Creating Interdependencies: Managing Incidents in Large Organizational Environments

Abstract

In recent years, we have witnessed the emergence of large-scale centres of command and control that bring together a range of personnel from various services responsible for the management of day-to-day incidents and events. These multi-centre control rooms stand in marked contrast to what Suchman termed 'centres of coordination' (Suchman 1997), that have typically formed the focus of much research within HCI and CSCW. In this paper, we explore the practices and technical resources within one of these very large multi-centre control rooms. Staff in this control room do collaborate with colleagues who are co-present, but there is little reliance on the subtle interactional practices found in earlier studies. However, one information system is critical for collaboration and managing incidents that arise. This is the information system that is used to record incidents. Unlike in previous settings where records were made after an incident had taken place, these records are used for the concurrent management of activities. We consider the practices through which staff assemble these records to serve the demands of different individuals, with differing responsibilities in various organisations within the control room. We consider instances of co-present collaboration and suggest that these are often to ameliorate problems with the records rather than supporting real-time colocated activities. Although staff may be co-present in these multi-centre control rooms they have different kinds of technological resources available to them, and a different 'division of labour'. This can undermine the integration of these resources within forms of work. We conclude by discussing the implications for our understanding of co-present work and also for the methods and approaches we can draw upon for understanding these contemporary workplaces.

Visible objects of concern: Issues and challenges for workplace ethnographies in complex environments

“…If a problem that affected the locations where we were recording at the time, say with respect to a potential evacuation or another major incident, we could consider the materials gathered in these different locations. Although collecting material of such incidents was largely serendipitous, it was possible to select domains where inter-organisational collaboration could be anticipated, and these data have contributed to the analysis of work practices, collaborative activities and the use of technologies in these settings (Heath et al, 2002; Luff et al, 2000, 2017).…”

“…As they need to be read quickly, they are written succinctly. In this way, the nature of the incident and any action or response taken can be made clear to colleagues (see Luff et al, 2017, for further details). They are designed for colleagues for particular purposes, to make sense of the incident and provide a warrant for any actions taken.…”

Communicative Constructions and the Refiguration of Spaces

“…The degree of integration varies, the simplest being "multicenters" of coordination that generally work independently on their tasks. London's Surface Traffic and Transport Operations Centre, studied by Luff et al (2017), is one example of this kind. Here, bus service management, metropolitan police, and traffic management are gathered in one place while continuing to work independently in most situations.…”

“…The fields of computer-supported collaborative work and workplace studies (cf. Heath, Knoblauch, and Luff 2004) have developed a rich body of ethnographic studies in a variety of research fields such as airports (Goodwin and Goodwin 1996), the London Underground (Heath and Luff 1992;Luff et al 2017), air traffic control rooms (Suchman 1997), ambulance control in Manchester (Martin, Bowers, and Wastell 1997), and camera surveillance (Berndtsson and Normark 1999). This research field, which also has an interest in participating in the design of such systems, highlights the social and cooperative aspects of work involving "human-computer" interaction in control rooms.…”

A Composite Framework of Co-located Asymmetric Virtual Reality

“…The solution is not as simple as "just put each collaborator in their own HMD," or "just show collaborators a monitor with what the HMD-user is seeing." Each of these options oversimplifies the collaboration needs and dynamics [3,[33][34][35]51]. As such, the authors propose a focus on harnessing the abilities of asymmetric design to foster engaging VR experiences.…”