EUC Ranges

EUC RangesEUC might work by one type of approach that attempts to integrate the human interface ergonomically into a user centered design system throughout its life cycle. In this sense, EUC's goal is to allow unskilled staff to use expensive and highly skilled knowledge in their jobs, by putting the knowledge and expertise into the computer and teaching the end user how to access it. At the same time, this approach is used when highly critical tasks are supported by computational systems (commercial flight, nuclear plant, and the like).

Another approach to EUC allows end users (SMEs, domain experts) to control and even perform software engineering and development. In this case, it can be argued that this type of approach results mainly from deficiencies in computing that could be overcome with better tools and environments. But, high-end roles for the computer in non-trivial domains necessitate (at least, for now) a more full interchange (bandwidth for conversation) that is situational and subject to near exhaustive scrutiny (there are limits influencing how far we can go (bringing up, the necessity for a behavioral (also, see black box below) framework)). Such cannot be filled by a pre-defined system in today's world. In a sense, the computer needs to have the same credentials as does a cohort (scientific method of peer review) in the discipline. This type of computing falls on the more 'open' side of the fence where scientific knowledge is not wrapped within the cloak of IP.

In the first type of approach of EUC described above, it appears easier to teach factory workers, for example, how to read dials, push buttons, pull levers, and log results than to teach them the manufacturing process and mathematical models. The current computing trend is to simulate a console with similar dials, sliders, levers, and switches, which the end user is taught to use. To further reduce end user training, computer consoles all contain components which are shaped, labeled, coloured, and function similarly. EUC developers assume that once the end user knows what and how a particular lever works, they will quickly identify it when it appears in a new console. This means that once staff learns one console, they will be able to operate all consoles. Admittedly each console will have new components, but training is limited to those, not the whole console. This approach requires more than just Pavlovian responses as the console content will have meaning that is of use and power to the particular computing domain. That is, there may be training that reduces the time between sensor reading and action (such as the situation for a pilot of a commercial plane) however, the meaning behind the reading will include other sensor settings as well as whole context that may be fairly involved.

Computing of this type can be labelled black box where trust will be an essential part, behavioral analysis is the name of the game (see Duck test), and there is a disparate (and very, very wide) gap between the domain and the computer-support ontologies.

In the other type of EUC described above, it has been argued that a (teaching programming and computing concepts to a domain expert (say, one of the sciences or engineering disciplines) and letting the expert develop rules (this type of action can be subsumed under the topic of business rules)) is easier than b (teaching the intricacies of a complex discipline to a computer worker). b is the normal approach of the IT-driven situation. a has been the reality since day one of computing in many disciplines. One may further argue that resolving issues of a and b is not unlike the interplay between distributed and centralized processing (which is an age-old concern in computing). In this sense of EUC, there may be computer scientists supporting decisions about architecture, process, and GUI. However, in many cases, the end user owns the software components. One thrust related to this sense of EUC is a focus on providing better languages to the user. ICAD was an example in the KBE context. Of late, this discipline has moved to a co-joint architecture that features advanced interactive domain visualization coupled with a complicated API accessed via VBA, C++, and the like. This type of co-jointness is an example of a domain tool augmented with non-trivial extensibility.