🚀 go-pugleaf

I thinkIn article <SHEA.90Jul24181213@edson.East.Sun.COM>,
shea@edson.East.Sun.COM (Tim Shea - Sun BOS Software) writes:
> How essential is it for people to be able to see
> inside (or manipulate) others' calendars? I would
> argue "not very".

This depends upon the local office culture.  Reasons why it might be
important are the following:

	1) announcements of events are come from multiple locations.
	   Is the reason this time period is already blocked out because
	   you are already scheduling yourself for the event in question?

	2) reprioritizing.  In some office cultures, ones superiors
	   reserve the right to re-prioritize which meetings you go to.
           Examples might range from a manager deciding you should attend
	   a customer meeting instead of his normal staff meeting, to a
	   VP deciding that a meeting announcing upcoming layoffs should
	   take precedence over ALL other meetings on site.  In the
	   latter case, they might well want to reschedule your time if
	   you were going to go to a staff meeting, but might not override
	   your schedule if you were going off-site to a Dr. appointment.
	   In some environments re-prioritizing of your time by a
	   superior without your permission is strongly looked down upon,
	   in other office cultures it is everyday life.

Note that this might mean that a variety of scheduling tools might be
more successful in the market than one that tries to please everyone
with compromises.  The question is whether each market segment is
large and profitable enough to support such differentiation.
 
> In my (informal) observations of people scheduling
> meetings the biggest problem seems to be obvious:
> finding the set of times when all (or most)
> members are free to participate. 

I believe that this IS the largest obvious problem.  Another large
unobvious problem is that HOW you handle the scheduling/acknowldegment
process is very different for different individuals and office
cultures.  Even in the case where there are grey bars and you don't
know what the time is scheduled for, what happens when you find an
open area.  Can YOU the scheduler reserve that part?  Or can you
merely request of the calendar owner that they reserve that part?
What sort of acknowledgment will you get if the owner does or does not
accept the proposed meeting?   How will people feel about this?
Will they feel someone else has too much control over their life?
Will they feel that their employees have too much autonomy?
Will they feel that the methods are uncertain and inefficient?
All these sorts of questions affect acceptance of groupware products.

I believe that the biggest problem for scheduling systems is not the
privacy issue mentioned above, but rather one related to the portability
version mentioned below.

> Another factor which seems very important, and
> which those of us who spend much of our day at computers
> tend to forget, is portability. One of the primary
> times that people tend to schedule meetings is after
> other meetings. So a solution which was portable would
> have a significant advantage. We're seeing more of 
> solutions of this type in the form of pocket computers.

But there is another side to this portability problem other than
just the technological component.   Meeting scheduling is not 
done equally by all individuals in many organizations.  Commonly,
managers schedule more meetings, and employees attend them.  The
convenience of the on line system is for the scheduler.  The 
inconvenience of keeping the on line version up to date is for the
attendees.   If the inconvenience is sufficiently small enough
(as it might be with pocket computers that upload), then the economics
of the effort equation might balance sufficiently for acceptance.  But
if the inconvenience factor is large (copying back and forth from
a paper calendar and constantly checking for surprise meetings) then
the system is likely to fail.  In the latter case, schedulers (managers)
might even mandate regular use of the system in order to receive the
benefits.  People might agree to comply, but unconciously, and unintentionally
they'll forget to keep calendars up to date a few times when they are busy.
They'll get reminded, they agree to use it, and this will be repeated,
without any form of intention disobediance.  Eventually, schedulers will
conclude that they on-line data isn't accurate enough to meet their
needs and that further reminders to keep things up to date don't achieve
the goal.  At that time the calendar system will fail.  Estimated time
to recognition of failure will vary from group to group, but 9-15 months
would probably be typical.  There might not even be a formal closure or
recognition of the failure of the computer tool, people would just slowly
revert to social tools to get things done.


> Is this too simplistic a view? Do people have experience
> with commercial group scheduling products which supports
> or contradicts these suggestions? If so, I would appreciate
> hearing about them.

There are several papers (see proceedings from CSCW'88 for instance)
that note the importance of economics of benefit and effort being
equally distributed.  E-mail succeeds best in environments where
the people who receive a lot of mail also send a lot of mail.  It
does worst where large number of people are only supposed to
receive mail and not to send mail to anyone other than their own
superior.  This is another example where effort and benefits being
unequal have lead to lower acceptance.

Scott McGregor
mcgregor@atherton.com