What Administrative Assistants Do, What Computers Don’t
For years the HCI and CSCW community have taken on the notion of a personal digital assistant as a gold standard. However, this supposedly-routine work is in fact complex and requires much knowledge of context, and as of yet we haven’t succeeded. What can we learn about these activities, and how can we bridge these insights into interactive systems?
In a best paper winner, Tom Erickson and colleagues at IBM interviewed assistants and their bosses to learn more about what kind of work administrative assistants do. They model the admin’s work:
- monitoring ongoing events in the boss’s life — for example, reading all of the boss’s email
- handling events when necessary (blocking, do, redirecting, facilitating, scheduling)
- managing ongoing background work such as keeping situational awareness
The danger is that assistants require high access to their boss’s situation and context — without this access, breakdowns are likely to occur.
Assistants spend lots of time collaborating with other assistants rather than their boss directly. “I can pick up the phone and in thirty seconds get a project, get a screen, get coffee for a meeting, get a conference room that no one else can get — because of the people I know.”
The authors see opportunities for tools that assist assistants. Quite meta.
Trip report from CSCW 2008.