18476883
Electronic Mail as a Medium for Rich Communication: An Empirical Investigation Using Hermeneutic Interpretation
This study provides an account of how richness occurs in communication that uses electronic mail. In examining actual e-mail exchanged among managers in a corporation, the study interprets the managerial use of the communication medium of electronic mail as the users themselves understand and experience it. Employing the research approach of interpretivism in general and hermeneutics in particular, the study finds that richness or leanness is not an inherent property of the electronic-mail medium, but an emergent property of the interaction of the electronic-mail medium with its organizational context, where the interaction is described in terms of distanciation, autonomization, social construction, appropriation, and enactment.Conclusions and recommendations are that managers who receive e-mail are not passive recipients of data, but active producers of meaning; that the best or just an appropriate communication medium is not determined through an individual manager's exercise of rational decision making, but emerges as best or appropriate over time, over the course of the medium's interactions with many users; that systems professionals need to treat the managerial user of an e-mail system not merely as a client of information services, but also as a processor or co-processor to be integrated into the system design; and that information systems researchers need to dedicate attention to the actual processes by which the users of communication medium come to understand themselves, their own use of the medium, and their organizational context.
17399297
Distinctions Among Different Types of Generalizing in Information Systems Research
It is incorrect and even harmful that many information systems researchers typically criticize their own intensive (qualitative, interpretive, critical, and case) research as lacking “generalizability.” We untangle and distinguish the numerous concepts now confounded in the single term “generalizability,” which are generality, generalization, generalize, general and generalizing. These clarified terms allow us to identify four distinct forms of generalizing (everyday inductive generalizing, everyday deductive generalizing, academic inductive generalizing, and academic deductive generalizing), each of which we illustrate with an information systems-related example. The clarified terms provide the basis for an explanation of how information systems researchers who perform intensive research may properly lay claim to generality for their research.
2129731
Sensing activity in video images
Video-based awareness tools increase familiarity among remote group members and provide pre-communication information, Low-cost iconic indicators provide less but more succinct information than video images while preserving privacy. Observations of and feedback from users of our video awareness tool suggest that an activity sensing feature along with a variety of privacy options combines advantages of both the video images and iconic indicator approaches. We introduced the activity sensing feature in response to user requests. It derives activity information from video images and provides options to control privacy and improves the usability of video-based awareness tools.
15346826
Open implementation analysis and design
This paper describes a methodology for designing Open Implementations -software modules that can adapt or change their internals to accommodate the needs of different clients. Analysis techniques are used for capturing domain knowledge, user requirements, and domain properties that influence the module’s eventual implementation. Design techniques are used for determining and refining the interfaces by which clients control the modules implementation strategies. The methodology has evolved over the past two years in several pilot projects.
5106605
Prototyping considered dangerous
In this paper, we argue that prototypes can hinder, rather than aid effective communication. The dangers are: (1) prototypes may contain hidden assumptions which might surface too late; (2) obtaining feedback in the context of use is prohibitively expensive and rarely done; and (3) partly as a consequence of these problems, prototypes cause a focus on displays and other surface features of computers, not on the more difficult problem of how people function in their environments to solve problems. We propose design intent which specifies how a system will fit in and interact with the environment in which it is placed and expectation agents which monitor the system in use and detect uses counter to the intent as ways to alleviate these dangers.
1879649
Low-Complexity Approaches to Slepian&#8211;Wolf Near-Lossless Distributed Data Compression
This paper discusses the Slepian-Wolf problem of distributed near-lossless compression of correlated sources. We introduce practical new tools for communicating at all rates in the achievable region. The technique employs a simple "source-splitting" strategy that does not require common sources of randomness at the encoders and decoders. This approach allows for pipelined encoding and decoding so that the system operates with the complexity of a single user encoder and decoder. Moreover, when this splitting approach is used in conjunction with iterative decoding methods, it produces a significant simplification of the decoding process. We demonstrate this approach for synthetically generated data. Finally, we consider the Slepian-Wolf problem when linear codes are used as syndrome-formers and consider a linear programming relaxation to maximum-likelihood (ML) sequence decoding. We note that the fractional vertices of the relaxed polytope compete with the optimal solution in a manner analogous to that observed when the "min-sum" iterative decoding algorithm is applied. This relaxation exhibits the ML-certificate property: if an integral solution is found, it is the ML solution. For symmetric binary joint distributions, we show that selecting easily constructable "expander"-style low-density parity check codes (LDPCs) as syndrome-formers admits a positive error exponent and therefore provably good performance