SAMBA - agent-supported visual interactive control for distributed team building and empowerment

Using computers to co-ordinate work is meant to improve the efficiency of distribution teams, but has the potential to decrease effectiveness by fragmenting work into seemingly unrelated tasks. It can also replace team-based communication activities such as workload negotiation, which will make workers feel isolated and not in control of their work. If the workforce is demotivated, customer service quality and employee job satisfaction will suffer. This paper shows how workload negotiation and informal team-building activities can be integrated with an operational support system for workload control and job scheduling. A proof-of-concept demonstrator, called SAMBA, has been built. The demonstrator uses agent-based negotiation strategies and allows workers and team managers to control the system in a visual interactive fashion. This type of system could be used to enable workers to set work preferences, trade jobs, share knowledge as well as build informal alliances to help each other with their work. Managers will be able to review and control local business rules and scheduling preferences. The approach presented in SAMBA can be generalised to support team-based collaboration in environments where team members have different perspectives on the collaboration process and artefact, e.g. call centre staff could control call routeing preferences, on-job training and so on.