Memory-Based Feedback Controls to Support Groupware Coordination

In this paper we first present an empirical study of groupware use illustrating problems that users faced with restricted feedback about others' activities. Awareness can aid users in learning interdependencies, and in forming conventions to regulate system use and information-sharing. As a solution to providing awareness, we integrate the framework of organizational memory with intelligent agent technology to provide a coordination mechanism that enables the structuring of awareness events and gives information about the users' feedback control. In the proposed model, feedback control relationships are captured into a multilayered model of organizational memory and transferred to users by agents-facilitators. The approach is based on a system dynamics approach to organizational learning.