is exploited
to develop a representation of the work of a unit in the bank to convey
this work to those outside the unit. Each of these examples also illustrate
the manner in which an understanding of work is used in practice by
those involved to essentially design artefacts that represent work and
provide a resource to support that work. Finally, we conclude by considering
the implications for the development of future workplace systems and
the role of representation in these systems.
Representation
as a Practical Accomplishment
In turning
to any study of work we are immediately struck with the diversity of
representations of work that exist in everyday organisational settings
and the heterogeneous nature of these different representations. On
a day to day basis members in the Bank engage with a range of different
things that might be considered to be ‘representations’.
Their offices are replete with manuals, edicts, and forms, all of which
‘represent’ the organisation but get used in all sorts of
different and ad hoc ways. There are reports and files, and a
plethora of IT-mediated information and decision-making packages that
together provide highly selective ‘representations’ of the
Bank, its employees and its customers. So, for example, as Business
Managers prepare to interview customers they will routinely examine
computer generated Risk Analysis summaries; access the Customer Notes
on the computer database; read through letters sent to the customer
and so on. There are also the publicly available images of the Bank
and its activities that might be encountered on posters and booklets,
or on the screens of the ATMs. Whilst primarily displayed to customers,
these sorts of ‘representations’ also get subsumed within
and oriented to in the sense of what is locally understood to be the
organisation and its ‘style’ (Bittner, 1965). Furthermore,
there is a range of more informal representations such as instructions
scribbled on post-it-notes and attached to screens, walls or filing
cabinets.
These
different resources are routinely drawn upon and are often used in unison
to support different feature of everyday work. The routine interaction
and usage of these different representations in everyday work is illustrated
in the following fieldwork extract:
{Lending
Manager dealing with a colleague’s enquiry} - Colleague
giving history of the situation - uncertainty... Checking though
screens to track down the customer’s history... Questioning
the figures - Reading a faxed letter - Manager noting donations
on post-it-note - then numbering reasons for his decision to pass
on to the customer - Crosses out point 1 and point 3 - appends a
comment
What
is worth noting here is that to make sense of the work to be done the
lending manager simultaneously draws upon a number of resources. Each
of these different sources of information are simultaneously used to
allow the lending managers to orient themselves to the work taking place
and each provides different representations of the work and those involved
with the work.
As well
as being drawn upon directly as a resource to support work, representations
across the organisation provide a backdrop to many of the informal common
practices essential to the work of the bank. For example the fieldwork
extract below provides a simple illustration of how organisational stories
- chat or gossip about what’s going on in the Bank, and anecdotes
about customers - also display a routine orientation both to the range
of representations available (in this case 'vouchers' - paper records
of financial transactions) and to their place in the accomplishment
of routine work ('keying-in' the amounts on the vouchers and balancing
the figures)
Lending
Manager talking about problems at the new Voucher Processing Centre
- There have been keying-in mistakes - Have become almost daily
- "The only variable now is how many piles of work they don’t
key"
Various
representations also provide a significant everyday resource in the
co-ordination presentation and management of work within the bank and
much effort is expounded in the production of representations of the
work that is being undertaken. In particular, members working in the
Bank, and especially managers, have to constantly provide accounts of
how they, and those for whom they are responsible, have spent their
time. These get collated and passed on. Such accounts are gathered in
a number of different ways but together they get subsumed within a diffuse
body of ‘Management Information’. There is often considerable
uncertainty about the exact destination of all this information or even
its validity: as one manager put it "we know how busy our people are"
so conveying the strong implication that as far as they are concerned,
records of work done is of little use to them since they know this already.
(Blythin and Rouncefield, 1996). Nevertheless, individuals are obliged
to enter information about work activity into their screens every day.
Team Leaders have to collate it for their teams; functional managers
seek to pool that information in order to gain a picture of how their
particular unit is ‘performing’; and overall centre managers
will bring information about discrete units together to answer regional
concerns. In this fashion the various members of the work teams within
the bank are witnessably responsible for providing the story of ‘what
it is we have been doing’ and ‘what it is we do’.
Clearly manifestations of this information could be understood to be
‘representations’ of some kind and there is a sense in which
the members in the Bank are routinely engaged in describing their everyday
activities. In that way the Bank becomes a self-describing organisation.
In addition
to everyone being involved in providing, within the work, an account
of the work they do, they also get involved in working together to provide
some description of the relationship between the work they do and the
work of others. There are continual ongoing efforts to describe the
‘process’ of work in the bank. Clusters of staff come together
to develop ‘process maps’ - idealised ‘representations’
of the workflow. These representations are routinely produced as part
of a series of Quality Assurance initiatives in the Bank and these kinds
of ‘representations’ are overseen and refined by managers
too, so that their production becomes a collective enterprise.
Considering
the nature of representation
The
term representation has been quite deliberately used so far without
any consideration of a definition of the term. In many ways to recognise
the activities we have been describing as ‘representational’
is unproblematic. Few, one might argue, would have trouble seeing them
that way. However, representations have a tremendously situated nature
and many things can be considered as acting as a representation. In
this regard, the punning title of this paper is no sheer act of flippancy.
Its purpose is to underscore the highly contextualised ways in which
the word ‘representation’ is used and understood. For members
its use is not a theoretical or methodological problem but a practical
one. What is meant by it is usually wholly evident through the situated
character of its use, and, in the Bank, ‘how to ‘represent’
the workers?’ is a very real and everyday practical problem. This
only serves to emphasise the extent to which, whilst clearly an issue
for matters of design, ‘representation’ is also a matter
of everyday interest and work for organisations and those who work within
them. It is this situated nature that underpins the dual role of representations
as a means of presenting the work to others and as a means of making
sense of the work. Understanding these dual but related roles provides
the central motivation for the need to understand how representations
are used in practice to underpin the design of systems based on understanding
the nature of work.
Our
concern here, then, is with what mileage the word ‘representation’
as an analytic gloss might offer when considering a whole range of disparate
activities where the whole sense and orderliness of those activities
is necessarily situated and distinct. When one writes in general terms
about ‘representation’ it is hard at the present moment
to see what it can say about such diverse activities as painting a picture,
building a model, producing numerical descriptions of some phenomenon,
or describing someone you just met. All of these might readily be referred
to as representational activities and consequently involved themselves
in the production of representations of work.
However,
the main problem in taking this view is that we are effectively accepting
a presumption of commonality without any effort being made to fully
explicate these distinct activities in such a way that ‘meaningful’
isomorphisms (if such could ever be discovered) might be pointed to.
Given the intimate role of the production, manipulation and use of representations
to manage and support work, uncritically embedding this assumption in
the overall design and development of systems to support work is potentially
problematic, as these activities are central to the support of work.
