Design of effective e-Work: review of models, tools, and emerging challenges

Abstract

The foundations and scope of e-Work are described, and investigations of fundamental design principles for e-Work effectiveness reviewed. The premise is that without effective e-Work, the potential of emerging and promising electronic work activities, such as virtual manufacturing, telerobotic medicine, automated construction, intelligent transportation, and e-business, cannot be fully materialized. A typical and recent example of the inability to fulfill the potential of e-Work is the frustration of workers over supply chains/networks with complex ERP and other information systems, originally designed to simplify and improve their performance. Challenges and emerging e-Work solutions are described, and recent discoveries are clustered in four areas, e-Work; Integration, Coordination and Collaboration; Distributed Decision Support; and Active Middleware, with annotated references. PRISM Center developments of e-Work design principles, models and tools are described, including: Cooperation Requirement Planning; the principle of parallelism; the principle of conflict resolution; new measures of viability and scalability; and the Teamwork Integration Evaluator (TIE), which applies the analogy of distributed computing.