Publicação

Evaluating mobile collaborative applications support of teamwork in critical incidents response management

Detalhes bibliográficos
Resumo:	This thesis contributes to the understanding of the use of Information and Communication Technology, more specifically on the introduction of Mobile Collaborative Applications to assist teamwork in Critical Incidents Response Management. Due the increasing complexity of organizations’ socio-technical system, existing work structures and processes may be challenged when they are required to cope with the particular demands posited by unanticipated events. Such events, as for instance, the failure of key organizational resources, may be classified as critical when they entail disruptive consequences for the regular organizational activity. Although, from risks and vulnerabilities assessments organizations may devise business continuity and contingency plans, training programmes and set up teams to address such situations, like service maintenance or help desk teams, an inherent characteristic of the critical incidents considered on this thesis is that they posit novel situations that lead teams to depart from pre-established work arrangements toward an emergent and adaptive behaviour. Under such work contexts teams often rely on their experience to develop improvised and creative solutions to mitigate the effects of a disruptive event. The development of Team Situation Awareness had been put forward by the related literature as a fundamental asset under this settings. The inherent affordances brought by mobile devices, namely, situated use and real time information sharing and persistence, lead to the consideration of the use of Mobile Collaborative Applications to assist operational teamwork in cases that the Critical Incidents Response Management endeavour move teams to operate distributed through different locations. Evaluating the use of Mobile Collaborative Applications on assisting the operational level of teamwork, and their role on Team Situation Awareness development, reveals a challenging research effort, since the more established collaborative technology evaluation methods may reveal short for the considered work contexts. The associated difficulties of conducting field research or achieving a trade-off between the control of the evaluation process without constraining the inherent openness of human behaviour within a collaborative setting, restrict the adoption of more typical evaluation approaches. Moreover, by considering Team Situation Awareness one of the main evaluation dimensions, it should be noticed that it is required to account for the different levels that compose the construct. As it had been debated on the literature Team Situation Awareness should be accounted at both individual and team level and therefore requires the consideration of numerous interwoven factors, that range in the realm of individual cognition to the team processes that bound teamwork. This thesis puts forward the adoption of a Microworld environment to support quasi-naturalistic oriented experiments toward a fine-grain understanding of the use of Mobile Collaborative Applications in operational settings. Although, the use of Microworld environments as an experimental paradigm is not new, its adoption on (collaborative) software applications evaluation is still emerging. Moreover, it had been noticed from most of the related research works, that Microworlds are typically bounded by specific research aims and lack a frame of reference to inform their development in a more phenomena and domain independent manner, so that they provide a well-grounded experimental instrument. One contribution of this thesis is the comprehensive specification of the set of foundational building blocks that should guide a Microworld environment development in order to constitute a test-bed for the experimental evaluation of collaborative applications. The demonstration of such specification on informing Microworld environments development is accomplished by its implementation on the selected target application domain that supported the conducted experiments. Although, bounded by the domain characteristics the implementation of the Microworld constitutes also a contribution since it holds a set of software components that are reusable in other contexts of software applications evaluation (particularly those addressing collaborative work support). The selected target application domain had been the Help Desk Teams operational work enacted on the context of organizational network infrastructures Critical Incidents Response Management, since has it is discussed in this thesis it constitutes a representative domain for the present research aims. The combination and extension of existing Team Situation Awareness measures and measurement techniques that supported the definition of the devised experiment’s dependent variables constitute the third contribution of this thesis. The fourth contribution of this thesis draws from the results of the conducted experimental trials that yield that Team Situation Awareness had not been enhanced or impaired by the introduction of a Mobile Collaborative Application, but the unveiled usage points that the design of Mobile Collaborative Applications to assist Critical Incidents Response Management teams, should be focused mainly on functional features that support operational information management in disregard to those that assist team management. Such insights could only be achieved by the capability of the Microworld environment to trace team operational work accounting for the context of the team collective task at different levels of granularity. The experimental results show that team management will still be carried out through speech based communications, mainly as team task complexity increases. This result is consistent with several research works, which seems provide some evidence for the validity of the Microworld as an experimental paradigm.
Autores principais:	Sapateiro, Cláudio Miguel Garcia Loureiro dos Santos
Assunto:	Computação móvel Avaliação Trabalho colaborativo Teses de doutoramento - 2013
Ano:	2013
País:	Portugal
Tipo de documento:	tese de doutoramento
Tipo de acesso:	acesso aberto
Instituição associada:	Universidade de Lisboa
Idioma:	inglês
Origem:	Repositório da Universidade de Lisboa