A user-centred approach to groupwork systems development

It is recognised that many application areas now involve people working together using IT as an aid for sharing information and communicating with other workers in local proximity or over longer distances using networking technology. Such working environments present fresh challenges for analysts and designers, requiring new working methods which allow for user involvement in the system development life cycle within a groupworking context. This paper reports on the experience of using a process centred approach to the development of human centred applications in a general hospital. In particular, the use of Role Activity Diagrams (RAD) [1] as an alternative to IDEF [2] and other process modelling methods is briefly explored. Evaluation of RAD as a notation for representing the interaction between human agents which is both accessible to clients and which may be readily mapped onto enactment technology is discussed. The overall objective of the work is to investigate the effectiveness of this approach in enabling business analysts and systems designers to work with each other and with systems users in a participative way to exploit shared information and distributed processing.