The following design principles guide the UAM project in developing work support systems based on explicit representions of activities:
- Organize work around activities, not around tools and artifacts.
Activity representations give pointers to everything needed to carry out the activities - people, resources, events, communications, and related activities. Activity representations are the "semantic glue" that integrates information around carrying out and reflecting on activities. The activity representation integrate resources from other systems - documents in a library, messages in email, instances from a CRM system, tasks in workflow systems, etc. - Guide, support, and coordinate work, but not overly constrain it.
Shared activity representations are guides to action. They describe the components and structure of the work, but they do not prescribe a control structure. People - the "intelligent interpreters - are in control." They determine when and if subactivities are worked on and whether they should be modified to adapt to the current situation. - Provide a single place for people to manage the whole range of their activities.
Shared activity representations are not only created by oneself, but also by different systems and by other people. Having one place to collect and organize all one’s activities provides a higher-level view for reflection: planning, prioritizing, and negotiation. - Let people capture, reuse, and evolve best practices as Activity Patterns.
Activity Patterns can be created by "logic" or by "cleaning up" actual instances of activities that have been successfully carried out. Activity Patterns can be evolved by analyzing the variations of activityinstances created from the Activity Patterns. - Integrate informal business activities and workflow-driven business processes.
Activities can connect the informal practices of communicating and collaboratingwith the more formal business processes driven by workflow systems. This connection provides a business context to support the informal work and makes it easier to search and retrieve informally-created information.
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