INTERACT 2003 - Bringing the Bits together
Tutorial 4
#4 - Collaboration Technology in Teams, Organizations, and Communities
Jonathan Grudin
Microsoft Research, Redmond, Washington, USA
jgrudin@microsoft.com
Steven Poltrock
The Boeing Company, Seattle, Washington, USA
steven.poltrock@boeing.com
Fifteen years ago almost all experience with collaboration technology was confined to research laboratories and reported at conferences, notably the then-new Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) series. The situation has changed, especially in the past few years.
This full-day tutorial provides a framework for attendees who have some experience as designers, developers, evaluators, marketers, buyers, and users of these technologies. It relies primarily on lectures and videos to survey the topic, and includes exercises to allow participants to share experiences. We identify key challenges and factors responsible for successes and failures. We survey the current state of research and application, and identify specific trends and general issues that
are central to design and use.
Most INTERACT attendees are generally aware of CSCW research and collaboration technology, although the pace of change in the area has accelerated, making it difficult to keep up. Fundamental contributions come from many areas. We briefly identify the diverse backgrounds of technologists, behavioral and social scientists,
customers, and users from a wide range of organizational contexts. CSCW may be more usefully viewed as a forum for communication and exchange of ideas rather than as a technical field.
Successfully overcoming technical hurdles has not guaranteed success. We briefly review behavioral, social, and organizational phenomena that undermine technically impressive applications. Some of these hinder the development of useful and usable
software, some prevent the acquisition of the systems, and many obstruct successful use. Methods to address the challenges have been refined as our understanding of these problems has matured. Again, diverse disciplines have contributed, from specialists in organizational behavior to computer scientists to anthropologists. We briefly review several promising approaches to improving the design and introduction of collaboration technologies, identifying strengths and weaknesses.
We present an overview of the state of the art in collaboration technology research and applications. his survey is structured around collaboration activities, which in turn are structured by the human organizational entities such as teams, projects,
companies, and communities. In this tutorial we focus on three key organizational structures: Teams or groups, organizations, and communities. Each of these has different collaboration requirements that are met by different kinds of technologies.
Participants will consider the requirements of these structures in two of the group exercises.
Although we cannot predict what technologies will succeed or how their use will evolve, we present several case studies of success and failure and point to trends that have emerged over the past decade. In addition, at a broader level, we can identify changes that are likely to raise fundamental questions for us as users as well as developers of these technologies.