Methodological issues for the design of an office information server

摘要

This paper deal with the necessity of consideration of organizational and user requirements to create the basis for the successful design of future office information servers.

Today volumes of the order of 10.000 to 50.000 multimode documents and 1 to 10 million documents at a company level (companies with over 1000 employees) per system have to be archived. The average amount of filing is 12 to 16 running metres of paper per year, with an increasing tendency (Ben84).

However the shortcoming of systems of today is not the incapability of storage of big amounts of information but the fact they only support particular (and well structured) office tasks in an operative way. Future systems have to support all kind of work (procedures) people do in an office, consider the strategic and operative goals of the particular office and take the user behaviours especially their knowledge to solve problems and the individual kind of doing their jobs (e.g. search strategies, reminder functions) into account.

Analysis methods for the collection of data for the design of office systems have mostly been developed in the context of office automation to develop systems to support particular tasks, to restructure offices to improve the profitability of the company. Because of that fact, these methods must be quite extended to supply data which are suited for the successful design and development of future office information servers.

Focal topics of the analysis from an office system perspective are: information generation and location, consistency and permanence, work support, information handling and manipulation, access right and confidentiality, accountability, information flow and use of abstractions. Detailed dimensions concerning these areas are posted in this paper.