Lotus Notes Invented in the 1970s

• Lotus Notes invented in the 1970s
  • Foreword added in 1996
• Teleconference-Based Management Information Systems
  • Abstract
  • Swedish abstract
  • Search keys
  • Publication reference
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Word Processing, Information Retrieval and Teleconferencing Systems
• 3. Extending Teleconfefencing Systems: The Activity Concept
• 4. Structure of a Teleconference-Based Management Information System
• 5. Acknowledgements
• 5. References

Foreword added in 1996

The text below is the original, unchanged text of the 1978 paper. The word teleconferencing, as used at that time in the paper below, corresponds to what today is usually called bulletin board, computer conferencing or non-simultaneous computer conferencing systems.

Stockholm in November 1996

Jacob Palme E-mail: jpalme@dsv.su.se.

Teleconference-Based Management Information Systems

Abstract:

Swedish Abstract:

Search Keys:

Publication Reference:

1. Introduction

As soon as more than one person handles the same information in the computer, then one person will sometimes receive information which has been input by someone else. Thus, the computer is used to communicate information from one person to another. Examples:

1. One person tells the computer to make a payment to someone else.
2. One person tries to book a seat in an airplane, but the computer replies that it is fully booked by other people.

One important difference between this communication process and manual processes is that the computerized process is governed and limited by the rules built into the computer program. These can be rules governing the kind of information which can be stored or rules governing the handling of the information. Example:

1. If the computer system has built-in rules about who may order a payment, it is usually much more difficult to circumvent these rules in emergency cases than it is in a manual system.
2. If there are no fields in the computer data base in which to store priorities, and no algorithm to handle them, then it is much more difficult to give priority when this is necessary.
3. If there are no fields in the computer data base in which to store explanations why certain data have exceptional values, then these exceptional values may give dangerously false impressions.

One can compare this with a famous chapter in the book "19814" by George Orwell. The book is about a future authoritarian state in which the government tries to control even the thoughts of its people. Orwell says that the thoughts of people are governed by the language they are using. If the government can create a new language, in which unwanted ideas cannot be stated, and can enforce this language on the people, then their thoughts can be controlled.

Computer systems can be seen as such a controlled language, the permitted record types and field types being the words in the language. Thus, the computer systems will control the concepts which can be communicated through them.

In most organizations, the ability to adjust to the special needs of special cases and the ability to evolve are important both for the organization as a whole and for the people within it. An organization which has difficulty in adjusting itself to new needs and environments may soon find itself in serious trouble. It is well known that a lack of facilities for a person to evolve and modify his/her environment ("helplessness") is a common cause of maladjustment and depression (see Seligman 1975).

Even when computer systems are designed by or in close cooperation with their actual users, they will still often cause these problems of difficulties to adjust to the needs of the organizations and people using them. This is because the basic principle of designing into the system rules about what kinds of records and fields to be stored and how they can be handled will in itself cause rigidity and difficulties to adjust (see further Palme 1976).

These difficulties with computer systems are especially pronounced with so-called "management information systems", that is computer systems designed to aid in the managing of organizations. One cause of this is that computer systems are typically designed for doing the same kind of information handling all the time. They are designed to output the same kind of data. But managers or managing groups will delegate routine information handling to other people or to automatic systems. It is the unusual and different problems which have to be handled by managers and management groups. Thus, computer systems are often not suited to the real needs of the managers.

Another reason why "management information systems" often do not work is that they are often structured in such a way that lower-echelon employees are given the task of inputting routine data which are collected and summarized in reports given to the managers. Because the lower-echelon employees do not themselves see the benefit of the data, they will often dislike this part of their work, which will lower the quality of the data. The quality of the data is higher when the people inputting data can also take out and benefit from the data stored in the computer.

2. Word Processing, Information Retrieval and Teleconferencing Systems

Word processing is the handling of texts, usually natural language texts, in computers. The handling involves the inputting, editing and distribution of textual information. Special computer systems are often used to communicate information partly stored as natural language texts. Examples of such systems are information retrieval systems and teleconferencing systems.

Information retrieval systems will aid a user in searching for information stored in natural language texts, employing keywords and other classification methods.

Teleconferencing systems aid the communication procedure by providing a structure well suited to human communication. This structure is a number of "conferences". Each conference has a number of humans as "members" and consists of a collection of "notices". Each conference is concerned with a special subject. Typical conferences are a group of people developing a new system or solving. a certain problem, or With a common need of exchanging information on a special subject, e.g. people solving similar problems in different parts of an organization.

Every time people connect to the computer, they can read those notices they have not yet read in the conferences in which they are members, and can then add their own notices, which are thus made available to the other members of the conference into which the notices are entered.

Teleconferencing systems are often combined with information retrieval systems to simplify the search for certain information among the notices stored in the teleconferencing system.

Teleconferencing systems can be used as management tools in many ways. A group of people working on a problem can communicate even if they are geographically dispersed. A manager can ask for suggestions on how to solve a problem in a teleconference. A large group of people can rapidly be reached with such an inquiry. Suggestions put forward can be discussed, facts and argument for and against different solutions can be discussed. Because more people can easily be Involved, the risk that some important aspect is forgotten when the decision is made is lessened.

An important difference between teleconferencing systems and rigid computer application systems is the ease with which they can adjust to new tasks. With a rigid system, the introduction of new tasks may require months of program development work. With teleconferencing systems, the opening of a new conference on a new subject will only take a minute.

