Dissertation Information for Kevin G. Crowston NAME: - Kevin G. Crowston
- (Alias) Kevin Ghen Crowston
DEGREE:
- Ph.D.
DISCIPLINE:
- Management
SCHOOL:
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA) (1991)
ADVISORS: - Thomas Wendell Malone
COMMITTEE MEMBERS: - None
MPACT Status: Incomplete - Inspected
Title: Towards a coordination cookbook: Recipes for multi-agent action
Abstract: "This thesis presents the first steps towards a theory of coordination in the form of what I call a coordination cookbook. I attempt to develop a theory of coordination grounded in detailed empirical observation. I am especially interested in using this theory to identify ways of coordinating that may become more desirable when information technology is used to perform some of the coordination. I address the following question: how can we represent what people do to coordinate their actions when they work together on common goals, in a way that reveals alternative approaches to achieving those goals?
I develop a technique for describing the behaviour of the members of an organization, based on research in distributed artificial intelligence (DAI). I first develop a data-flow model of the change process to identify what information was used and how it was processed by the different members of the organization. Then I model what each individual must have known about the task and the rest of the organization to act as observed.
I generalize from specific individuals to the kinds of tasks they performed. I develop a typology of interdependencies between organizational tasks and objects in the world which includes four categories of coordination needs, due to interdependencies between: (1) different tasks, (2) tasks and subtasks, (3) tasks and objects in the world and (4) different objects.
I then re-examine the cases to identify the coordination methods used to address these needs. I represent each method by a set of what I call coordination recipes that identify the goals, capabilities and knowledge of the individuals involved. This framework allows an analyst to abstract from a description of how a particular organization performs a task to a description of the coordination needs of that task and a set of alternative coordination methods that could be used to address those needs."
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