Report of the Workshop on Collaboration Engineering

2005

By collaborating people can accomplish more than they could as separate individuals. Yet, achieving effective team collaboration remains a challenge. Organizations struggle to make collaboration work. They often resort to implementing technologies, while experiences show that technology alone seldom is the answer. Collaboration processes need to be explicitly designed structured and managed to maximize the focus of purposeful effort. This is at the heart of a new area of research: Collaboration Engineering -designing recurring collaboration processes that can be transferred to groups that can be selfsustaining in these processes using collaboration techniques and technology. Through a number of action research studies with a host of organizations we developed a Collaboration Engineering design approach. This paper presents and illustrates this approach in terms of its way of thinking, working, modeling and controlling. Finally, an agenda for future research is defined.

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.

Abstract Facilitation is increasingly used to support collaboration processes. An important task of the facilitator is to prepare a collaboration process by choosing an appropriate sequence of facilitation techniques. At present little is known on how experienced facilitators make this choice. In this paper we collect data on the choice of facilitation techniques, using a questionnaire, a group session, and a series of interviews with experienced facilitators. Qualitative analysis of the results revealed a generic set of choice criteria.

The collaboration does not always require an horizontal political structure. It is often thought that the collaboration is done by everyone in equal measure. This is not necessarily true.

2012

We live in ‘interesting times’: the world wide web is undermining traditional work practices while opening up entirely new approaches to research and its communication. Ubiquitous communication and improved access to data and knowledge repositories has an obvious impact on scientific progress. However, the ‘socialization’ of the web means that individuals can become members of a number of loosely coupled formal or informal groups. Members of these groups share the tools of knowledge acquisition: data, algorithms, information, synthesis and potentially more importantly experience. Inevitably the web has been the catalyst for the majority of these changes. For some the ability to interact dynamically with different individuals and groups in both a formal and informal capacity has led to the development of new approaches for the acquisition and sharing of scientific data, information and knowledge. This chapter will consider these issues in light of recent social, organisational and technological developments that impact upon collaboration and what can be transferred to the analysis of Airborne Laser Scanning for heritage applications.

2004

In the past decade, there has been a steady increase in the importance of collaboration to value creation in organizations, which has given rise to a new research field. Collaboration Engineering aims to model, design, and deploy repeatable collaboration processes to be executed by practitioners themsleves of high-value recurring collaborative tasks. Thus the aim of collaboration engineering is to create ready made designs for group processes. A key concept in Collaboration Engineering is a thinkLet – a codified facilitation intervention in a group process to create a desired pattern of collaboration. This paper presents an analysis of the thinkLet concept and possible thinkLet classification schemes to support collaboration engineers in effectively designing collaboration processes.

Journal of Computer Applications in Technology, 2006

Under the right circumstances, teams that use professional facilitators and Group Support Systems (GSS) experience significant gains in productivity and quality of work life. However, because of the expense, facilitators are not available to many teams that could benefit from their interventions. The emerging field of Collaboration Engineering aims to formulate an approach for designing high-value recurring collaboration processes that capture the best practices of master facilitators and packaging the processes in a fashion that can be transferred to practitioners to execute for themselves without the ongoing intervention of professional facilitators. Towards that end, Collaboration Engineering researchers have developed thinkLets, an Alexandrian design pattern language. A thinkLet is a named, packaged facilitation technique, captured as a pattern that collaboration engineers can incorporate into process designs. These patterns can be instantiated at design time in such a way that a practitioner can use them to recreate a predictable pattern of collaboration. This paper articulates the details of thinkLet design patterns and explains the utility that facilitators, collaboration engineers, researchers and practitioners are deriving from thinkLets in the field. It examines the parallels and differences among the goals and structures of the thinkLets pattern language, Alexander's architectural patterns and software design patterns. She is an experienced facilitator of ThinkLets-based Group Support Systems workshop, having worked with numerous public and private organisations. Her research focuses on the quality of thinkLet-based collaboration process design for complex tasks. She developed the first example of Computer Supported Collaboration Engineering (CSCE) technology -an integrated support suite to assist collaboration engineers in process design. Her research has been presented at the Hawaiian International Conference on System Sciences and CRIWG.

