CASE STUDY: GROWING AN APPLICATION FROMCOLLABORATION TO MANAGEMENT SUPPORT—THE EXAMPLE OF CUPARLAGerhard Schwabe, University of Zurich(Switzerland)Analysis and DesignJust like in other towns, members of the Stuttgart City Councilhave a large workload: In addition to their primary profession(e.g., as an engineer at Daimler Benz) they devote more than 40hours a week to local politics. This extra work has to be doneunder fairly unfavorable conditions. Only council sessions andparty meetings take place in the city hall; the deputies of thelocal council do not have an office in the city hall to prepare orcoordinate their work. This means, for example, that they haveto read and file all official documents at home. In a city withmore than 500,000 inhabitants they receive a very largenumber of documents. Furthermore, council members feelthat they could be better informed by the administration andbetter use could be made of their time. Therefore HohenheimUniversity and partners* launched the Cuparla project toimprove the information access and collaboration of councilmembers.A detailed analysis of their work revealed the following char-acteristics of council work:1 Since council members are very mobile, support has to beavailable to them any time and in any place.I Council members collaborate and behave differently in dif-ferent contexts: While they act informally and ratheropenly in the context of their own party, they behavemore controlled and formal in official council sessions.I A closer investigation of council work reveals a low degree ofprocess structure. Every council member has the right of ini-tiative and can inform and involve other members andmembers of the administration in any order.I Council members rarely are power computer users.Computer support for them has to be very straightforwardand intuitive to use.When designing computer support we initially had to decide onthe basic orientation of our software. We soon abandoned aworkflow model as there are merely a few steps and there is littleorder in the collaboration of local politicians. Imposing a newstructure into this situation would have been too restrictive forthe council members. We then turned to pure document-orientation,imposing no structure at all on the council members' work. Wecreated a single large database with all the documents any mem-ber of the city council ever needs. However, working with thisdatabase turned out to be too complex for the council members. Inaddition, they need to control the access to certain documents at allstages of the decision-making process. For example, a party may notwant to reveal a proposal to other parties before it has officiallybeen brought up in the city council. Controlling access to eachdocument individually and changing the access control list was notfeasible.Therefore, the working context was chosen as a basis of ourdesign. Each working context of a council member can be sym-bolized by a "room." A private office corresponds to the councilmember working at home; there is a party room, where he collab-orates with his parry colleagues, and a committee room symbolizesthe place for committee meetings. In addition, there is a room forworking groups, a private post office, and a library for filedinformation. All rooms hence have an electronic equivalent in theCuparla software. When a council member opens the Cuparlasoftware, he sees all the rooms from the entrance hall (Figure 1).The council member creates a document in one room (e.g., hisprivate office) and then shares it with other council members inother rooms. If he moves a document into the room of his party,he shares it with his party colleagues; if he hands it on to theadministration, he shares it with the mayors, administrationofficials, and all council members.The interface of the electronic rooms resembles the setup of theoriginal rooms. Figure 2 shows the example of the room for a parlia-mentary party. On the left hand side of the screen there are documentlocations, whereas, on the right hand side, the documents of theselected location are presented. Documents that are currently beingworked on are displayed on the "desk." These documents have theconnotation that they need to be worked on without an additionaloutside trigger. If a document is in the files, it belongs to a topic that isstill on the political agenda. However, a trigger is necessary to move it offof the shelf. If a topic is not on the political agenda any more, alldocuments belonging to it are moved to die archive.The other locations support the collaboration within theparty. The conference desk contains all documents for the next(weekly) party meeting. Any council member of the party can putdocuments there. When a council member prepares for the meeting,he or she merely has to check the conference desk for relevantinformation. The mailbox for the chairman contains all documentsthat the chairman needs to decide on. In contrast to his e-mailaccount all members have access to the mailbox.Case Study (Collaboration to Management Suppport), Page-2Double work is avoided as every council member is aware of thechairman's agenda. The mailbox of the assistant contains tasks forthe party assistants; the mailbox for the secretary, assignments forthe secretary (e.g., a draft for a letter). The inbox contains docu-ments that have been moved from other rooms into this room.Thus, in the electronic room all locations correspond to thecurrent manual situation. Council members do not have torelearn their work. Instead, they collaborate in the shared envi-ronment they are accustomed to with shared expectations aboutthe other peoples' behavior. Feedback from the pilot users indi-cates that this approach is appropriate.Some specific design features make the software easy to use. Thesoftware on purpose does not have a fancy three-dimensional interfacethat has the same look as a real room. Buttons (in the entrance hall)and lists (in the rooms) are much easier to use and do not distract theuser from the essential parts. Each location (e.g., the desk) has alittle arrow. If a user clicks on this arrow, a document is moved to thelocation. This operation is much easier for a beginner thanproceeding by "drag and drop."Case Study (Collaboration