We are
not attempting to deny here any possibility of ‘family resemblance’
between such activities but rather we are concerned about what one can
say about ‘the family’ in general that might simultaneously
say something meaningful about one of its members and inform the support
of these activities. Our concern here is very much that expressed by
Wittgenstein:
"Consider
for example the proceedings that we call "games". I mean board-games,
card games, Olympic games, and so on. What is common to them all?
- Don’t say: There must be something common, or they
would not be called ‘games’" - but look and see
whether there is anything common to all. - For if you look at them
you will not see something that is common to all, but similarities,
relationships, and a whole series of them at that. To repeat: don’t
think, but look!
[Wittgenstein,
PI66]
This
assumption of commonality is often further embedded in a theoretical
stance that further abstracts away from the complexity of these similarities
by focusing on the development and production of appropriate representations.
This is precisely the problem, for example, with Foucault’s ‘crisis
in representation’ where the ‘representations’ provided
by language are seen as becoming increasingly divorced from the things
they ‘represent’ (Foucault, 1970). Here the whole matter
of representation becomes a critical, theoretical, and ontological issue.
However, such endeavours do not so much look at things like work, as
at indices that might supposedly represent aspects of the work.
For
us, representation is a practical member’s problem and it is hard
to see what such abstractions have to say about how representations
might be practically achieved and used. Like Wittgenstein we would suggest
that if you want to understand representations at work you necessarily
have to not ‘think’, but go out and ‘look’ at
how workers represent work. In other words we are concerned to explicate
and attempt to understand concrete, real-world phenomena in the workplace
(or elsewhere) rather than to engage in ‘might-be’s’
that are necessarily theoretical abstractions with an unproven —
and undemonstrable - connection to the phenomena they purport to describe.
No theory of representation can capture the sense of these real-world
phenomena because it fails from the outset to pay attention to the representational
activities themselves. As we have already commented, in the context
of the Bank, how to represent the workers (and indeed the work itself)
is a wholly pragmatic issue that has to be engaged with every day at
numerous levels. We endeavour here, then, to provide a detailed empirical
study of specific, concrete ‘representational’ activities
that fully recognises the situated character of the work itself. We
are not setting out to provide another speculative contemplation upon
what it is that representation might be, but rather a detailed account
of specific instances of ‘representation’ in action, through
which the particular sense of doing that particular representation is
achieved.
It has
to be stressed that we are not so much arguing for total abandonment
of the term ‘representation’ here as for a use of the word
that is wholly grounded in witnessably available real-world phenomena
and that wholly recognises the situated and particular ways in which
‘representation’ is achieved. So much as we have any working
definition of ‘representation’ it would amount to the following:
the taking of certain aspects of something that was once present,
in order to make relevant features of it present again. ‘Present’
here we take to be in both the temporal sense, and also in the sense
of being present rather than absent. What this amounts to is simply
saying that representation is the taking hold of aspects of something
from elsewhere and elsewhen in order to make those aspects available
for inspection, discussion, practical use etc. etc. here-and-now,
in the fully accountable ways that anything gets drawn into situated
interaction. As such it is a gross summation of all of those accountable
activities of making available, and the products of those activities,
as well as the accountable orientations to, and engagements with, those
activities and products, in praxis, with all of those activities, orientations
etc. being investigable issues in their own right. In no way is this
an attempt to provide a ‘right’ definition. Rather, like
other members definitions, it constitutes a modus operandi in
relation to the specific activity in which we ourselves are engaged.
‘Representing
the Workers’ - Management Information and Self-Representation
The
ongoing reorganisation of the Bank into large, centralised functional
units highlighted issues of management control and the importance of
management information, particularly in the identification, calculation
and prediction of labour costs. Initially the Bank relied on a manual
system, the Productivity Management Programme (PMP) for the measurement
of productivity and efficiency and to assist management in the allocation
of staff to work tasks.
Each
working day, the Assistant Managers completed a PMP sheet of work pending
and then calculated, using the PMP and Work Tally Sheet, how much work
there was to be done. Each staff member completed a Daily Work Management
sheet that detailed what he or she had accomplished the day before and
how much time each activity took. These documents were then used - in
theory at least - to allocate work, identify backlogs and bottlenecks.
An ‘Assignment Planner’ used PMP and the Work Management
Sheet (and sometimes the ‘Customer Volume Tally Sheet’)
to work out how much work was accomplished ‘yesterday’ and
was thereby supposed to form the basis for the allocation of work tasks
‘today’. However, the process of tallying the work, calculating
the amount of time required for completion, and then examining each
section member’s Work Management sheet proved a lengthy business.
As
the process of centralisation got under way, electronic forms of monitoring
and display became increasingly important. This was particularly evident
in the development of the various 'call centres' used to support the
growth of "phone banking". In these centres management information,
in the form of a number of computer generated metrics, provides
details of what individuals are doing throughout the day in terms of
whether they are available or unavailable for calls, how many calls
they take, average time of calls, etc.. These reports are then used
to create spreadsheets, again as part of a management information pack,
which effectively summarises the information for those higher in the
management hierarchy. The improved communication facilities offered
by computer systems are often seen as an ideal means of storing and
transferring this form of information and it is through this information
that members of the bank will manage both their work and the work of
others.
As the
Bank shifts towards more distributed co-ordination and a perceived reduction
in the opportunity for managers to know exactly what everybody is up
to ‘on the ground’, there is a growing emphasis in the Bank
on producing detailed information about what people are doing, what
they are capable of, and what they have achieved. In a number of the
field sites we investigated across the bank this ‘Management Information’
was systematically gathered by the managers and collated on Spread Sheets
and Word Processed Documents into ‘products’ that they referred
to generically as ‘MI Packs’.
Within
the Bank MI Packs contained a diverse set of information of different
forms and styles. These focused particular on metrics and measures and
included
Financial
information such as arrangement fees for certain months, refunds,
provision-loss figures and amounts transferred to their Insolvency
and Debt Recovery Department;
Internal
Quality information such as staff utilisation, processing standards
and risk management; Customer Information such as sales performance;
Organisational
Development information such as their own performance in dealing
with and completing A & Ds (Appraisal and Development Reviews).
A lot
of the information gathered for MI Packs was simultaneously shared between
other documentation and a targeting and performance document called
a Balance Business Scorecard (or BBS). Indeed, several managers used
the BBS format as the basis for the presentation of their management
information.
In the
following fieldwork extract, the Manager of a Monitoring and Control
section of a Lending Centre is discussing backlogs (work, chiefly printouts
to be checked and processed, that is left over from previous days) and
work for the day ahead at a meeting with the Team Leaders in the section.
Throughout the meeting he flicks through various Spreadsheets on his
computer, making reference to figures that the Team Leaders have entered
or requesting and discussing the figures on the spot:
Liz:
"We having our meeting now Rob?..." (Liz , Mel, Linda, & Ruth
are Team Leaders for teams denoted MAC1, MAC2, MAC3, and Bad Debts
respectively, Steve is manager of the Monitoring and Control floor)
Steve
entering details on Office Organizer (a general staff administration
package) regarding staff leave
Mel
and Linda sit down to side of desk - Steve goes out of Office Organizer
and into Excel - Comments on slowness of machine
Steve
brings up the MAC data ‘book’ and clicks on the ‘Backlogs’
tab - Introduces ‘backlogs’ as the topic and relevances
the method for entering the details
Steve:
MAC2?
