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When a little knowledge isn't a dangerous thing

Published: 07 May 2011 Publication History

Abstract

In this paper we compare two departments of a public administration body carrying out similar work. In one department two sections, telephony and processing, are collocated whereas in the other they are not. We demonstrate the costs of distribution, in particular how the strictly enforced division of labour and limited visibility onto the workflow of the other section causes problems when dealing with normal, natural exceptions. The setting is one of seemingly routine bureaucratic work rather than high-skilled cooperative work, thus the impact of distribution might be considered rather surprising. We argue that a key requirement for any solution is to enable practitioners on the 'shop floor' the freedom to find elegant solutions to problems.

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cover image ACM Conferences
CHI '11: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
May 2011
3530 pages
ISBN:9781450302289
DOI:10.1145/1978942
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 07 May 2011

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Author Tags

  1. call centres
  2. collocation
  3. distributed work
  4. ethnography
  5. public administration

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CHI '11 Paper Acceptance Rate 410 of 1,532 submissions, 27%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 6,199 of 26,314 submissions, 24%

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Cited By

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  • (2023)Implicit bias and negative stereotyping in global software development and why it is time to move on!Journal of Software: Evolution and Process10.1002/smr.243535:5Online publication date: 25-Apr-2023
  • (2020)Attending to implicit bias as a way to move beyond negative stereotyping in GSEProceedings of the 15th International Conference on Global Software Engineering10.1145/3372787.3390432(22-32)Online publication date: 26-Jun-2020
  • (2018)PrayanaProceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3173574.3173963(1-13)Online publication date: 21-Apr-2018
  • (2015)Blended Learning in Indian Colleges with Massively Empowered ClassroomProceedings of the Second (2015) ACM Conference on Learning @ Scale10.1145/2724660.2724666(47-56)Online publication date: 14-Mar-2015
  • (2014)"Figure out how to code with the hands of others"Proceedings of the 17th ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work & social computing10.1145/2531602.2531612(1107-1119)Online publication date: 15-Feb-2014
  • (2014)Relation Work in Collocated and Distributed CollaborationCOOP 2014 - Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on the Design of Cooperative Systems, 27-30 May 2014, Nice (France)10.1007/978-3-319-06498-7_6(87-101)Online publication date: 3-Jun-2014
  • (2013)Form digitization in BPOProceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/2470654.2470683(197-206)Online publication date: 27-Apr-2013

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