Collaborative working environment

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A collaborative working environment (CWE) supports people, such as e-professionals, in their individual and cooperative work. Research in CWE involves focusing on organizational, technical, and social issues.

Contents

Background

Working practices in a collaborative working environment evolved from the traditional or geographical co-location paradigm. In a CWE, professionals work together regardless of their geographical location. In this context, e-professionals use a collaborative working environment to provide and share information [1] and exchange views in order to reach a common understanding. Such practices enable an effective and efficient collaboration among different proficiencies.

Description

The following applications or services are considered elements of a CWE:

Overview

The concept of CWE is derived from the idea of virtual work-spaces, [2] [3] and is related to the concept of remote work. It extends the traditional concept of the professional to include any type of knowledge worker who intensively uses information and communications technology (ICT) environments and tools [4] in their working practices. Typically, a group of e-professionals conduct their collaborative work through the use of collaborative working environments (CWE). [5]

CWE refers to online collaboration (such as virtual teams, [6] mass collaboration, [7] and massively distributed collaboration); [8] online communities of practice (such as the open source community); and open innovation principles.

Collaborative work systems

A collaborative working system (CWS) is an organizational unit that emerges any time when collaboration takes place, whether it is formal or informal, intentional or unintentional. [9] Collaborative work systems are those in which conscious efforts have been made to create strategies, policies, and structures in order to institutionalize values, behaviors, and practices that promote cooperation among different parties in an organization so as to achieve organizational goals. A high level of collaborative capacity will enable more effective work both at the local and daily levels, and at the global and long-term levels.

Beyerlein et al. define collaboration as the collective work of two or more individuals where the work is undertaken with a sense of shared purpose and direction, that is attentive and responsive to the environment. [9] In most organizations collaboration occurs naturally, but ill-defined work practices may create barriers to natural collaboration. The result is a loss of both decision-making quality and valuable time. Well-designed collaborative working systems not only overcome these natural barriers to communication, they also establish a cooperative work culture that becomes an integral part of the organization's structure. [10]

Differences from CWS

A collaborative work system is related to the collaborative working environment. The latter notion is more focused on technology and was issued from the concept of collaborative workspaces, [11] driven from research within the MOSAIC Project.

The concept of 'system' in 'collaborative work system' has a self-explanatory power that is different from 'environment'. The former pertains to an integrated whole, including collaborative work conceived as a purposeful activity, whilst the later stresses the surroundings of an object – the collaborative working practices.

A collaborative work system generally includes a collaborative working environment, but it should be conceived primarily as a set of human activities, intentional or not, that emerge every time a collaboration occurs. This enables focus on the work practices that are necessary for human collaboration and draws attention to important behavioral variables such as leadership and motivation that are not considered within the CWE definition.

CWS and collaborative software (or groupware)

Besides participatory leadership, another key element of a successful collaborative work system is the availability of group collaboration technology or groupware – hardware and software tools that help groups to access and share the information the professionals need to meet, train or teach.[ citation needed ]

However, a collaborative work system (CWS) does not necessarily require groupware support. A simple way to conceptualize the relation between the two concepts is to consider computer supported cooperative work (CSCW) as a whole consisting of a collaborative work system (CWS) supported by collaborative software or groupware.

On the other hand, a collaborative working environment which supports people in both their individual and cooperative work, whatever their geographical location transcends the notion of CSCW which deals specifically with cooperative work.

See also

Related Research Articles

Collaborative software or groupware is application software designed to help people working on a common task to attain their goals. One of the earliest definitions of groupware is "intentional group processes plus software to support them."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Workflow</span> Pattern of activity often with a result

A workflow is a generic term for orchestrated and repeatable patterns of activity, enabled by the systematic organization of resources into processes that transform materials, provide services, or process information. It can be depicted as a sequence of operations, the work of a person or group, the work of an organization of staff, or one or more simple or complex mechanisms.

Computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) is the study of how people utilize technology collaboratively, often towards a shared goal. CSCW addresses how computer systems can support collaborative activity and coordination. More specifically, the field of CSCW seeks to analyze and draw connections between currently understood human psychological and social behaviors and available collaborative tools, or groupware. Often the goal of CSCW is to help promote and utilize technology in a collaborative way, and help create new tools to succeed in that goal. These parallels allow CSCW research to inform future design patterns or assist in the development of entirely new tools.

Awareness in philosophy and psychology is a concept about knowing, perceiving and being cognizant of events. Another definition describes it as a state wherein a subject is aware of some information when that information is directly available to bring to bear in the direction of a wide range of behavioral actions. The concept is often synonymous to consciousness and is also understood as being consciousness itself.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Collaboration tool</span> Tool that helps people to collaborate

A collaboration tool helps people to collaborate. The purpose of a collaboration tool is to support a group of two or more individuals to accomplish a common goal or objective. Collaboration tools can be either of a non-technological nature such as paper, flipcharts, post-it notes or whiteboards. They can also include software tools and applications such as collaborative software.

Workspace is a term used in various branches of engineering and economic development.

A collaboratory, as defined by William Wulf in 1989, is a “center without walls, in which the nation’s researchers can perform their research without regard to physical location, interacting with colleagues, accessing instrumentation, sharing data and computational resources, [and] accessing information in digital libraries”.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wanda Orlikowski</span> American computer scientist

Wanda J. Orlikowski is a US-based organizational theorist and Information Systems researcher, and the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Information Technologies and Organization Studies at the MIT Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Computer-supported collaboration research focuses on technology that affects groups, organizations, communities and societies, e.g., voice mail and text chat. It grew from cooperative work study of supporting people's work activities and working relationships. As net technology increasingly supported a wide range of recreational and social activities, consumer markets expanded the user base, enabling more and more people to connect online to create what researchers have called a computer supported cooperative work, which includes "all contexts in which technology is used to mediate human activities such as communication, coordination, cooperation, competition, entertainment, games, art, and music".

An integrated collaboration environment (ICE) is an environment in which a virtual team does its work. Such environments allow companies to realize a number of competitive advantages by using their existing computers and network infrastructure for group and personal collaboration. These fully featured environments combine the best features of web-based conferencing and collaboration, desktop videoconferencing, and instant message into a single easy-to-use, intuitive environment. Recent developments have allowed companies include streaming in real-time and archived modes into their ICE.

Virtual collaboration is the method of collaboration between virtual team members that is carried out via technology-mediated communication. Virtual collaboration follows the same process as collaboration, but the parties involved in virtual collaboration do not physically interact and communicate exclusively through technological channels. Distributed teams use virtual collaboration to simulate the information transfer present in face-to-face meetings, communicating virtually through verbal, visual, written, and digital means.

E-professional or "eprofessional" or even "eProfessional" is a term used in Europe to describe a professional whose work relies on concepts of remote work: working at a distance using information technology and communications technology, as well as online collaboration (i.e. virtual team, mass collaboration, massively distributed collaboration, online community of practice such as the open source community, and open innovation principles.

SharedX is a set of extensions to the X Window System that was developed at HP in the mid to late 1980s. It enables X servers to "share" individual X windows or an entire desktop, thus allowing users at multiple workstations to use standard applications to collaborate in real-time in an X Window System network environment, similar to desktop sharing, but for only a single window.

Group information management (GIM) is an extension of personal information management (PIM) "as it functions in more public spheres" as a result of peoples' efforts to share and co-manage information, and has been a topic of study for researchers in PIM, human–computer interaction (HCI), and computer supported cooperative work (CSCW). People acquire, organize, maintain, retrieve and use information items to support individual needs, but these PIM activities are often embedded in group or organizational contexts and performed with sharing in mind. The act of sharing moves personal information into spheres of group activity and also creates tensions that shape what and how the information is shared. The practice and the study of GIM focuses on this interaction between personal information and group contexts.

