UC IRVINE - ICS 125 PROJECT IN SYSTEM DESIGNPROJECT DESCRIPTION |
Mark Bergman
In brief, I want to create a feedback system that facilitates/supports organizational problem discovery. My idea is to augment/change a chat tool to support this activity. The feedback system would be a network of interrelated chat rooms that represent the social network aspect of the existing workflow. The social part of a workflow network can be seen as: who works with & for whom to get something done in addition to who hands finished work, usually an artifact with data/information, to whom or performs a service for whom). Hence, the first step in creating the complex feedback network is capturing a snapshot the existing workflow in an area where a new system is proposed (for example, a new travel planning system) is captured. It can be assumed, for the sake of this project, that such snapshots would be available to the students who are designing the new system.
The social part of the workflow network is to be used as the basis for chat room population. A room would be populated per person, from his/her point-of-view in the workflow network. This person controls their own chat room. Rooms are private and can only be entered by invitation only. Since the rooms are constructed from each person's work perspective, there will be overlap of people across various rooms. This way, people will be able to peer in and respond issues/problems being brought up by people 'upstream' and 'downstream' from them in the workflow network and well as those who work directly with them, on an issue.
To accomplish this, a chat system needs be augmented with the following functionality:
* Ability to create 'seeded' chat rooms from a XML netlist of a workflow network.
* Ability to timestamp and log all activity within each and every chat room.
* Logs are to be (simple) XML formatted
* (Simple) Log Management Tool: Basic multi-file editing capabilities
* Ability to start/stop all of the chat room discussion.
* Ability to enter a seed problem, i.e. a general broadcast statement, and have it display in all of the chat rooms.
* Ability for the members to bring up the main heuristics they are to follow while 'chatting':
* Describe how the problem affects you and your work.
* Describe what changes you would do the deal with the problem.
* Describe how this (or related) problem(s) affect people/tasks upstream and downstream from you.
* Respond to other's problems as discussed.
* Ability to enforce the privacy of the rooms.
* Java based chat tool
* Java 1.2.x JDK
* Supplied Workflow Netlist Structure (Note, this could be part of the assignment to design this)
* XML based flatfile
More InfoICS125 WQ00 Project Opportunities
ICS125 WQ00
David F. Redmiles Home Page
Department of Information and Computer Science
University of California, Irvine CA 92717-3425