An architectural style for supporting work practice: coping with the complex structure of coordination relationships

Abstract

We present an architectural style to directly support the formal and informal relationships that underlie work activity. Rather than defining the dependencies between activities, our focus is on the structure of coordination within the organization. The approach is guided by a need for scoped information and communication spaces, decentralized ownership of work product and process, and support for varying levels of work definition, integrating structured models of work process with ad-hoc activities. The base of the approach is a peer-to-peer style with peers supporting work participants. Peers are subdivided into active task spaces, associating information resources, software components, and communication. Independent connectors define the relationships between peers and provide the mechanism for defining larger more complex structures. This paper describes the style in detail and discusses a prototype implementation