Mel
provides the relevant figures - Steve asks why they look like that
- Mel tries to explain
Steve
double-checks the figures are right, then expresses surprise - Mel
accounts for the way they look
Steve:
Are they worse than the day before? Or at the same level?
Mel
affirms they are at the same level
Steve:
Right, MAC3?
...
Steve
asks if they are comfortable with the backlogs, then goes to next
screen - MAC data
Linda
gives details, then Mel
Steve
asks about Sickness - Ruth answers regarding member of staff off,
then Steve discusses the matter with Mel
Steve
checking it’s mirror image of yesterday then saying: ‘I
don’t want the Grade 6s to do MAC stuff’ {The ‘Grade
6s’ were a ‘floating’ group of 4 members of staff
who had not been firmly allocated to any one team}
This
extract reflects the means by which individual members will arrive at
‘the meaning behind the metrics represented as numbers in the
collated information’. This process of negotiation surrounding
the interpretation of collected metrics is a common feature of the work
of the bank. For example, negotiation between a manager and a member
of staff concerned just what story it is that the numbers tell is a
standard device used in bringing individual cases to a manager’s
attention. In addition, as we see illustrated above just what a set
of numbers might mean is something that is also applied in increasingly
sophisticated ways to staff and teamwork as well. In essence, these
numbers are made in practice into a representation of the work of the
bank.
The
rationale behind gathering all this metric information is not always
as clear cut as it might seem. Frequently the perceived objective was
to provide information for, say, the overall Manager of the Lending
Centre so that he in turn could use it as a basis for negotiation at
some higher regional or even central level. However, it could also be
drawn on as a justificatory or rationalising document in a manager’s
own appraisal and development.
In other
contexts managers were often observed to show one another parts of their
MI Packs and enter into discussions about what they were doing and whether
they were doing it in more or less the same way. During our observations
the Manager of the Sanctioning section of the Lending Centre received
a telephone call from the overall Manager of the Centre, Phil, who was
unable to return to the office that day. He was asked to ensure that
a comprehensive MI pack be put together and got to Phil that evening
so that he could have it in readiness for a meeting in London the following
day. The Manager of the Sanctioning section advised other section managers
of the need to do this then spent the rest of the afternoon chasing
around staff and putting together something on the basis of what he
understood to be the conventional format. In the following extract the
Sanctioning Manager (Clive) has just gone with the Phones Manager (Chris)
to the Centre Manager’s office to put the pack together:
Clive
flicks through Phil’s MI Pack - Chris highlights what he’s
got
Clive
looking at a section in the pack - Clive flicks through the different
sections (they are grouped in separate plastic sleeves inside a folder)
Clive
comments on them and pulls out the (old) Telephone Standards documents
(as manager of the ‘Phones’ floor this is the particular
body of information that Chris is going to have to replace)
Chris
is sorting through and reordering documents - inserting new for old
- He reaches for a stapler and staples some together
Chris
explaining figures to Clive - Relevances the March figures in relation
to February’s
Clive
mentioning switch from ‘not ready’ to ‘ready’
Chris
formulating his understanding and explaining a further set of figures
to Clive - Clive checking it’s also been explained to Phil -
Chris confirms
...
Chris
goes - Clive concludes, closes the folder, and stands up
...
Clive
goes to see Graham (one of Clive’s Team Leaders) - Graham discussing
with him the figures for Personal Lending - Clive discussing the format
of the MI and how the rest have done it their own way {Work on
the Sanctioning and Phones floors was divided up between teams relating
to ‘Personal’ lending and ‘Non-Personal’ lending
- ‘Personal’ related to individual, personal accounts
whilst ‘Non-Personal’ handled things like business accounts}
This
extract reveals a number of interesting aspects of the production of
Management Information, not least the mundane activities it implicates
and the way that ‘what the numbers mean’ is far from self-evident
but rather requires ‘explanation’ by the parties involved.
We can see this in the way both Clive and Chris try to account for the
difference between the February and March figures. Clive’s proposal
here about the ‘switch from ‘not ready’ to ‘ready’
was one recurrent account provided for the way the monthly figures had
yet to ‘stabilise’ in any sense. It was a way of putting
it down to the very newness of the centre and the fact that it had only
recently gone ‘live’, with the work of many smaller centres
still in the process of being ‘migrated’ into it. However,
perhaps the main point to observe about this particular instance is
the way that, even when the managers sought to achieve standardisation
in their production of Management Information, it required as much co-ordinated
negotiation and achievement as any other task. Left to their own devices
and put under pressure the managers had resorted to producing the information
according to their own understandings, competencies and relevances.
Under the circumstances the end result was that no two packs looked
even remotely the same.
Of course,
as we have already seen in the use of Management Information in the
context of a Team Leaders meeting, information that is gathered under
an MI rationale can be, and often is, directed back to staff further
down the managerial scale in order to simultaneously assess performance
and to propose ways of working. In this way materials that are primarily
intended to be representations of the work that people do - virtualised
manifestations of the teamwork one might say - can become themselves
implicated in a number of complex ways in the actual achievement of
that teamwork from day to day. This amounts to a recognition amongst
staff that MI is a resource for the day to day management of teams,
both amongst managers and with the teams and team leaders themselves.
Not only does the representation subsumed within the MI amount to a
simple ‘story’ of ‘the work we have done’. It
becomes a resource for both rationalising future work and, indeed, a
description of the work to be oriented to and achieved within the ongoing
work they do - and increasingly to predict or anticipate volumes of
work and staffing. The description is not simply a description of a
certain body of work done over a certain period of time. It is a description
that necessarily informs their understanding of just what the work they
are doing might amount to. Subsumed within it are local understandings
of organisational goals as revealed in comparative percentages that
can be construed to represent performance. And also subsumed within
it are representations of what a normal amount of work to be received
and got through might consist of, revealed in both periodic totals and
averages. Of course the numbers that lie behind these representations
are provided by individual team members and team leaders in the context
of the work itself. In that way part of the work is to provide a description
of the work. Inevitably the production of an ‘adequate’
description of the work requires some sort of previous knowledge of
just what ‘adequacy’, in the terms of the organisation,
might amount to. In that case individuals are required to orient to
how they understand the organisation in order to describe it. The descriptions
they produce, together with other ‘adequate’ descriptions
being produced around them, become themselves a resource for understanding
the organisation. It is partly in this that the very sense of there
being an organisation is produced, hence our suggestion earlier that
the Bank might be thought of as a ‘self-describing’ organisation.
