Distributed planning and monitoring in a dynamic environment: trade-offs of information access and privacy

Distributed planning and monitoring relies on wide, lateral information access that may promote anticipatory behaviour, opportunistic planning and redundant checking and monitoring. The reliability of the resulting system performance is thus enhanced. However, information access control is often critical given the wide adoption of information technology. After presenting findings of several field studies related to the strategies used by distributed team members in managing information access control, we highlight how inefficiencies in information flows are exploited to achieve information access control. We then present implementation strategies for a video-based coordination platform to resolve the trade-off between information access and privacy. In particular, a role-based assignment of information access, along with mechanisms of controlling levels of information access was used to balance the potential loss of privacy with the gain in coordination efficiency.