Colloquia Archive
Collaboration Engineering: Overview and Experiences
February 13, 2009
AbstractThe performance of organizations can be limited by the capacity of each of their individual members to assimilate information, reason with it, and act upon it. Their members can accomplish more through collaboration, but effective team management is challenging. Through facilitation, collaborative efforts can be explicitly designed, structured, and managed to maximize results. Field research at IBM, Boeing, BP, EADS, and ING Group shows that applying groupware technologies to designed collaboration processes can result in more than a 50% improvement in productivity.
To reap these benefits, simply implementing technologies is not enough. What is needed is the exciting new field of collaboration engineering. Collaboration engineering entails the design of effective collaboration processes and technologies to support them. It enables recurring high-value collaborative tasks to be executed by practitioners without professional facilitators. Collaboration engineers design a collaboration process in such a way that it can be transferred to groups that can be self-sustaining in their use of collaboration techniques and technologies.
This presentation will provide a detailed overview of the collaboration engineering design approach. We will discuss current advances and outline promising avenues for future research.
Dr. Gert-Jan de Vreede is the Kayser Distinguished Professor at the Department of Information Systems and Quantitative Analysis at the University of Nebraska at Omaha where he is Director of the Center for Collaboration Science. He is also affiliated with the Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management of Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands from where he received his PhD. Currently his research focuses on field applications of e-collaboration technologies, the theoretical foundations of (e)-collaboration, the (un)successful implementation of e-collaboration technologies, the development of practitioner-driven collaborative processes, facilitation of group meetings, and the diffusion of collaboration technology. His articles have appeared in or have been accepted for various journals, including Journal of Management Information Systems, Communications of the ACM, Journal of the AIS, Communications of the AIS, DataBase, Small Group Research, Group Decision and Negotiation, Journal of Decision Systems, Journal of Creativity and Innovation Management, Journal of Global Information Technology Management, International Journal of Technology and Management, Journal of Information Technology Cases & Applications, African Journal of Finance and Management, Journal of Informatics Education and Research, Simulation & Gaming, Simulation, and Journal of Simulation Practice and Theory.