What
we are proposing here is that the totals, statistics, performance measures,
etc. that together make up any particular artefact describable as Management
Information, amount to something more than just a ‘truthful depiction
of the work we did’ (if any of the staff ever do take such a view).
The pragmatic value of such number work resides in the way it comes
to inform work allocations through understandings of what is and isn’t
practically achievable, and to provide for rationalisations of particular
instances of failure or success (see the example below). In other words
it is one way in which members in the Bank can go about rendering the
day-in, day-out vagaries and contingencies of the work they do to some
extent coherent and manageable. So the outcomes of gathering Management
Information are not simply ones that amount to accounting to one’s
superiors. The information also provides for just how many printouts
arrive on someone’s desk in the morning (in the extract below
a printout known as the 'eight') and what particular work someone might
be asked to do:
Mel
I’m calling Debbie in to help with the eights because there’s
two hundred and thirty three lines today and she’s not going
to cope
{the
eight is a computer printout that details all of the accounts that
are currently ‘out of order’ in some way - each account
constituting a ‘line’}
Steve Right (.) Two hundred and thirty three (.) total
lines of eight is that?
Mel
No, Personal {ie this number only applies to the 'Personal' customer
accounts and not the 'Non-personal' business accounts}
Steve Really? God, that’s high
This
underscores the way in which numerical representations of this order
have no inherent ‘truth’ or ‘value’. Rather
they become a tool through which practical decisions can be made each
day about things like how much work to give any particular worker and
whether to phone another manager for some extra staff to ‘help’.
So not only does MI describe (or ‘represent’) the work of
particular teams, it is also used by them. In that way particular representations
of teams come to have a negotiated and highly contingent relevance to
the work of real teams, a relevance that is always subject to situated,
interactional work.
All
of the above reveals the extent to which Management Information is not
something that unproblematically resides within the computers, to be
accessed at the simple push of a button. In fact Management Information
is a ‘representation’ of the work of individuals, teams,
and whole sections that has to be worked up and achieved in a rich interweaving
of computer-based materials, paper documentation, and physical noting
down and drawing as the following extract - of a manager working up
the management information in preparation for an appraisal and development
review - reveals:
Gets
BBS documents out of briefcase then turns to his Workstation, goes
into Word and opens a document {The BBS or Balance Business Scorecard
was the Conventional Means of ‘representing’ the targets
and performance of a particular unit throughout the retail division
of the Bank}
Goes
to Excel, and opens ‘MACData’ - Prints - Goes to printer
and brings back printout of MAC BBS 1998
...
Goes
back to Word document and highlights and deletes portion of text -
Repeats for Financials,
Customer
Perspectives, and Organisational Development pages - Leaves bullet
points at bottom
Prints
and goes to the printer to get documents
...
Comments
that he could put in Word Tables or could do embedding of Excel, currently
trying to work out if he’s got all the information he needs
to put in
Looks
in a desk drawer, then borrows a ruler from Martin who sits opposite
Uses
ruler to draw a line across at the top of the Utilisation sheet -
Makes it a box - Counts over measures - Puts marks on the line and
the same on the line below - Draws verticals with ruler - Hand draws
a small box above - Writes ‘Target’ to left of it and
puts ‘%’ in box
Enters
in boxes as below:
JAN
FEB MAR . . . . . . . . . . CUMM
%
% % %
It often
also involves not just these skills but a great deal of talk, involving
many tacit social competences and activities along the way. The following
extract demonstrates some of these practical, everyday activities
being brought into play:
Chris
is talking about what management information is required and looking
at a hand-written outline of the kinds of categories and calculations
he thinks they should include. On one sheet of paper he has written
a number of ideas; ‘non-utilisation periods’, R/E (reasonable
expectancy) how many calls could we have taken?’, ‘what
does the productivity gap equate to in man hours’, speed/quality/control’,
industry comparisons’ and so on. On another he has divided the
sheet into columns as the precursor for producing a spreadsheet. Heading
the columns are categories such as ‘calls offered’, ‘staff
required for 100% calls handled’, ‘staff required for
90% calls handled’. A series of comments are written down the
side - these are later to form the basis of their discussion - ‘figures
as at certain date with customer base of X’; ‘do subsequent
charts/spreads for take-on of Centres for rest of year multiplying
calls offered by factor of X (customer base in future divided by customer
base now’; ‘when new ‘actuals are obtained from
future ACD information revise figures for comparisons and compare
to model’; ‘do we want to put in model numbers of staff
to see divergence?’. A final sheet has a complicated calculation
by which they might obtain a measure of effectiveness.
Whilst
this is going on Les is looking at the BBS (Balanced Business Scorecard)
as it will be important that the measures reflect elements of the
BBS both for the section and him personally and at a basic set of
management information spreadsheets that they produced last week for
the managers’ meeting which forms the basis for this current
MI pack.
Chris
uses the computer to get an Excel spreadsheet on screen - ‘AOBT
accuracy’ (advice of borrowing terms) - they then chat about
the layout of the spreadsheet. The talk centres on how much information
they need to display and how to present it; the emphasis is on ‘totals’,
totalling columns because "... all he’ll (the Centre Manager)
be interested in is that (pointing at total)". They then work together
setting up the various ‘macros’ (calculations) for the
various parts of the spreadsheet, talking about its use for making
predictions with the suggestion that "that would be good for ‘Hours
by Design’"(a new initiative on hourly working within the
Bank). They then turn to the MI figures they produced last week -
"these are great . . . but I think we need the graphs and a comments
box . . . he (the Manager) doesn’t need all that (the detailed
figures)". They then use the computer to access the spreadsheets
they produced last week -
For
the above managers preparing the MI Pack was very much a matter of working
up ‘the story of what it is we’ve been doing and what we
plan to do’. Centrally, however, it is important to see how all
of such Management Information - whether it is being used to account
for particular situations, to justify certain decisions, as a basis
for rationalisation, or as a means of arriving at some sort of assessment
- relies on an underlying assumption that work activities are ultimately
reducible to figures. But, of course, just what these figures amount
to is far from self-evident. In that case the MI effectively becomes
a resource for discussing and arriving at some sort of understanding
of what it is we are doing, other ways of doing it better, and just
how good what it is we are doing might be. This use of Management Information
as a representational method for informing understanding, a heuristic
use of it one might say, is well demonstrated in the following extract:
Clive
sorting through MI papers - Looks at the calendar under his keyboard
and writes ‘P/E 27/2’ {Period Ending 27/2} on 4-Weekly
Total printout
He
then continues to write on a sheet from his notepad:
P/E
27/2 P/E 27/3
ASH
% HE ASH* %
He
enters the total from the 4-Weekly Total sheet for Non-Personal, then
does the same for the others
Clive
draws a line down to split up the ‘P/E 27/2’ group, then
shifts the other 4-Weekly Total Sheet in front of himself and notes
the figures similarly for the ‘P/E 27/3’ group
Clive
draws a line at the right hand side to separate the figures and percentages
- He does the same for the ‘Backlogs’ - He writes the
‘Backlogs’ as a total, then puts the P/Es, then notes
the figures from the sheets (averages for the 4 week period)
Clive
comments that the figures for the backlogs don’t relate to any
specific allowance - He needs to see if they are retaining the backlogs
at a ‘manageable level’ - He admits it’s ‘not
rocket science’ - He is just using it to give him an idea
*
{‘ASH’ = Actual Staff Hours, ‘HE’ = Hours
Earned - The distinction here recognises the way that the work measurement
system in the Bank provides a particular allowance for certain activities,
but these do not necessarily tally precisely with the actual hours
worked}
Two
points are particularly worth bringing out from the fieldwork extract
above. Firstly, the manager does not just faithfully copy the numbers
he has been provided with by his teams across into his Management Information
pack. Not only has the work of individual members of particular teams
been transformed into a numerical representation, but that representation
is now being subjected to a further ‘transformation’ in
order to make the numbers specifically relevant to, and meaningful for,
the task in hand. In other words he transforms the numbers into percentages
so that particular totals for things like the actual number of hours
people have worked or the total quantity of backlogged work can be expressed
as a proportion of something else such as a targeted amount of work
to be done, or the number of hours you actually get an allowance for,
or the total amount of work received, in order to facilitate, in this
case, a comparison of performance across periods. Part of what this
transformation process is about, as one traces its movement between
individuals, is the achievement of "co-ordination through appropriate
representations of the ‘basic information’" (Hughes, Rodden
and Rouncefield, 1996). This transformation process is something that
is deeply involved in all kinds of co-ordinated activities. It enables
co-ordination within and between the different functional units by making
the work available to others in a format that they can work with.
