Issues in the Design of Personal Office Support Systems

Abstract

The work undertaken by office-based professionals who work closely together on information management tasks has been the object of various studies which seek to categorise and provide guidelines for the smooth performance of those tasks. However, current technology support to be found in many offices provides little in the way of integration between different information media and processes, usually relying on the workers themselves to ‘adapt and survive’ both in terms of ‘personal work’ and ‘collaborative work’. This paper describes the complexities in the design of computer-based technologies to support through a detailed study of the design of a ‘personal office support system’ (POS) currently being undertaken.