Position paper for a workshop at ECSCW 2007 on effective handovers

1. ECSCW Workshop Position Paper -- Handover: Collaboration for Continuity of Work
Toward a Pattern Language for Effective Handovers
John C. Thomas
IBM T. J. Watson Research Center
PO Box 218 Yorktown Heights, NY 10598 USA
A Handover Story: Danny H. was one of our most fun but problematic child psychiatric
patients. He had a severe case of Type 1 diabetes and had successfully learned to use this
as a “lever” to manipulate his parents. One day in the hospital, he posted a high blood
sugar level right before lunch. Therefore, his insulin dosage for his pre-lunch injection
was calculated to be correspondingly high. Instead of eating however, once inside the
lunchroom, he threw a tantrum and fought an intense physical struggle with staff. He
was eventually escorted to the “quiet room” and wrapped in a calming mattress. A nurse
was assigned to watch him and I explained the situation to her; that he had just had a very
large insulin dose and instead of his anticipated lunch, he had eaten nothing and instead
had engaged in vigorous physical activity; therefore, she needed to watch him closely.
My own duty was back in the lunchroom but after a few minutes, I decided to leave to
check on Danny. The nurse said, “Oh, he’s fine. He went right to sleep.” In fact, of
course, he was in insulin shock. Luckily, we quickly administered some instant glucose
and he recovered. Later, we discovered that this nurse was almost completely deaf and
had developed a clever set of social habits to give the impression that she understood
what people were telling her while actually hearing almost nothing. ..
Position: Socio-technical Pattern Languages. A Pattern is a named recurring problem
and the essence of its solution. A Pattern Language is a lattice of inter-related patterns
that together cover a domain. Pattern Languages have been suggested for physical
architecture, object-oriented programming, management, human-computer interaction
and socio-technical systems. I propose a number of socio-technical patterns related to
successful handovers based on mechanisms that have developed in a number of domains
such as sports, oral traditions, and storytelling. In particular, the metaphor of a
“handover” itself may be problematic as it may suggest a tripartite temporal segmentation
of responsibility: 1. Person A is responsible; 2. Transition from A to B; 3. Person B is
responsible. In some domains, more holistic and complex responsibility threads are used
to help make handovers more likely to be successful.
Background: My current work at IBM’s T. J. Watson Research Center relates to the
usability and usefulness of tools in the high performance computing arena. Relevant
handovers include those between software tools and the programmers the tools are meant
to support; between domain experts such as meteorologists and parallel programming
experts; and between system administrators and programmers. Handovers, in a
metaphorical sense, are also a crucial part of the complexity and challenge of parallel
programming itself.

2. Prior to this, I developed the user experience for an e-learning system which allows users
to specify goals, types of materials, time constraints, and background. Based on these
inputs as well as an ontology and metadata associated with each Learning Object, a
customized sequence of learning materials is proposed. Handover issues here included
those between our development team and end-users as well as between our development
team and other teams to provide content; between authors and derived learning objects
and between subject matter experts who provided the metadata and the learning objects.
Empirical lab work and field trials show this to be a useful and usable tool. Other work
focused on developing tools, techniques, and representations to support the capture,
creation, analysis, organization, finding and use of stories and scenarios. These
techniques have continued to prove useful in subsequent projects. I received a Ph.D. in
psychology from the University of Michigan in 1971 and managed a research project in
the psychology of aging at Harvard Medical School. I then joined IBM Research and
conducted research in various areas of human computer interaction including query
languages, natural language processing, design problem solving, audio systems, and
speech synthesis. In 1986, I began the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at NYNEX
Science and Technology. I was active in the formation of ACM's Special Interest Group
in Computer Human Interaction and have served in various capacities including general
co-chair of the CHI conference in 1991. I have co-chaired various workshops on Human-
Computer Interaction Patterns and Socio-Technical Patterns since 1997 at CHI, CSCW,
and Interact. I’ve also taught at a variety of institutions of higher education including
courses in cognitive psychology, problem solving and creativity, the psychology of aging,
storytelling, and human factors in information systems.
References:
Thomas, J. C., Kellogg, W.A., and Erickson, T. (2001) The Knowledge Management
puzzle: Human and social factors in knowledge management. IBM Systems Journal,
40(4), 863-884. Available on-line at http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/sj40-4.html
Thomas, J. C. (2001). An HCI Agenda for the Next Millennium: Emergent Global
Intelligence. In R. Earnshaw, R. Guedj, A. van Dam, and J. Vince (Eds.), Frontiers of
human-centered computing, online communities, and virtual environments. London:
Springer-Verlag.
Thomas, J.C. (1980). The computer as an active communication medium. Invited paper,
Association for Computational Linguistics, Philadelphia, June 1980. Proceedings of the
18th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics., pp. 83-86.
Malhotra, A., Thomas, J.C. and Miller, L. (1980). Cognitive processes in design.
International Journal of Man-Machine Studies, 12, pp. 119-140.
Thomas, J.C. (1978). A design-interpretation analysis of natural English. International
Journal of Man-Machine Studies, 10, pp. 651-668.
Thomas, J.C. and Carroll, J. (1978). The psychological study of design. Design Studies, 1
(1), pp. 5-11.