A second
point is the way the manager was quite specific about what he was trying
to do with the figures for ‘backlogs’. They ‘don’t
relate to any specific allowance’, he wants to see if things are
being kept at a ‘manageable level’, and he is just using
them to ‘give him an idea’. In other words he is using the
figures as a heuristic for assessing trends. By transforming everyday
working phenomena into numeric depictions the persistent variability
and unpredictability of those phenomena can be eliminated to some extent.
Real teams, subject to the everyday vagaries of working life, are in
this way transformed into ‘virtual teams’. That is, they
become representations within the machine that are open, just as in
Lynch’s observed mathematisation by scientists of ‘recalcitrant,
"naturally occurring" phenomena’ (Lynch, 1990), to systematic
description, standardisation and mathematical operations. In a discussion
of scientific diagrams from various journals, Lynch suggests that such
illustrations have a lot to do with transformation of particular representations
in order to synthesise form and identify "‘universal’ properties
which ‘solidify’ the [represented] object in reference to
the current state of the discipline" (Lynch, 1990). And he details a
number of ways in which this is achieved. The process of making something
‘useful’ through its representation involves the ordering
of it through such things as [to paraphrase] ‘exposure, seizure
upon, clarification, extension, codification, comparison, measurement,
and subjection to mathematical operations’ in relation to the
pre-existing order that was somehow resistant to the intended ‘use’
(Lynch, 1990).
...
"as we trace through the sequence of renderings, we see that the object
progressively assumes a generalised, hypothetically guided, didactically
useful, and mathematically analysable form. It becomes progressively
less recalcitrant to the textual devices of describing, displaying,
comparing, causally accounting, mapping, and measuring."
(Lynch,
1990 , 168)
This
mathematisation is something that we might say is ‘accomplished’
through representation. So in this sense representation could be seen
as amounting to a hybridisation of the particular and the ideal. And
this telling of it in a way that is understandable to the discipline
is altogether similar to the orientation in the Bank towards producing
a representation of the work in terms of ‘the way bank work (or
more specifically lending work) like this’ can be understood by
those who do it, in a way that anyone else like them, working in a bank
and doing the activity of ‘lending’, might well understand
it and reasonably represent such things. In other words the representations
are accountable in terms of the way they are worked up, just as there
are appropriate and inappropriate ways of working up any kind of story.
This way of putting the material together, it must be stressed, is a
common-sensical organisation rather than it being self-evidently necessary
to put it together that way. And, vitally, it is through such shared
depictions of the work they are doing that some sort of common-sense
understanding of what ‘lending’ might amount to continues
to be arrived at and oriented to. Not that managers laboured under any
illusion as to the possibility of there being some disparity between
the figures and what actually occurred. We have already seen one manager
readily admitting, "it’s not rocket science". Instead MI was one
way in which managers sought to practically achieve a displayed orientation
to the much vaunted principle of standardisation, to provide ‘adequate’
accounts of the work that their staff do in particular circumstances
of accountability, and to arrive at practical decisions as to how
to mete out between real teams and team members the ongoing influx of
work. And, of course, the very practice of mathematising and rendering
real work phenomena open to further transformation and manipulation
in ‘standard’ and ‘generalisable’ terms makes
MI a resource for the discussion of a huge range of other issues such
as Centre-wide performance and staffing.
This
brief examination of the use of Management Information Packs has revealed
a subtle set of arrangements and accommodations between the information
used to represent work and how to convey the nature of this work to
those involved. While one might consider the management information
to be a simple representation of the work taking place we actually see
that it is a resource to be drawn upon in constructing appropriate accounts
of the work often targeted for particular parties. Thus members of the
bank interpret and alter the representation of the work to reflect particular
issues and concerns and to allow for the contingencies likely to arise
in the everyday undertaking of work.
For
workplace systems the complexity of the various arrangements between
those that undertake work and the various representations of the work
they manipulate is significant. For us this raises a real question about
the nature and role of models of work and the notation used in the representation
of work within CSCW systems. Considerable debate has focused on the
issues of notations and categories (Suchman 1994; Winograd 1994) in
CSCW. However, to date this is often characterised in terms of the coverage
or flexibility of the representations of work. We would suggest that
rather than focus on how well a notation provides a depiction of the
work to those involved in it we need to consider the use of these depictions
in practice. In particular we need to consider the way in which various
material is made into representations of the work and how people
exploit and use these. This has significant implications for
the way in which we might see different views of the work being developed
and certainly it suggests that we need to be vary careful about the
linkage between the notations and representation used and the facilities
provided to access and manipulate them.
Our
examination of the development of Management Information Packs has considered
the way in which units in the pack develop and use representations of
the work they do. The representations developed within this setting
are intended to be used as a means of representing the work of the bank
to those involved in it. The development of these packs was a significant
tool in the management and co-ordination of the work taking place and
provided an important resource to allow managers to understand the work
taking place and design and develop solutions to work problems.
In the
following section we would like to complement this consideration of
self-representation by focusing on how the sorts of notations that are
normally used for conveying work to others across and outside the organisation
are used. Essentially, we are interested in understanding how the representation
that might normally be used in processes such as system development
are actually devised to understand the work taking place and how they
are drawn upon to provide a representation of the work of the bank.
