A MODEL FOR ORGANISATIONAL INTEGRATION OF MEETING OUTCOMES Carlos J. Costa Departamento de Ciências e Tecnologias de Informação, ISCTE, Lisboa E-mail: carlos.costa@iscte.pt Pedro A. Antunes Informatics Department, Sciences Faculty of the University of Lisboa E-mail: paa@di.fc.ul.pt J. Ferreira Dias Departamento de Ciências de Gestão, ISCTE, Lisboa E-mail: ferreira.dias@iscte.pt ABSTRACT Organizations convert meeting outcomes into digital documents for many obvious reasons. This paper discusses one such reason: simplifying the integration of meeting outcomes in the organizational process. Unfortunately, the level of integration afforded by digitalized meeting outcomes is still very weak, serving more official or legal purposes rather than catalysts for action. In order to tackle this problem, we propose an information system and a framework. The framework is necessary to analyse how does a community of users produce and disseminate meeting outcomes, and also to tailor the information system to the community. This framework is composed of three levels of detail: context level, genre level and implementation level. The context level clarifies and models the general problem. The genre level designs a solution, using the concept of communication genres. Finally, the implementation level transforms communication genres in a software system. This paper illustrates the application of the framework to a specific organisation. The proposed framework contributes to develop information systems where organizational integration of different social systems is required. INTRODUCTION Many different problems with meeting processes are largely discussed in the literature, e.g. poor planning, conflict, hidden agendas or groupthink (e.g. Buttler, 1996, Nunamaker et. al., 1997). Considering the meeting life cycle (Bostrom et al., 1993, Clawson et al., 1995), the focus of discussion is typically placed in the pre-meeting preparation and in-meeting management. Regarding the post-meeting phase, emphasis is generally placed in the subject of meeting evaluation. But the post-meeting phase also raises other interesting problems. In particular, there is the need to integrate meeting outcomes with other organizational systems (Antunes and Guimarães, 1997). In fact, the outcomes produced by a meeting must flow to other organisational processes, in order to induce the production of goods and services, increase productivity or just motivate people. From the beginning of the 1980’s, Electronic Meeting Systems have been viewed as the Holy Grail to improve meeting processes (Fjermestad and Hiltz, 1999). The role of EMS can be broadly defined as supporting work by enhancing group cognition. As such, EMS have tried to enhance communication among groups members, provide shared information bases, coordinate individual tasks to assure a coherent result, guide and stimulate collaboration, all this while overcoming limitations of distance, time and memory. We show later in the paper that EMS support has somewhat neglected the post-meeting phase. Thus, we do not see current EMS making any significant change in the approach traditionally used to preserve and communicate formally meeting outcomes. The traditional approach uses a documentum, i.e. official words, which may assume typical forms such as, for instance, meeting reports, transcripts and memoranda. Organizations are nowadays producing meeting outcomes in the digital format, many of them available on the World Wide Web, that simply mimic their paper versions. Unfortunately, the level of