Evaluation of an Office Analysis Methodology

Abstract

We have developed a model of the office that describes semi-structured office work. This model underlies an office analysis methodology and an office-specification language. An evaluation of the usefulness and practicality of the model, the specification language, and the methodology has dhown that the model is clearly a useful approach to understanding offices, the specification language is interesting but not as useful in practice as we had hoped, and the methodology is useful but could be improved. We have developed a new methodology that addresses the issue of diagnosis as well as description. This new methodology is still being evaluated, but early results show that it is as useful for training new analysts as the old methodology.