‘Representing
the Work’ - Process Modelling
One
of the preoccupations that came to light in our fieldwork, especially
in a new Lending Centre, was that of process modelling and the production
of process maps. The Lending Centre in question is currently taking
on the work of a number of somewhat smaller Lending Centres throughout
the North West of England in one large centralised unit that is spread
over three floors of a modern office block. Given the large numbers
of temporary and part-time staff the objective behind process modelling
was claimed to be one of ensuring that, for every single process the
bank engaged in, there would be a process map so that anyone could come
in and do the job in exactly the same way as anybody else. Clearly the
backdrop to this objective is a drive towards standardisation but it
does reflect the need for representations of work in systems development
and systems such as workflow.
In this
section we wish to focus on the tremendously rich way in which Lending
Centre 'process maps' were developed and used to facilitate co-ordination.
In particular we wish to highlight the way achieving adequate representations
of workflows was itself open to far from standard considerations, and
frequently the product of ad hoc and wholly contingent interpretations
and activity.
The
very newness of the Lending Centre (it was the first centre of its kind
to go ‘live’ in the Bank and still had a long way to go
before all of the smaller Lending Centres had ‘migrated’
into it) meant that a disproportionately large amount of management
time was concerned with discussing just how to make something like this
sort of Lending Centre work. Within the Lending Centre itself there
was a basic division of labour between the three floors along the following
lines:
-
‘Monitoring
and Control’ where there was a basic processing of various
printouts relating to the current status of loans and overdraft
facilities etc.;
-
‘Phones’
where most incoming calls to the centre from the customers were
fielded and where staff might have to deal with anything from a
request for a loan to a complaint; and
-
‘Sanctioning’
where requests for loans etc. were either approved or declined.
The
process maps used in the lending centre where essentially a diagrammatic
notation showing various processes as sets of interconnected activities.
Each activity in a process map was represented as a box with the dependencies
shown as connections between the boxes. In practice, when managers and
their staff worked on process maps, it was far from immediately obvious
to them how the process map might relate to the activities in other
parts of the Lending Centre and how different process maps might connect
up.
Something
particularly worth pointing out about a representation like a process
map is that it is not simply a logical representation of the best way
of achieving some particular end. Instead for the Bank it was the negotiated
product of individual perspectives and experience. In one particular
instance we witnessed the manager of the Sanctioning floor overseeing
the production of a process map by two of his staff. The process in
question was a complex one regarding how to eliminate or reduce the
level of ‘hard-core’ debt run up by customers using a certain
kind of Credit Card, while simultaneously turning it into an opportunity
for what was effectively ‘a sale’ by offering the customers
loans to clear the debt. In order to achieve this overseeing facility
and the production of suitable advice, the manager in question was obliged
to physically visit the managers of both the Phones and Monitoring and
Control floors in order to discuss the best way to model the process:
Clive
goes upstairs to MAC and waits while Steve is talking to Mel
Clive
gets chair then sits and explains to Steve about the Monday ‘process
map’ meeting, and shows Steve a rough copy from the whiteboard
- Then he gives Steve the Stage 1 sheet
Steve
Looks it through and Clive explains as he adjusts his chair
Clive
what they’ve done is they’ve come up with a three
stage process map (.) but I don’t think it’s quite there
yet (.) errm (.) so there’s (3.0) that’s what they’re
lookin at fer Stage one (.) being (.) in MAC (.) but there isn- (.)
that- er i- (.) it’s not quite right that (2.0) ((cough)) (1.8)
coz the one- the thing that I tried to get them to do just to say
well (.) what are yer e- what are yer expectations of (.) of your
people (.) y’know and at least start off (.) y’know (.)
the process
Steve
mm
(13.0)
Steve
so?
An immediate
thing to observe about this is that, as with anything else being mooted
as relevant to interactional work, that relevance cannot be simply presumed
to be self-evident, it has to be accounted for (Sacks, 1992). Clive’s
first stab at prefacing the relevance of all this to Steve is a signal
failure, as the thirteen second pause and Steve’s ‘So?’
make evident. Under the circumstances Clive has to do some more work
to get Steve to engage with the activity. This he does by specifically
relevancing aspects of the first sheet of the rough draft of the process
map (Figure 1) that he has given Steve:
![]()
Figure
1: The first draft of the process Map
Clive Yeah (.) Theirs
(.) to me (.) u- (.) you look at that ((points to end box that
says ‘YES’)) and you think (.) right okay well (.)
now need to follow on
Steve
mm
Clive
er and (.) when I follow on here I think (.) things will
be a lot (.) simpler (.)
Steve
right=
Clive
=but
Steve
the only thing I think is what you’ve got on that=
Clive
=yeah=
Steve
=as far as I’m concerned (.) I get there ((points out box
with no parameter)) (.) there’s no parameters inside this
hardcore (.) any risk grade* (.) any amount
*
{Each customer was allocated a certain risk grade by the system
based on a number of variables that together might indicate the
potential ‘risk’ of lending to them}
From
this point onwards the various sheets that make up the draft version
of the process map become implicative for a whole range of disparate
activities. They engender heated discussion about just what the process
really does entail, much of which is heavily informed by wholly parochial
considerations, such as ‘if I buy into this are my staff going
to have to do more work?’ and ‘if they do, are they going
to get any sort of allowance for it so that it doesn’t undermine
our performance figures?’. Much of this, as will be visible from
the printout, revolves around the pros and cons of using a particular
printout called a WE017 which was a standard diary printout used to
throw up certain kinds of recurrent activities for attention. Clive,
whilst adamant that he would not get any kind of allowance for using
that printout because it was not a process allocated to the Sanctioning
floor, felt sure that if Steve used it he would get an allowance.
The point here for Clive was that if someone was doing this work then
they should be getting an allowance of some kind for it so that it didn’t
simply add up to so much lost time and undermine the performance figures
for the Centre as a whole. Steve, however, was not convinced he would
get any allowance for using it and was, in any case, reluctant to devote
any time to the process:
Steve
I’m being selfish here ((Looks at Clive))
Clive
yeah ((leans back in chair to listen))
Steve
I will not diary it on a Seventeen (.) I do not have to have
a response (2.0)
Clive
Sorry (.) say again
...
Clive
But (.) if we- If we look at (.) If we’re lookin at er improvin
the efficienc-- the operational efficiency of the unit (.) we need
the (.) We Oh Seventeen (.) t come in (.) becoz the We Oh Seventeen
generates an allowance for an activity which is (.) diarising for
a response to a letter (.) and if we don’t (.) if we don’t
bring in the We Oh Seventeen we’re undertakin a process for
which we’re not gettin a measurement
...
Steve
Look (.) write this information down that you’ve already got
Clive
yeah
Steve
you set the loan up
Clive
mmmm
Steve
Yeah?
