Orchestration Scripts: A System for Encoding an Organization’s Ways of Working to Support Situated Work

Title of the Paper

Orchestration Scripts: A System for Encoding an Organization’s Ways of Working to Support Situated Work

Paper Information

• Subject Area: Human-Computer Interaction, Collaborative Systems, Workflow Automation
• Keywords: Socio-Technical Ecosystems, Situated Work, Ill-Structured Problems, Orchestration Scripts, Organizational Objects

Research Background and Problem Statement

• Identified Issues or Challenges:
  • Ill-structured problems require workers to adopt efficient strategies in complex environments.
  • Existing tools fail to support monitoring and strategy planning due to a lack of comprehensive understanding of organizational workflows, social structures, and tools.
  • As organizations scale, traditional human guidance (e.g., mentorship) struggles to cover all daily scenarios.
• Importance of the Problem:
  • Modern work environments demand employees to handle complex tasks and adapt flexibly to dynamic constraints.
  • Ineffective technological support for work practices leads to resource waste and reduced employee efficiency.
• Research Motivation and Related Work:
  • Academia has proposed methods for workflow automation and context-triggered programming, but these approaches fall short in addressing complex socio-technical ecosystems and dynamic demands.
  • The authors advocate for the development of situationally-aware work support mechanisms and a novel work programming framework.

Proposed Solution

• Proposed Method or Solution:
  • Workplace Programming for Situationally-Aware Systems: Using computational abstractions to represent an organization’s ways of working.
  • Implementing the system “Orchestration Scripts,” which leverages “Situated Scripts” to monitor daily work scenarios and recommend strategies.
  • Introducing the programming abstraction “Organizational Objects” to model workflows, social relationships, collaborative scenarios, and tools.
• Innovative Aspects:
  • Binding work practices with programmable organizational abstractions to provide more flexible situational support than traditional automation systems.
  • Enabling work strategies to be expressed in a generalizable manner and dynamically adapted to specific individuals or teams.
  • Offering strategy recommendations at the right time while leaving the decision-making power to workers, avoiding excessive automation.
• Implementation Steps and Key Technologies:
  1. Define computational abstractions of work practices (Organizational Objects), including workflows, social relationships, collaborative spaces, and connections to existing tools.
  2. Use APIs to integrate organizational data, providing programmable support for the abstractions.
  3. Employ an orchestration engine to monitor work scenarios and identify opportunities for strategy implementation, enabling script execution and strategy output.

Research Outcomes

• Specific Outcomes:
  • Case studies demonstrate how the system encodes work practices and flexibly responds to dynamic work scenarios.
  • The system detects work demands in real-world scenarios and provides timely strategy recommendations.
  • In user trials, the system offered 36 specific strategy supports, raising user awareness of work situations and assisting in planning.
• Advantages Compared to Existing Solutions:
  • Greater situational adaptability and flexibility than traditional workflow automation.
  • Enhances collaboration efficiency within organizations while reducing the burden of manual monitoring and guidance.
• Experimental or Evaluation Results:
  • A one-week trial within the research community showed that the system effectively improved situational awareness and the naturalness of human-computer interaction in the work environment.
  • The system provided clear but non-mandatory strategies, allowing users to decide whether to execute them based on actual needs.
• Limitations and Future Directions:
  • Long-term use may lead to notification fatigue, diminishing the effectiveness of strategy prompts.
  • The current research environment is limited to academic institutions; future work should extend to enterprise-level scenarios to validate the system’s broader applicability.
  • User-friendly script generation tools should be developed to enable non-programmers to easily create work scripts.