Exceptions are easy to handle in teleconferencing systems, since the notices are written in natural language, where almost anything can be formulated, and since it is simple to communicate notices in special ways, e.g. send a notice as a letter to someone who is not a member of the conference in which the notice was put.

Teleconference systems provide all users with the ability both to input and output information. Thus, even lower-echelon people in the organization can see the value and benefit of the systems to them, which will give higher quality to the data.

3. Extending Teleconfefencing Systems: The Activity Concept

Such an extension was made already in the EMISARI system, one of the first teleconferencing systems developed by Murray Turoff in the U.S. Office of Emergency Preparedness (See Renner 1973). In the EMISARI system, certain special facilities where added to the teleconferencing system. Thus, certain notices in certain conferences contained special kinds of texts, and the text of a notice could contain commands so that when someone requested a notice, it was created by combining texts from other notices. Thus the text stored for the notice "monthly y report" might be the same all the year, but the "monthly report." output to a user would be different since different text segments would be combined at different times.

Computers for management use in the future may have some kind of extension of teleconferencing, information retrieval and data base systems as their basis in the same way as file handling systems are the basis of today's computer. The basis of a teleconferencing system are the conferences or collections of notices. But many of the collections of notices in the extended system would not naturally fit under the heading "conference". Thus I suggest instead the more general purpose word "activity".

The basis of such a system would be a number of activities. Each activity would consist of a number of notices. Example of activities:

• level zero element - my markers stripped - This is the recommended style.
• Conference is of course one kind of activity, that is a group of people reading and adding to a common message pool.
• Bulletin is an activity in which only a limited number of people can write, but a larger group of people can read, just like an ordinary published journal or bulletin.
• Personal mail is a special kind of activity, containing letters to and from each person using the system. If someone wants to allow someone else to help handling his/her mail, that other person can be made a member of this personal mail activity.
• Every user of the system can also have other special areas for storing text segments. These areas can be called personal workspaces.
• A manuscript is one special case of activity, where each notice is a section of the text in the manuscript. If several people are working together on the text of a manuscript, they may all be members of that activity.
• If there is a need to collect information from a number of people, this can be set up as an inquiry activity - that is an activity in which all the participants are asked to enter a message with the answer to one or several specific questions.
• A vote is a more formal variant of an inquiry. Even if people are asked to answer "yes" or "no", they can still be allowed to follow this "yes" or "no" with an explanation or modification to their vote, since the vote is stored as a special kind of notice, so that all the facilities for handling notice texts can be made available without extra programming.
• There can be more specialized activities for special matters in an organization. For example, one activity may contain travel expense accounts as entered by the travelers. A special computer program may be written to help Inputting such accounts, but the text format of the notices would allow the inputter to add explanations etc. where needed. Another program could take notices from the activity for unchecked travel expense accounts, check them and then copy them to the activity for checked travel expense accounts. Still another program could take notices from this second area and create payment notices in a third activity for payment notices.

• Teleconferencing, Information Retrieval Systems and Data Base Systems may be merged into one system if the notices in some activities are given a structure of fields with values. However, in many cases is would be advantageous to allow the writer to add extra natural language text comments in addition to the given fields. A program in such a system might process the contents of certain fields, e.g. compute the sums of certain fields in certain notices in the same way as is done when using data base systems.
• Another natural extension is to allow the notices in certain activities to be computer programs. To look at such a notice would be equal to executing the computer program stored in that notice.

4. Structure of a Teleconference-Based Management Information System

For example, each person in the system would be a notice in one or more activities "list of persons using the system". Each person would also be connected to a personal activity of letters to and from that person. Finally, a person would also have the right to read and/or write in other activities, sometimes only through the use of a special computer program in cases where some control is necessary.

Since a computer program can also write in certain activities, read in certain activities and receive messages, it could also both be regarded as a notice (in a conference of executable programs) and be connected to an activity (of messages to and from that program).

This structure is very suitable to systems based on computer networks, where messages can be sent, stored and answered. Thus, if the receiving computer is down, the message is stored in an appropriate activity until it can be transferred, and the answer is returned when the receiving computer is' up again.

Basic to the system would be the handling of activities, activity membership and the editing of text notices. Basic would also be ways of making notices into data base records by adding certain defined fields to them and allowing owing retrieval based on these fields. Basic programs for inputting data into such record-like notices would also be available, easily modifiable to special tasks.

The adjustment of such a system to a new task or a modification for special handling in a special case may in many cases be as simple as opening a new activity or using a text editor to enter or modify a notice in an activity.

The activity concept is easy to understand for the users of the system, and thus their participation in the development of new applications will be made easier - a common problem with user participation in system development is the difficulty of explaining to a user group how a system will work.

This way of designing a computer system may seem very different from the typical computer systems of today. But the advantage of flexibility and ease of adjustment to new tasks, and the natural way in which such systems would be similar to the shuffling of paper in a typical office, may mean that this is how many of the computer systems of tomorrow will look.

5. Acknowledgements

The idea of extending teleconference systems to general purpose data management systems comes of course from Murray Turoff, and many other ideas in this paper are also based on personal communication with him. Murray Turoff designed the first such system (see Renner 1973).

The idea of extending the conference concept to a more general purpose activity concept comes both from Murray Turoff and from Torgny Tholerus and from discussions with a number of people in a teleconference system used by my organization.

The idea of allowing notices to be executable programs also comes (probably independently) from both Murray Turoff and Torgny Tholerus.

5. References