Coordinating Human and Software Agents through Electronic Mail

Abstract

As organizations move towards decentralized control structures, software has evolved to facilitate this new style of working. Such software includes conferencing systems (Kerr et al. 1982, Flores et al. 1988), bulletin boards (Payes et al. 1987) and electronic mail collectively referred to as groupware (Greenberg 1991). Groupware offers many benefits:

• Distributed communication. Geographically distributed groups can communicate with one another, using a computer network. Cooperative tasks can thus be performed without group members having to meet, often a time and finance consuming operation.

• Asynchronous communication. Communication can be asynchronous, therefore individual group members can also be temporally distributed (which is often a side-effect of the geographic distribution of large organizations) (see Chapter 6).

• External computer facilities. Users can access additional computer facilities such as databases and information-gathering telemetry, so providing group members with more information on which to base their decisions.