Clive
Yeah
Steve
And give you the result you know about any way (.) Coz you’ve
dun it (.)
Clive
Yeah
Steve
So that (.) isn’t effective (.)
Clive
But (.) what you’re asking me to do isn’t effective
(.) coz I’m not gettin an allowance for it but by using
the We Oh Seventeen (.) .hh you’re get- you’re goin to
get an allowance for the activity that you’re undertakin (.)
whereas I’m not goin to get any allowance (.) but you will
The
sheets also implicate a great deal of physical experimentation, drawing
bits in, and crossing other bits out, along with verbal projections
and collaborative ‘imaginings’ of scenarios in order to
‘see’ what might work:
Clive
we’re still having to go into the sys- into the system
Steve
but=
Clive
=to find out (.) who has responded (.) on a (.) on a negative
basis= {said ‘no’}
Steve =yeah so yo- you’re list then i- is partly
completed en’t it? (.) P//artly
Clive
//Yeah (.) So?
Steve
the one- So you start off with ten {customers} ((Demonstrates
numbers and divisions with hands on desk))
Clive
Yeah
Steve
Four have responded=
Clive
=yeah (.) yeah
Steve
and you’ve got those there’s six left
...
Clive
Right (.) Okay? (.) So (.) Let’s see What we need to do here
now MAC ((appends box and oval on stage 1 document*)) (.) so then
what we then ((crosses out YES/NO)) (.) send them M S Qs and then
blah//blahblah ((scribbles over end ovals and draws fresh lines))
Steve
//yeah
Clive
and i- (.) all that there then s down to (.) an action en’t
it?
Steve
Mm
Clive
Mark yer log (.) update (.) spreadsheet (2.8) and (2.0)
Steve
Mm (.) In a way that lines up wi- (.) with all the bits to do fer
sales
Clive
Yeah
Steve
Then (.) can I put this in here? ((appends further box))
Clive
Yeah (.) Right (.) Okay
*
(See Figure 1 for the outcome of all these changes)
An interesting
point is the way that hugely informal representational activities in
their own right are used here. The scribbles, circles, lines, and frequent
movements over the sheets to indicate specific notions but which leave
no mark behind, are all wholly local and contingent and often abstract
to the extent that they have no connection to any external phenomena
beyond the nominal connection that is in operation here and now.
Ultimately
the sheets containing the process maps came to serve as a resource through
which the managers found themselves able to negotiate a model they felt
they could both ‘live with’. They also resolved the problem
of the WE017 by adopting Clive’s suggestion that they use a screen-based
log using shared Excel spreadsheets as the most appropriate and, more
specifically, workable (both in terms of its production and use) ‘representation’
of the current status of customer responses:
Steve
On here It said (.) You’ve sanctioned it (.) note it on the
(.) Managed Rate Log Pro Forma located on the Gold Card desk (.) so
he’s got it in (.) on a number of places in //his process
Clive
//Right (.) ((takes Stage 1 document)) Well we don’t (.) w-
we’ll change that (.) we’ll work on a spreadsheet (.)
so we’ll come up wi a spreadsheet (.) we’ll probably end
up (.) puttin it in customer (.) put it on Excel
Steve
It’s got to be available t everybody
Clive
Yeah (.) Put it on Excel (.) and then: in:: sorta Customer
Keep {one of the shared server locations for the whole centre}
(.)
Steve
mm
Clive
er:: (.) errm (.) your guys could instead o doin a (.) coz the thing
is the only thing that they’re goin to be puttin in there (.)
is
Steve
Details
Clive
Sorta (.) like (.) sorta like the date ((appends Date Column)) (.)
t- t- the date of (.) er the letter (.) the account number (.) and
the sort code (.) so that ‘s your inputs (.) yeah? (.) and then
it’s over to us
Steve
Mm
Clive
as opposed t manual- manual bits o paper (.) Happy wi that?
(.)
Steve
Yeah I mean as I say there’s two options you can run
Clive
Yeah
Steve
and it’s either manual log (.) or somethin on there ((gestures
to Workstation)) (.)
Of course,
a vital feature of all this is the way that the representational activity
they are engaged in is not somehow separate to and apart from other
activities and the ongoing achievement of their work. That was, of course,
partly evidenced in the surfacing of parochial concerns that had nothing
to do with representing ‘best practice’, let alone some
idealised notion of how to do a process model. But it is also visible
in the way Clive had to provide for the relevance of Steve engaging
in the activity in the first place; the way various asides have to be
entertained during the discussion; and in the way it is brought to a
close.
The
particular thing to note about all this, at least in the context of
the Bank, is that a process map is not something that is simply a definitive
consequence of the rational deduction of processes and implications.
Instead it is a ‘representation of the work’ that has to
be collaboratively achieved as a part of the work itself in situated
interaction, with all of the here-and-now preoccupations that parties
to it will inevitably bring to bear. A description of just what the
work should amount to, just what is ‘the right way to accomplish
a particular work process’ (‘best practice’) is itself
an accomplishment within the work. So, to extend upon Suchman’s
observations regarding the situated and contingent realisation of ‘the
sense within the plan’ (Suchman, 1987), we might further observe
that the very making of the plan (or in this case the process map) is
a situated and contingent affair. The representational activity of process
modelling, in that case, provides one way of arriving at ‘best
practice’ for a particular work process, through intensely situated
negotiation, practical experimentation, practical projection and collaborative
‘imagining’ of scenarios. More significantly perhaps, it
also provides one way of moving beyond the strict ‘egological’
focus of work in order to gain some insight into the implications of
one’s own work for the work that others have to do - what in CSCW
has been characterised as 'awareness of work' (Blythin et al 1997).
Summary
In this
paper we have used ethnographically gathered materials in order to examine
in detail the accomplishment of some ‘representational’
activities in the everyday working practices of a High Street bank.
In particular we have focused upon just two activities: the production
of Management Information; and Process Modelling. We have particularly
considered how the different representations of the work and those involved
in the work have been produced as a practical activity rather than as
a theoretical or abstracted interpretation of the work.
In fact,
we would suggest that abstract and theoretical notations fail to capture
the sense of specific representations we have observed because they
do not adequately attend to where such ‘sense’ actually
resides, that is, in the representational activities themselves. We
have pointed out that representation of workers, teams, and work practices
is not at all the concern of some external ‘expert’, but
rather a very real matter of everyday concern for members of the Bank
at all levels
Bank
work (and other kinds of work of course) often involves the ‘telling
of stories’ through numbers and we saw instances of this in the
production of Management Information. Although the stated rationale
for gathering such material is the passing of information progressively
up the line, as we have seen, this kind of representational work is
not, in a practical sense, at all specific in its use but rather hugely
varied with it being potentially turned to all sorts of contingent needs.
And we particularly noted the way in which MI becomes a resource for
informing hugely practical matters such as the day-to-day allocation
of work. So it is not just a representation of the teams but
also a representation for the teams.
