Cooperative service management over enterprise networks: a case study in health care environments

Various technologies including networked client-server systems and telemedicine have generated intense interest among health care professionals in the hope that they can contribute to lower costs and improved health care. Health care organisations are now moving towards new service concepts, such as managed care and integrated delivery systems to provide quality health care in a cost-controlled environment. Service management is concerned with the planning, monitoring, and controlling of activities and resources within an enterprise to provide a level of service that is acceptable to end users and at a cost that is acceptable to the organisation. Computer supported cooperative work (CSCW) provides an understanding of human-centered development methodologies for networked enterprise computing. Therefore, it may be useful to examine the role of CSCW techniques to improve human cooperation for the successful management of health care services. This is known as "cooperative service management". This paper presents a CSCW based methodology for the development of cooperative service management solutions. It starts with a discussion of the methodology of the study. This is followed by the application of this methodology to study the help-desk based service management processes in a large hospital environment.