Exploring the transformations of interaction in mobile work contexts

Abstract

The usage of work related mobile services is often very complex, affected by a multitude of intertwined factors including the technological, environmental and human. Un-derstanding how to model the complexity of mobile work and particularly its mobile interaction would be beneficial in ensuring the success of mobile services in userâ??s long-term, goal-oriented usage. Previous attempts to evaluate success factors in mobile business services have concen-trated on rigid analytical tools modeling users and tasks and mainly focusing on understanding routine work tasks and standard information exchange between different users. However, this covers only a narrow field of mobile work and it is argued here that existing analytical tools do not suffi-ciently consider factors arising from different levels of mo-bility and the temporariness and non-routine tasks of mo-bile work. In this paper we present a process oriented ap-proach, 'MoBiS Map, derived from Actor-Network theory, to describe the complex network of interactions and the transformation of interactions. We argue that our approach is a useful analytical tool when the focus is on examining the transformation of interactions that takes place when mobile work services are implemented. This is a methodological paper aiming to better understand the transformation of mobile interactions, and therefore to support development of mobile business services.