Alanah J. Davis

Toward a Taxonomy of Groupware Technologies

The rise of the global marketplace and the advancing of the World Wide Web have given impetus to rapid advances in groupware. Hundreds of products now exist in the groupware marketplace, and more appear monthly. To ease the cognitive load of understanding what groupware technologies are, what capabilities they afford, and what can be done with them, we analyzed hundreds of computer-based collaboration-support products and distilled their attributes into two complementary schemas --- a classification scheme and a comparison scheme. The classification scheme provides a way to organize the many products from the rapidly expanding groupware arena into a small set of relatively stable categories. The comparison scheme provides the means to compare and differentiate collaboration technologies within and across categories. Taken together, the classification and comparison schemas provide a basis for making sense of collaboration technologies and their potential benefits to the collaboration community.

Overcoming the Digital Divide through Electronic Commerce: Harnessing opportunities in IT for Development

The disparities in access to and use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) comprise a divide between those who can and cannot reap the benefits of the information superhighway. Electronic commerce appears to enable this divide to be overcome. This paper provides insight into the ways in which development is brought about through ICTs. Following an analysis of the key factors effecting development through e-commerce, the contribution of this paper is in a framework that describes the relationship between the tools and benefits of e-commerce and its effect on development

Real-World Opportunities for Virtual- World Project Management

Virtual worlds provide technology capabilities that could transform education, communication and collaboration, and project management.

Collaboration Engineering For Incident Response Planning: Process Development and Validation

Many organizations have plans for incident response strategies. Despite incident response planning (IRP) being an essential ingredient in conjuring security planning procedures in organizations, extensive literature reviews have revealed that there are no collaborative processes in place for such a crucial activity. This study proposes a design for a facilitated incident response planning process using technology such as GSS. Three sessions were conducted and an analysis of the sessions revealed that the facilitated IRP process design held up strongly in terms of efficiency, goal attainment, and session participant satisfaction. Future research implications entail devising an all-encompassing integrative general approach that would be applicable to any form of corporate security development planning process

Does Mutual Knowledge Affect Virtual Team Performance? Theoretical Analysis and Anecdotal Evidence

This paper describes the concept of mutual knowledge and its potential impact on virtual team performance. Based on an analysis of extant literature, we argue that there is a gap in our understanding of what is known about mutual knowledge as it impacts team dynamics and virtual team performance. Supporting literature, anecdotes, and case studies are used to discuss the importance of mutual knowledge for virtual team performance and the research issues that need to be addressed in the future.

Understanding Methodological Differences to Study Convergence in Group Support System Sessions

While previous research has studied the process of group divergence extensively, little studies have been published regarding the process of group convergence. Therefore, this research answers a call for more research on group convergence to establish a better understanding of this critical group process. The goal of this study is to answer a methodological question: Does the idea set that a group processes during a convergence activity supported with a Group Support System have to be pre-defined or should it be generated by the group itself? The results of our lab experiment suggest that the results of the convergence process are not significantly affected by whether or not participants use pre-defined ideas or generate their own. This finding has implications for experimental design in collaboration research and participant selection and session design within organizations.

Transferring a collaborative work practice to practitioners: a field study of the value frequency model for change-of-practice

Collaboration engineers design collaborative work practices for high-value recurring tasks and transfer them to practitioners to execute for themselves without the on-going intervention of professional facilitators. It would be useful to increase the predictability of developing self-sustaining and growing community of practice around these designed processes. This paper reports a field study that applies the Value Frequency Model (VFM) for change-of-practice to the deployment of an engineered work practice to groups in a large global organization. The results suggest that VFM provides useful insights for discovering candidate tasks for Collaboration Engineering (CE) interventions, for designing new work practices, and for designing transition interventions for creating a self-sustaining and growing community of practice.

Managing Resistance to Organizational Change: How GSS Can Reveal Role Related Resistance Behaviors

Organizational change brings about a number of behaviors that are seen to run counter to the implementation of the information systems. These behaviors may be seen as jeopardizing the success of the change process and the success of the information system. This paper investigates the resistance to change using a change management game conducted with senior level employees and partners of a top four consulting company. While the task was based on a real organizational transformation, the participants were also going through the same real experiences. Following analysis of resistance to change behaviors, this paper provides insight into the ways in which resistance to change can be mitigated. The contribution of this paper is in the discovery of change management behaviors as they relate to organizational transformation and information systems development

Predicting Change: A Study of the Value Frequency Model for Change of Practice

Information systems (IS) researchers have made considerable progress on defining and formalizing structured methods to support collaborative development of information systems. Concepts and methods for transferring IS artifacts to practitioners in ways that give rise to sustained use nonetheless remain more an art than a science. A better understanding of the mechanisms that give rise to willingness or unwillingness to change could help IS developers predict whether intended users would be willing to embrace a new system if it were offered to them. Such understanding might also help IS researchers to develop more effective and reliable deployment concepts and methods for their solutions. This paper reports the findings of an action research study of change-of-work-practice among 17 groups at the headquarters of a 3,000-person organization. All of the groups considered changing to a new project-trackingand-status system which supported a new collaborative project management approach. Five of the groups adopted the new system while 12 either did not adopt, or adopted but then abandoned, the new IS. The goal of this study was to explore whether the change-of-practice behaviors and choices that manifested in the field were consistent or inconsistent with the Value Frequency Model (VFM), a new causal theory for willingness-tochange that emerged from the Collaboration Engineering literature. Observed outcomes were consistent with the theory, which suggests that the constructs and relationships proposed by the VFM may provide useful insights to help explain and predict willingness to change to new information technologies and the work practices in which they are embedded.