User Support: From Surface to Structure

It is not unusual that a user gets lost when using a computer system. Supporting users in difficult situations is therefore very important independently of whether they are working with personal applications or with an integrated information system. User support can be approached in many ways. One possible way is to develop help systems for assisting the users. I claim, however, that most current approaches to help systems tend to focus on plain data and information processing issues leaving the organizational context in which the use takes place without attention. It is asserted in this paper that it is possible to reflect the context in a help system. An approach to representing the context in connection with a help system is made by introducing the idea of a context database. A context database is parallel to the actual database and it contains information about task flows, task-connected information objects, and the like. (The information objects themselves are stored in the actual database). In order to be able to realize a help system which takes the organizational context in account the analysis of work and information system has to focus on information processing tasks, information objects, and other entities which are needed for the context database. A proposal for how to perform such analysis enterprises is presented. The proposal introduces five groups of objects of analysis: tasks, organization of work, job design, computer applications, and information media