Concept of Operations as Epistemic Object: The Sociotechnical Design Roles of a Systems Engineering Document

When large, complex interorganizational collaborations create new systems, they must discover how the system should work and how it should integrate into the overall organizational milieu. These collaborations must also draw upon and accommodate a host of processes and resources. In this paper, we present results from a qualitative case study of a key policy and process document for a large design project for a civic traffic management system that must serve multiple organizations and government agencies. The document is one common to systems engineering, but less familiar to CSCW: the Concept of Operations (ConOps). We describe the sociotechnical design functions of the ConOps. We also analyze the document and its developmental process using Ewenstein and Whyte's concept of epistemic objects," which has been useful for CSCW and design research scholars to understand the roles artifacts play in the messy processes of design and cooperative work. We find that the ConOps exhibits many qualities of an epistemic object and supports the deeply integrated work of "designing" both the system and the interorganizational collaboration itself. We then explore avenues for future research in similarly complex infrastructural design settings.