Clarence "Skip" Ellis was an American computer scientist, and Emeritus Professor of Computer Science and Cognitive Science at the University of Colorado at Boulder. While at the CU-Boulder, he was the director of the Collaboration Technology Research Group and a member of the Institute of Cognitive Science. Ellis was the first Black Person to earn a Ph.D. in Computer Science (1969), and the first Black Person to be elected a Fellow of the ACM (1997). Ellis was a pioneer in Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) and Groupware. He and his team at Xerox PARC created OfficeTalk, one of the first groupware systems. Ellis also pioneered operational transformation, which is a set of techniques that enables real-time collaborative editing of documents.

Collaborative information seeking (CIS) is a field of research that involves studying situations, motivations, and methods for people working in collaborative groups for information seeking projects, as well as building systems for supporting such activities. Such projects often involve information searching or information retrieval (IR), information gathering, and information sharing. Beyond that, CIS can extend to collaborative information synthesis and collaborative sense-making.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Christian Heath</span>

Christian Heath is Professor of Work and Interaction at King's College London. He is known for his research in which he uses video to analyse social interaction in everyday settings in particular the workplace.

Distributed Collaboration is a way of collaboration wherein participants, regardless of their location, work together to reach a certain goal. This usually entails use of increasingly popular cyberinfrastructure, such as emails, instant messaging and document sharing platforms to reduce the limitations of the users trying to work together from remote locations by overcoming physical barriers of geolocation and also to some extent, depending on the application used, the effects of working together in person. For example, a caller software that can be used to bring all collaborators into a single call-in for easier dissemination of ideas.

Carl Gutwin is a Canadian computer scientist, professor and the director of the Human–computer interaction (HCI) Lab at the University of Saskatchewan. He is also a co-theme leader in the SurfNet research network and was a past holder of a Canada Research Chair in Next-Generation Groupware. Gutwin is known for his contributions in HCI ranging from the technical aspects of systems architectures, to the design and implementation of interaction techniques, and to social theory as applied to design. Gutwin was papers co-chair at CHI 2011 and was a conference co-chair of Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) 2010.

References

  1. ↑ Collaboration@Work Experts Group, May 1994, Towards a middleware for collaborative work environments Archived 2011-07-20 at the Wayback Machine
  2. ↑ Hans Schaffers, Torsten Brodt, Marc Pallot, Wolfgang Prinz (editors), March 2006, The Future Workspace Archived 2006-07-08 at the Wayback Machine
  3. ↑ Prinz, W.; Loh, H.; Pallot, M.; Schaffers, H.; Skarmeta, A.; Decker, S. ECOSPACE: Towards an Integrated Collaboration Space for e-Professionals Archived 2011-07-20 at the Wayback Machine
  4. ↑ M.A. Martinez Carreras, A.F. Gomez Skarmeta,2006, Towards Interoperability in Collaborative Environments
  5. ↑ Collaboration@Work Experts Group, February 2006, New Collaborative Working Environments 2020
  6. ↑ J. Lipnack and J. Stamps, 1997, "Virtual Teams: Reaching Across Space, Time, and Organizations with Technology", Wiley & Sons, ISBN   0-471-16553-0
  7. ↑ Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams, December 2006, Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything
  8. ↑ Kapor presentation Archived 2006-07-19 at the Wayback Machine , UC Berkeley, 2005-11-09.
  9. 1 2 Beyerlein, M; Freedman, S.; McGee, G.; Moran, L. (2002). Beyond Teams: Building the Collaborative Organization. The Collaborative Work Systems series. Wiley.
  10. ↑ Neilson, G; Martin, K.; Powers, E. (June 2008). "The secrets to successful strategy execution". Harvard Business Review86 (6): 60–70.
  11. ↑ Hans Schaffers, Torsten Brodt, Marc Pallot, Wolfgang Prinz (ed.) (March 2006). The Future Workspace: Perspectives on Mobile and Collaborative Working Archived 2012-02-25 at the Wayback Machine ; AMI Communities at The Netherlands: Telematica Instituut.; retrieved ?
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