Orchestration Scripts: A System for Encoding an Organization's Ways of Working to Support Situated Work

Ill-structured problems demand that people adopt sophisticated strategies for planning, seeking support, and using available resources along their work process. These practices involve a challenging monitoring and strategizing process that existing tools cannot support since they largely lack an understanding of an organization’s processes, social structures, venues, and tools. We introduce workplace programming for situationally-aware systems–an approach for encoding work situations using computational abstractions of an organization’s ways of working and surfacing support strategies at appropriate times and settings. With this approach, we implement Orchestration Scripts, a system that supports various situated work activities in a socio-technical organization. Through a case study and field study, we show how our approach encodes different aspects of working effectively and helps people identify situations to enact effective strategies using the available support opportunities. Our results show how a programmable technology can provide situated support in today’s workplaces.