The Foundations and Pragmatics of Cognitive Work Analysis: A Systematic Approach to Design of Large-Scale Information Systems.
Cognitive Work Analysis is notoriously difficult for those who encounter it for the first time. It is a complicated and expansive system of analysis, differing in scope and strategy from much of what currently goes on in cognitive engineering. There is little to do about this; the system is what it is for good reasons. Given that state of affairs, we need cohesive, pedagogical accounts of this analytic framework to guide beginners through their early efforts.
Cognitive work analysis remains difficult to understand and to execute because we have not made the foundational theory behind it sufficiently explicit and also because we have not been sufficiently tutorial in our approach to explaining it. In believing that these two things go together, I outline the theoretical basis for this framework of analysis and then offer a tutorial example that shows how the concepts can be applied.
Although I offer some refinements of Cognitive Work Analysis, there is nothing fundamentally new in this book. Rather, this is an effort to assemble the important ideas of Cognitive Work Analysis into a treatment that encourages solid understanding via a process of establishing specific concepts as knowledge anchors and then expanding that knowledge into a comprehensive system.
