Modeling communications aspects in office systems

An approach to modeling office organization and support technology in the framework of office support systems development is presented. The main contributions of the approach are models and languages to treat, in an integrated way, both the organization and its supporting technology. Specifically, the work and the personnel organization perspectives are linked to each other in the office work description. This is very important in analysis and design since it shows how the information processing technology should cross the communication support technology within the actual work execution. This cross cannot be a sum of the two (as it is now in most applications), but has to be an integration which avoids on the one hand procedures that are self-contained and on the other that people communicate in an unstructured way.<>