Collaborative Design of Organizational Systems

2004

The design and deployment of collaboration technology has, until lately been more of an art than a science, but it has produced some solid successes. Commercial groupware products now support millions of collaborations per year. Under certain circumstances teams that use Group Support Systems perform far better than groups that do not. However, as impressive as the achievements are in this field, we can do better.

Journal of The Ais, 2009

Collaboration is a critical phenomenon in organizational life. Collaboration is necessary yet many organizations struggle to make it work. The field of IS has devoted much effort to understanding how technologies can improve the productivity of collaborative work. Over the past decade, the field of Collaboration Engineering has emerged as a focal point for research on designing and deploying collaboration processes that are recurring in nature and that are executed by practitioners in organizations rather than collaboration professionals. In Collaboration Engineering, researchers do not study a collaboration technology in isolation. Rather, they study collaborative work practices that can be supported on different technological platforms. In this editorial, we discuss the field of Collaboration Engineering in terms of its foundations, its approach to designing and deploying collaboration processes, and its modeling techniques. We conclude with a Collaboration Engineering research agenda for the coming decade.

2004

ROBERT O. BRIGGS is Research Coordinator at the Center for the Management of Information at the University of Arizona and Associate Professor of Collaboration Engineering at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. He is also Director of Research and Development for GroupSystems. com.

Information Systems Development, 2002

" Purpose, " understood as a widely-shared commitment to the organization's fundamental raison d'être, can be a powerful driver of organizational performance by providing both motivation and direction to members' efforts. But different contexts call for different types of purpose, and different types of purpose require different organizational forms to support them. This paper aims to characterize the organizational form that can support the distinctively collaborative type of purpose that is needed in the context of large, complex, business enterprises facing dynamic environments. Building on the work of Selznick and Weber, we argue that purpose in such contexts requires a new organizational form that we call (to parallel the type of purpose it supports) collaborative. The collaborative organizational form is based on Weber's value-rational type of action, and overcomes the scale limitations of the collegial form of organization that is conventionally associated with value-rational action. We identify four organizational principles that characterize this collaborative form, and illustrate them with examples drawn from one healthcare organization, Kaiser Permanente.

1999

The paper presents a framework which is intended to embrace all forms of collaborative work. The framework comprises four major elements: The collaboration purposes at the outset; The features in place before collaboration begins; The features which emerge during collaboration and; The outcomes

International Journal of …, 2009

Recent years we can hear a lot about cooperative decision-making, group or collaborative decision-making. These types of decisions are the consequences of developed working conditions: geographical dispersion, team working, and concurrent ...

This paper introduces a set of information technology variables which can be used in designing organizations, We first look at traditional design variables and then present a series of options enabled by modern information technology. We use these IT design variables to describe four prototypical organizationsn which are beginning to appear in the workplace: virtual, negotiated, traditional and vertically integrated. It is argued that an organization designer must also consider how structure and technology influence job tasks and peopld in order to be successful. The paper discusses potential implementation difficulties, particularly in motivating traditional organizations to take advantage of IT design variables. The paper concludes that the design of information technology and the design of organizations is largely becoming the same task.

1995

Cooperative information systems (CIS) aim at continued cooperativity between user groups through componentized networks of information systems. Change management is therefore a definitional part of CIS. We advocate a conceptual modeling strategy for addressing this task, and illustrate it with experiences gained in WibQuS, a project aimed at CIS support for Total Quality Management in manufacturing organizations. These experiences emphasize the role of meta models in focusing the change process. Specific meta models and supporting environments are presented for : cooperative business process modeling in distributed organizations; simulation analysis of shortterm and long-term effects of information flow designs; forward and reverse mappings between a distributed (relational) system interoperability layer and the information flow model. Models are not just analyzed at change time, but also support planned and unplanned information flows at runtime. 1 Cooperative Information Systems and the WibQuS Project Information systems have traditionally been characterized as hardware/software/people systems that maintain data about a specific subject domain for one or more users, sometimes within a formal organization. The database community has dedicated much work to subject domain modeling (e.g. relational, object-oriented and semantic data models) and efficient systems implementation (e.g. query processing, concurrency control, and recovery). Relatively less attention has been paid to the usage side, both at the system level of user interface research and at the design level of modeling usage by individuals, teams, and formal organizations. Recently, this has begun to change due to massive complaints by user organizations that their central needs are not being adequately addressed by information technology. One of the responses raising to this challenge is the vision of cooperative information systems (CIS [3, 10, 5]) which see information systems as a communications medium among user groups in and across organizations. On one hand, this brings groupware and organizational research into the information systems fields. On the formal organization system integration 1 2 3 user group 1 user group 2 user group n system component 1

This research aims at providing an approach for designing business processes for adequate collaborative support. This approach comprises the explicit representation of collaboration practices in business process. It is argued that, by explicitly considering collaboration in process models, collaboration can be discussed within the organization; moreover requirements for collaborative support can be further identified. This paper proposes a process maturity model (CollabMM) which organizes collaboration practices and a method which provides a progressive step for introducing those practices into business process models.