Scalability through Cultivation. Designing IT Support for Co-ordination Work

Abstract

The objective of this thesis is to discuss how to enable the staff at an order-packaging department to cope with a drastically increasing scale of operation. In order to do this we introduce the term scalability and based on co-ordination theory we formulate a case specific method for designing for an increasing scale of operation. We argue that it is the co-ordination work that is lacking not the actual productive work performed. We apply our method to the results of an ethnographic field study conducted at the order-packaging department, and design a new work setting adapted to the increasing rate of growth. We state that the design method was very useful in our case, but we need to conduct further empirical studies in order to make a conclusive evaluation of its applicability in a more general sense.