Overall,
MI provides members of the Bank with a means to practically achieve
displayed orientations to such things as standardisation, to produce
‘adequate’ accounts of the work they do, and to arrive at
practical decisions about such things as work allocation. This is all
achieved in numerous and contingent ways and is dependent upon a wide
range of situated considerations and social and practical competencies.
Furthermore, the mathematisation of real work phenomena so that it is
rendered open to further transformation and manipulation in ‘standard’
and ‘generalisable’ terms makes MI a resource for the discussion
of other, potentially Bank-wide, issues.
Process
maps, rather than being representations of the work of particular clusters
of individuals are intended to be ‘representations’ of complete
workflows. We particularly noted here the way in which their production
was a non-’expert’ affair that particularly served to facilitate
co-ordination, and we also saw how their production, despite the aim
to produce idealised, ‘standard’ representations of ‘best
practice’, was subject to a whole battery of ad hoc and contingent
considerations where local, and even parochial concerns could be seen
to preside. In this way it quickly became clear that something like
a process map is not simply a logical representation of the best way
of achieving some particular end, but rather a negotiated product of
individual perspectives and experiences. This negotiated character has
two particular outcomes. Firstly, individual concerns inevitably surface
and must accountably be provided for. Secondly, this is necessarily
intensely collaborative work, often across sectional or organisational
divides. In that way process modelling can be seen to substantially
enhance practical matters of articulation and appreciation of other
people’s work.
Process
modelling, then, involves numerous situated and socially interactional
activities. In that way, regardless of the status of the finished process
map as a representation of ‘best practice’ and as an artefact
that gets circulated throughout the Bank, the actual activity of process
modelling is something altogether richer and more heterogeneous than
that might imply. It is emphatically not about the disengaged rational
deduction of process. Rather it is a members’ activity that is
just one possible way of getting together and trying to arrive at some
sort of understanding of what is that we are collectively trying to
do. A process map, then, is just one way of coming up with the story
of a particular division of labour and one way of trying to ‘plan’
what an effective division of labour might be. And the very arrival
at just what that ‘plan’ might be is a wholly situated and
contingent affair.
Conclusions
We have
used this paper to consider the situated accomplishment of two particular
kinds of representational activity. The two activities have, of course,
certain superficial similarities and differences. They both require
substantial informal transformative work on paper and through the use
of IT. They are also both hugely implicative of social interaction and
their production requires certain kinds of social competences. And they
are both about arriving at a certain idealised kind of representation
that can be readily recognised as an adequate representation of ‘the
work’ throughout the Bank. However, whilst Management Information
revolves around the production of relevant bodies of numbers that can
be seen to meaningfully represent the work of certain bodies of individuals,
Process Modelling involves diagrammatic representations of whole workflows
where the objective is not to tell a story about the performance of
individual workers and sections but rather to tell a story about how
a whole division of labour should be. One is a ‘history’
from which certain lessons might be derived (both strategic and from
day-to-day). The other is a ‘utopia’, a story of how it
should be rather than a story about how it has been.
But,
of course, this clutching at metaphors is in many ways beside the point.
So much as there is anything meaningful to be brought out by such a
comparison it is the simple, but nonetheless important observation that
representations of both workers and work are necessarily different because
they are a product of the different sets of relevances that are inevitably
brought to bear in different kinds of activities, and indeed in different
settings. So what if workers tell both historical stories and tales
of utopias? What does this tell us about the accomplishment of their
work? What is far more important to consider is both how the particular
representational activities are actually achieved within the workplace
and, just as importantly, how those representational activities are
rendered implicative for the further accomplishment of work. And it
is just those kinds of questions that we have attempted to address within
this paper.
At the
outset we suggested that the ‘sense’ or ‘meaning’
of any representation is inevitably bound up with the situated ways
in which it is engaged with and that the ‘sense’ of any
particular representational activity is similarly situationally bound,
so that generalisations about what is being represented or representation
itself are largely meaningless. The ‘sense’ of Management
Information, for instance, could reside (amongst other things) in providing
for accountability and for apportioning work. The ‘sense’
in process modelling could reside in locating notions of best practice
and negotiating in highly specific detail the co-ordination of work.
When we set out to try and understand something about the orderly production
of bank work such that it is recognisable as bank work (rather than
something else) and oriented to as just that, then we can see that such
observations are wholly adequate in their own right without any need
for theoretical accounts to propose some underlying ‘meaning’
or ‘purpose’ behind any of the particular representations.
The meaning and purpose, as we have seen, is wholly evident within the
context of their use.
What
these observations suggest is that the understanding of work is something
that is seen as an everyday feature of doing the work and that the systems
developers need to consider the development of notations and techniques
in that light. We have seen in both of our examples that the development
of different representations was accomplished in practice and drew upon
everyday concerns of the bank. These representations were used locally
within the bank and made sense to those in the bank because of the localised
nature of these representations. This is somewhat in contrast to the
need expressed by some CSCW developers for general notations that can
be used to represent a wide range of contexts.
A potential
danger exists in systems development in focusing on an understanding
of work as a means of communication between the setting and those involved
in development. In this paper we have focused on how representations
of work are constructed and used by those involved in the work to understand
it, and how these representational activities draw upon a range of resources.
This suggests that systems to support work also need to consider the
development of facilities to make the representations of work they use
available to those involved in undertaking that work. For example, process
models where used in the bank as a resource to design new work arrangements.
In terms
of systems development we would also stress that any system is developed
from a particular understanding of work at a given moment in time and
representations are used that reflect this understanding. However, as
we have seen in this paper, work is also understood as an everyday achievement,
and those involved undertake a range of activities to accomplish an
understanding of work. In addition to supporting work, system developers
need to consider how these activities are supported and how the notations
and representations they use within the systems they develop can be
in turn presented to users as a resource to support this form of work.
Achieving
and using representations like Management Information and Process Maps
is, of course, a wholly mundane matter for members and such problems
as arise are wholly practical ones i.e. is the representation adequate
to my purposes here-and-now? In that case it is hard to see what is
gained, other than a substantial loss of clarity, by moving away from
those practical considerations and towards the more abstract and speculative
considerations generated by theoretical accounts. To conclude, in that
case, if one wants to understand something about representations at
work, in work, or anywhere else we would repeat Wittgenstein’s
injunction to ‘look and see’!
Acknowledgements
The
research for this paper was drawn from the ESRC ‘Virtual Society?’
program project ‘Where the ‘Virtual’ Meets the ‘Real’:
management, skill, and innovation in the virtual organisation’.
Additional supporting projects are the ’DTI/EPSRC funded initiative
in CSCW; the DTI/EPSRC SYCOMT Project No. GR/J53409; and the NCR funded
project ‘Building the Virtual Bank’. We would also like
to thank Beki Grinter for her insightful and useful comments on an earlier
draft of this paper.
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