1. Tero Päivärinta University of Agder 17.9.2010
Lecture 4, IS 904 Genre-Based approach and method: Planning for organizational information requirements
Tero Päivärinta
University of Agder

2. Agenda
Genre concept
Role of genre in the organizational modelling landscape
A method for recognizing and analyzing genres (+ some experiences)
Exercise

3. Genre of organizational communication
Bakhtin (1952) - >Yates & Orlikowski (1992): a recurrently instantiating communicative action
identified by its communicative purpose and form(s) (medium/media, language, structural elements)
identified within a normative scope among a certain group of stakeholders within a certain community
e.g. lutheran marriage ceremony, invoice, requirements specification, sales report, project plan, budget, R & D meeting, ”The Diary” of papermill maintenance...
various levels of abstraction vs normative scope: specific genres recognized in a group of employees ... globally recognized abstract genres : memo of our group meeting ... memo
Genres can be ”emerging” or (to some extent) ”designed”
…or even ”given” by a 3rd party technology / application
-> assumption: a design made elsewhere fits also to us

4. Genre system / repertoire / ecology
genre system (Bazerman, 1994)
A set of interrelated genres in a wider communicative context (e.g. the genres for project mgmt: plan, memo, meeting, budget, report...)
Genre system for a meeting: scheduling (calender), invitation, agenda, (possibly document genres), meeting communications, minutes of the meeting
genre repertoire (Orlikowski & Yates, 94)
The set of genres recognized within a certain community of interest
E.g. genre repertoire of ”Aker Business Services”
genre ecology (Erickson, 2000)
Communicative practices facilitated by the use of a certain technological infrastructure/environment... e.g. Lotus Notes or virtual reality -applications
E.g. ”Genre ecology ”which can grow in” SharePoint” or ”MS Office 2007 Pro”

5. Genre systems for (e-) Collaboration
F2f-
genres
(e)Communication
genres
Document
genres
Document
genres
F2f-
genres
Document
genres
Document
genres
Document
genres
Document
genres
Awareness
genres
(Awareness of repositories,
workspaces and users)
Document / Data
repositories/workspaces

6. Reminder: The ”Diamond” of ECM
Environment: BUSINESS ENVIRONMENT OF THE ENTERPRISE
GOALS
(OBJECTIVES)
organizational
Socio-
PEOPLE
ROLES
(STRUCTURE)
PROCESSES
(TASK)
metadata
metadata
CONTENT & COMMUNIC.
GENRE
REPERTOIRE
GENRE
SYSTEM
GENRE
CONTEXT
DATA
metadata
INFORMATION
TECHNOLOGY
(IN CONTEXT)
Techn(olog)ical
Environment: INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY (OPPORTUNITIES)

7. Reminder 2… Communication / Content Infrastructure Administration
People / Culture
Content
Infrastructure
Administration
Change
Management
Objectives
Impacts
Enterprise
Model
Communication /

8. The genre-based method
focus: identifying organizational information / communication requirements for varying IS development initiatives
ECM, KM, DW, BI...
concepts: (become concrete in the organizational language)
genre (document types, types of meetings, reports, forms...)
property (of genre)
metadata (about genre, e.g. about its implementation, dev. needs,)
PUI entity = producer/user of information (structure, task, people etc.)

9. Overview of the method’s process

10. Identify stakeholders
I.e., those who should be involved in the development process & req analysis
For instance: Chief information officer, Chief executive officer, ISP champion, IS coordinator, Information technology manager, Information systems developer, Information security coordinator, Consultant, Researcher, Outside facilitator of ISP, Facilitator (from inside the company), Representative of a PUI entity in the ISP domain (including practically every identified work role in PUI entities), External stakeholder (affected by ISP decisions:customer, supplier, and subcontractor)
Just list them & their contact information

11. Identify PUI entities List of the PUI entities with which to start
Examples
processes
Sales process, Purchasing process, …
organization units & roles
Accounting department, Research & Development dept., Financial manager, Regional managers
individual people?
”Pekka Toivonen”
external PUI entities (with which ECM system exchanges information)
Customer, Subcontractor, Trade union, Department of Defense
existing databases?? (sales transactions…)
to be put in the diagonal matrix -model

12. Identify & name genres
I.e., those meaningful recurrent information objects shared between at least two PUI entities
note: to identify genres within PUI entities, the PUI entities could be structured further
> the diagonal matrix -technique
or otherwise (interviews, mind maps - important, remember to document the PUI entities!!!!)

13. The diagonal matrix
Direction of communication ”flow”: clockwise

14. Diagonal matrix (2)

15. Identify relevant properties to be analysed
I.e., those things which we want to analyse further about genres in connection to this particular ECM initiative -> genre list
…tens of them possible
those describing further production & use
those describing related technologies & applications
those describing development needs / problems
those describing relationship to other information resources

16. A general-level set of analysis questions: 6W1H:s
…when need to discuss the organizational purpose & implementation of a new or elaborated genre or genre system
Why? (Purpose(s) of communication)
Who? (Who communicate to whom?)
Whose? (Who ”owns” the communication – who can stop it?)
What? (Subgenres of a genre system, content/communication elements of the related genres)
When? (Any time-related issues between subgenres and about particular ones)
Where? (Where does the content /communication reside)
How? (How is it technically implemented – or should be?)

