Supporting distributed office problem solving in organizations

To improve the effectiveness of office workers in their decision making, office systems have been built to support (rather than replace) their judgment. However, these systems model office work in a centralized environment, and/or they can only support a single office worker. Office work that is divided into specialized domains handled by different office workers (where cooperation is needed in order to accomplish the work) is not supported. In this paper, we will present a model that supports office problem solving in a logically distributed environment. (In some systems, information is geographically distributed for performance purposes rather than for conceptual need. The term, logically, is therefore used to indicate the logical need of organizing information without having to worry about the physical location of the information.) In particular, cooperative tools that can be used to support office workers during the process of their problem solving is discussed.