This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 860721

Please visit the official project website here

Project 10: Tasks in the Enterprise

Host Organisation: Management School, University of Sheffield, UK (in the Operations Research and Decision Sciences Division)

The position in this project is no longer available.

Information needs are assumed to start with the user, but needs are driven by work tasks and the context from which those tasks emerge. In general we treat tasks as simple one-dimensional homogeneous requests. But a task can be multi-faceted and multi-dimensional such that information is consumed at multiple layers and in a particular sequence before that task can be completed. Think of producing a thesis or doing a systematic review as examples. At present, we have many classification schemes for tasks, but few that can be readily deployed in developing new systems that facilitate and support task completion in knowledge work environments. Overall, the objectives of this project are:

  • To understand and identify the types of tasks that knowledge workers do in the consumption of information (from creation to use);
  • To discriminate how/whether tasks differ by type of work environment and/or domain;
  • To develop a generic and domain-specific taxonomy of tasks and a task model that has practical as well as theoretical applicability.

The research will use three workplace scenarios (e.g., legal, patent and health) to develop the task model that discriminates among tasks in the enterprise.