17. Genre list (unanalysed)
PROPERTIES
-> 10-20
(>50)
METADATA
->

18. Analyse & redefine genre-based metadata
…to constitute an IS/IT implementation plan for ECM in the modelled domain
applications to produce / distribute / publish / communicate
technological functionalities
Useful to scrutinize, which useful in which context
consultants representing particular solutions -> those functionalities in their solutions
About Content: From genres to ”technical content types” and elements
Content genres sharing (almost) exactly the same technical metadata / flexible structure -> same technical content types
…the more tailored content systems -> the more genre-specific content types supported
give some examples?
Technical content types = aggregations of technical content elements
figure, text, formatted data field, etc.
the more tailored system -> the more semantically specific content elements / content structure models

19. Genre list (analysed) (also: reference to specific
content structure definitions
about more tailored content
types)

20. …until gap-fit analysis
Product analyses to be done in parallel with / after genre-based requirements analysis
with regard to the functionality of a product of interest
The genre-based analysis provides a basis to see, which functionalities of the available products would be highlighted in the selected domain
e.g. which existing meeting genres would fit to be replaced / elaborated with ”Live Meeting with Round Table” best, which with more advanced video meetings with ”presence feeling”.
…and would we able to envision new meeting genres now made possible with the technology?

21. Side-jump to the other article
What did you think about analysing the meeting genres at the level recommended by Antunes et al. 2006?

22. Background of g-b method
Dev. of electronic document management in industry (3-yr.METODI project, end of 1990s)
heterogeneous document resources -> the problem is first of all about IS planning
Need to delve deeper into doc resources
people tend to recognize genres rather naturally
IS developers were uncommon with the most genres in big organizations (although they must decide on IT implementation issues) -> practical need for a collaborative approach, genre repertoire forms an easily comprehensible, still comprehensive, conceptual ground for the stakeholders to collaborate

23. Experiences from action research
The reported method version elaborated in collaboration with industry
from the development of EDM to ISP in general
easy to find hundreds of genres in organizations
IT people recognize their lack of knowledge and need for closer collaboration
”end users” can express their problems and requirements in a detailed way, with a language familiar to them
e.g cf. to ”entity-relationship” modelling of data

24. Experiences from action research (2)
managers get insight into the actual practices of communication (by themselves they, too, are rather incapable of discussing the development of IT use for effective communicative practices)
help discuss, identify, and demarcate potential targets for development and prioritize them
”The method works too well. I dare not to analyze our other departments with my current dev. resources, people would expect fast improvements to the now defined needs in vain...” (A CIO).

25. Experiences from consulting
A consulting company has used the method in the business for specifying requirements for ECM since 1999
> 100 customer organizations 1999-
independently of the original method engineers
sizes vary employees, interorg. domains
manufacturing, engineering, financing, consulting, interorganizational domains...

26. Observations from consulting
genre-based approach works in practice (as illustrated also by the earlier action research –based efforts) <– req. anal.
simple, communicative, efficient, sometimes emancipatory?
genres & PUI entities useful as robust ”metaconcepts” of analysis
practical language = customers’ terminology for genres and PUIs
speak of ”what kind of documents, meetings etc.” does the customer have
socio-org. vs technology-oriented concepts
genres can bridge req. eng. and implementation issues of EDM
Here we are (still) at the beginning in terms of research!!!!

27. Observations from consulting (continued)
participative debate on genres is efficient and effective in requirements engineering for ECM
technology-oriented consultants tend to adopt the ”technology language” of a particular application -> genres represent still the customer business view better
a quick basis for analysing work processes
it seems for many to be easier to identify genres first and then to discuss about the processes which they relate to (than to start directly with a business process analysis)

28. (Very brief) comparison to some other modelling concepts
Data modelling / relational databases
Genres correspond roughly to reports (i.e. report types, not individual instances) and forms
(actually, the method has been used for clarifying possibilities of data warehouses in another consulting firm, occasionally)
Object-orientation, object classes
A genre can be an object class
which describes aggregations of content objects and sets of functionalities in use, production, and interaction contexts of the application under analysis
an instance document genre = a permanent object
an instance of an interaction genre = a run-time object (which may become a permanent object if stored)

29. Exercise
Let us do individually a diagonal matrix about ”the course communication”
for the virtual eCollaboration course at UiA
use the excel-sheet given for this purpose
…you can use the wikisite:
…as the basis (OBS! this does not involve all of the genres!)
-> Move 3-4 genres of communication to a ”genre list”
The second task is to suggest ways to improve collaboration in a virtual eCollaboration course at UiA…
…discuss about each of those
improvement ideas
functionality requirements etc.
45 minutes… -> coming back to present the model(s)
(if no time – do this exercise before the next lecture)