2008

Abstract Collaboration is often an afterthought to a project or development. In this paper we describe and analyze our experiences in developing collaborative technologies, most often involving the sharing of visual information. We have often developed these in a context that required us to retrofit existing analysis applications with collaboration capabilities. This approach, though fruitful, is time-consuming, expensive, and often difficult to re-apply elsewhere-it is just hard to change an existing application.

Proceedings of the 39th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS'06), 2006

Use of effective and efficient collaboration is important for organizations to survive and thrive in today's competitive world. This paper presents quality constructs that can be used to evaluate the success of a collaboration process. Two types of collaboration processes are identified: 1) processes that are designed and executed by the same facilitator who designed them, and 2) processes that are designed by a collaboration engineer and executed many times by practitioners. Accordingly, the quality constructs have been divided in two categories. Constructs within the first category apply to both types of collaboration processes. This category includes constructs such as process effectiveness and efficiency, results quantity, results quality, satisfaction, and usability. The second category contains constructs that are useful from the perspective of the collaboration engineering approach: repeatable collaboration processes executed by practitioners. The three constructs important for this perspective are reusability, predictability, and transferability.

2006

Organizations increasingly use collaborative teams in order to create value for their stakeholders. This trend has given rise to a new research field: Collaboration Engineering. The goal of Collaboration Engineering is to design and deploy processes for high-value recurring collaborative tasks, and to design these processes such that practitioners can execute them successfully without the intervention of professional facilitators.

2020

Journal of Management Information Systems, 2013

He researches the cognitive foundations of collaboration and uses his findings to design new collaborative work practices and technologies. He is cofounder of the collaboration engineering field and coinventor of the thinkLets design pattern language for collaborative work processes. He has made exploratory, theoretical, experimental, and technological contributions to the areas of team productivity, technology-supported learning, ideation, creativity, consensus, satisfaction, willingness to change, and technology transition. He has designed collaboration systems and collaborative workspaces for industry, academia, government, and the military. He cochairs the Collaboration Systems and Technology track for the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. He lectures worldwide on collaboration theory and practice, and on the philosophy of science.

2019

This study looked at how individuals choose whom to work with when a task necessitates collaboration. Prior research done on collaborative environments as well as outcomes of collaboration suggests that who you collaborate with will depend on two primary factors: the individuals from which you have to choose and the circumstances surrounding the task. In the proposed study, these factors will be explored. This thesis identified the lack of literature on informal collaboration, addressing the gap in the literature regarding processes that individuals use when choosing collaborators. This research focused on the influencing factors of similarity and expertise involved in this decision processes. Furthermore, this study aimed to understand how individuals choose collaborators under differing conditions of difficulty, novelty, and interdependence necessitated by the task.

IEEE Internet Computing, 2000

Theories of collaboration exist at the interfirm and intergroup level, but not the intragroup or team level. Team interactions are often framed in terms of leadership and followership, a categorization which may, or may not, accurately reflect the dynamics of intragroup interactions. To create a grounded theory of collaboration, the Farmer’s Exercise was given to groups of students, their interactions were recorded and post-exercise interviews of participants and observers were done. From a detailed analysis of the recordings and interviews a grounded theory of collaboration was developed. Two broad categories of collaborative behavior formed the frame of the theory that we call Collaborative Theory (CT). The first category, Individual First, is composed of three causal themes: turn-taking, observing or doing, and status seeking. The second category, Team First, also has three causal themes: influencing others, organizing work, and building group cohesion. This second theme can be identified with managerial and leadership action but we argue that it need not. Although this is a preliminary study subject to further validation and testing, CT already identifies collaborative behaviors that shed new light on intragroup interactions.