Systems Such As Symphony And Open Access Are Part Of This Generation

By Author: doris zhang
Total Articles: 74
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Office automation took its birth in the late seventies against the backdrop of maturing mainframe technologies . When the IBM PC was introduced, the stage was set for personal software aimed at the office. From Table 2, it is clear that the evolution is marked by the introduction of various hardware and software technologies. Rather than to discuss these individually, it is convenient to discuss them in terms of generations. The first generation systems were standalone software such as word processing and spreadsheets developed soon after the introduction of the IBM PC. These were single-user generic programs designed for activities such as typing letters/documents and preparing financial statements. These can be regarded as the PC version of mainframe technologies such as PROFS and CEO. Lotus 1-2-3 and Word star exemplify this generation . The second generation systems were multi-function systems such as word processing, database and spreadsheet, integrated into a single package. We can regard them as integrated extensions of the first generation. Systems such as Symphony and Open Access are part of this generation. Systems ...
... integrated to a lesser extent, such as through common operating environments also fall into this umbrella. For example, operating environments such as MS-Windows were part of this generation although the concept did not become entrenched into the desktop until the 90’s. Work group and network-based systems comprise the third generation systems. These systems link together groups of employees working on common projects and enable them to share information. Email, Distributed CASE tools, and similar groupware belong to this generation.

The co-ordinator, first introduced in 1985 is a well known example of the third generation.In this system, work group communications were viewed as “commitments”, “obligations”, dry erase desktop whiteboard “propositions” etc. The system was a forerunner for more sophisticated groupware. Given the technological focus hitherto, none of the three generations of office systems had the ability to specify and automate business processes. So they were incapable of supporting process-oriented office activity such as approving loans or handling work orders. They were primarily generic tools utilized in segments of processes and adapted to the tasks by relying on the limited customization capabilities provided. While it was expected that the fourth generation systems would have some intelligence, the nineties have witnessed the birth and explosion of a new category of office software known as workflow systems. Flow mark is one of the well known products in this area. These systems do not have intelligence, although the capability to perform tasks automatically or to act in accordance with the roles and responsibilities of office workers may give a semblance of this ability. The main focus of the fourth generation systems is automation of business processes. By enabling employees to create process models and operationalize them, fourth generations systems are providing much needed support in areas such as loan approval, order processing, purchasing etc. Many of these are web enabled for better accessibility. Fifth generation systems do not exist leaving open the possibility for conjecture. According to some researchers they are expected to be integrated in function , capable of process support , and will likely include a primitive level of intelligence. The systems will likely have the ability to parse and fulfill primitive natural language requests for both actions as well as for information. For e.g. an employee may request the system to “apply for leave on the 13th”, and the system would carry out the task. These systems would have the ability to learn about and recognize objects in the end user’s universe such as his/her superiors, colleagues, contacts, reports etc. They would also be specifically designed to handle minor problems such as re-scheduling meetings for an employee if he/she goes on leave. Such systems will need to exploit contemporary technologies such as tablets, mobile phones, cloud computing, etc.There have been a number of studies of offices, both qualitative as well as quantitative.

The quantitative studies attempted to identify the proportions of time office workers spent on various activities such as typing, filling forms, reporting etc.. A majority of the studies date back to the seventies and eighties. The usefulness of the studies is limited by their purpose as well as the underlying paradigms used to collect the data. The early studies were intended to identify the scope for office information systems and were therefore focused on the activity paradigm. This meant identifying the proportion of time spent in each activity. Even within this paradigm, there was a tremendous variation in the terminology, owing obviously to the infancy of the field. For instance, one study classified office activity into “advising”, “deciding”, “approving”, “arranging”, “scheduling”, etc. while another classified it into “writing”, “proof reading”, “calculating”, “mail handling”, etc. The percentages of time spent in each activity are themselves not very useful and this is compounded by the differences in terminologies so that meta-data analysis cannot be carried out. Since the office has undergone radical changes, these studies will be of limited utility at present and new studies have to be undertaken. The qualitative studies focused on the co-operative nature of office life required especially to interpret policies and to resolve problems. Gerson and Star reported on the due process that accompanies the pricing and classification of medical services while Suchman reported on the due process that accompanies the troubleshooting of purchase orders in an accounting office. Both these studies highlight the richness that seems to characterize office work. Classification of medical procedures or troubleshooting of purchase orders requires “articulation”, the set of activities that are required to perform a task. These include discussion, negotiation and information exchanges with various entities within and beyond the organization. Within the realm of OIS literature, there are few studies of this type pointing to a research lacunae.In the forms perspective, database models of forms and specifications of form operations have been developed. Forms models are generally adaptations of basic hierarchical or relational data structures which consist of groups of attributes that are mapped to base tables. The external presentations of forms correspond to database views and include fields and labels as well as other information such as instructions, page numbers etc. Form operations include form filling, filing, update, copying, retrieval and transmission.

