yam@cbnewsi.att.com (toshihiko.yamakami) (10/01/90)
As readers may know, "Is groupware a passing fad?" is a title of panel held in "IFIP WG8.4 conference Multi-user interfaces and Applications" (Sep 1990, Crete, Greece). I am tempted to talk about it on the net. Groupware is recognized as collaboration oriented computer system construction efforts. Many agree with that group interface is a little bit difficult than ordinary personal computer user interface because of its social factors. However, at the same time, there are lots of office products which claim to be groupware, with price range from $199.00. It has attracted more and more researchers these years. It is just as same as our previous experience on "OA: Office Automation" and "MIS: Management Information Systems". (Someone may have heard "SIS: strategic information system"). Dr. Jonathan Grudin mentioned a repeated 6-stage cycle in such an emerging technology field, in the panel: (1) passionate enthusiasm (2) total disillusion (3) confusion and panic (4) search for the guilty (5) punishing the innocent (6) promotion of the uninvolved If readers currently happen to be pushing their bosses into this part of business and have no view on a long list of groupware difficulties(Jonathan presented eight items), I hope they are careful to avoid the fifth stage, 'punishing the innocent'. :-) :-) From my viewpoint, there are three (computer science oriented) factors which will lead groupware research into another passing fad. (1) Evaluation Everyone menaions 'to improve group productivity', howver no one indicates 'how to measure group productivity'. (2) No basic computation model Distributed processing. parallel processing, knowledge engineering, human cognition are all difficult areas in computer science. Without simple and general model, people needs another effort every time they would like to introduce a new function, a new hardware(or environment), or a new combination. However, no one seems to know how we can make various fragile effort into incremental stable progress. (3) No user interface metaphor In groupware, it is important to provide useful illusion for a group of users. Direct manipulation may be one example of such illusion in human interface. People need or expect 'magic' and 'sense of control' in computer systems. However, users' expectation is not stable nor predictable, so it is extremely difficult to provide some general views for group users. If something cannot happen in these areas, groupware will be likely another victim of 'passing fad' in 1990. Yes, we will have a good multi-media environment in the near future. I am quite skeptical. To support multi-user and multi-media is far more difficult than to support individual writing. I think we can compare them to the relation between making a movie and writing a novel. For example, if you give an excellent set of movie making gears to some high school cinema club, how much possible is it for them to produce a fantastic movie? In any case, I am looking forward to CSCW'90, now. -- yam -- Toshihiko YAMAKAMI(NTT, Japan) Resident visitor in Bell Labs until Feb 1991 Room 4G634, AT&T Bell Labs, Crawfords Corner Rd. Holmdel, NJ 07733-1988 Tel:(908)949-5742 e-mail: yam@vax135.att.com (was: yam@nttmhs.ntt.jp)