The interface aspects of these operations and integrity problems that can arise have been addressed. The representation of forms is still an area needing research. The conventional approach of storing form data using normalized base tables is awkward because of the interdependence among attributes and the need to model operations on them. The problem becomes more complicated for attributes which require simultaneous visibility of other form attributes. In tax forms for instance, the tax rate will be based on filing status and gross wages which are filled earlier in the form. Frequently, attributes of a form such as capital gains in a tax form are looked up from other forms or tables. To build intelligence into forms applications therefore requires a conceptual representation that is closer to its actual presentation than a secondary representation where data is partitioned into a number of normalized tables. A conceptual level view having all the form’s data types such as date-ranges, income classification, data aggregates etc. is more appropriate for advanced forms applications . Such data types will suitably be identified from a thorough research into forms structures and data filling operations. An academic study and documentation of the business logic of form operations is also warranted.A number of data and document models have been introduced into the OIS literature which have been inspired by semantic data models. These models address three main aspects of data modelling: classification, object definition/relationships and activities. As in object-oriented models, data objects have been classified into types-structured objects such as forms, memos, financial worksheets etc and unstructured objects which have free form text and graphics. Some models such as Minstrel-ODM and TEMPORA [45] allow for non-exclusivity in the classifications, resulting in a network structure of object types.The definitions of object types make use of such well known mechanisms as abstraction, reference, object composition, object instances, derivation, time-stamping etc. In TEMPORA for instance, objects can be simple, composite or derived. Composite objects are those that consist of other objects; for instance, a document could consist of “author”, “abstract”, “table” etc. each of which are individual objects. The details of composite objects are not shown in the main schema but in the object’s sub-schema. Derived objects are specified by constraining simple or complex objects with conditions. For instance, a proposal can be viewed as a document that is “submitted for evaluation”.

Objects can have a variety of relationships with other objects such as “part-of”, dependent, independent, exclusive etc. Dependent objects for instance, are objects whose existence depends on other objects. Thus a “car engine” is a dependent object of “car”. The activities performed with objects usually include storage, presentation, retrieval, deletion and update. There has been a tendency in the research to define these activities in terms of their relational equivalents which causes problems similar to those in forms viz. the inability to define higher level activities. The representation must be close to the native form of the objects or operations on them become awkward. A second major criticism is that the implementation perspective has been missing from many of these approaches. This is perhaps due to the fact that maintaining the various types of objects and their relationships while ensuring the fulfillment of integrity constraints is an extremely complex problem. Additionally, many of the operations,gun concealment wall shelf such as querying will depend on the object type. In recent years there has been a push towards representing digital documents using markup languages. The markup languages are domain dependent and have been developed for certain domains such as bibliographic databases. But generalized semantic models fulfilling a variety of data needs in practical office situations continue to be a research challenge. Models of document operations which go beyond simple retrieval such as, extracting parts from different documents are also potentially of interest to next generation systems.Procedures are executed by human agents within the context of the goals and policies of the organization. Agent’s roles and responsibilities have been modeled using sets, predicates and objects. An interesting approach is to model the different roles of an agent with a set of properties describing the agent, the states which the agent could have , the set of messages that the agent could receive that would move the agent to the different states and the rules for transitioning among the states ”. Goals and policies have been modeled with the Actor Language , with rules, and with logic. Modelling of policies does not appear to present any special problems given the variety of languages available today, however, the manner in which they influence processes is still of research interest. For instance, how do organizational policies influence the hiring of a contractor? Are policies implemented implicitly by the agents or explicitly? At what stage in the process are they an issue? Implementation research could take the approach of identifying and developing policy objects accepting a given situation as input and assessing whether or not a policy is violated. Can a part time employee work for more than 10 hours of overtime in a given week? Agents communicate with other agents and with applications, but research in these areas under the auspices of the OIS field has been comparatively sparse.In the process perspective we dovetail traditional work on procedures with workflow research.

Processes have been modeled using both graphical and declarative techniques. Graphical specifications are usually variations on Petri-Nets, Data flow diagrams, State transition networks or activity networks while declarative techniques specify processes using programming languages. A similar pattern is found in recent work where researchers have used Petri-nets, variations on state transition networks, program specification techniques, and additionally transaction models, UML, logic and frames. The criticisms of these approaches are best described by the concepts of domain adequacy and representational adequacy.Domain adequacy refers to the extent to which the models incorporate all elements of a process while representational adequacy refers to the extent to which the model incorporates the control structures necessary to specify the process.