Doug Vogel

Implementing electronic meeting systems at IBM: lessons learned and success factors

Businesses of the future will rely more than ever on the work of teams. Making better use of the team times spend in meetings will be a high priority, as will being able to adapt rapidly to change. Electronic meeting systems (EMS), which apply information technology to support the meeting process, can help accomplish these goals. This paper describes and discusses the implementation of EMS at IBM in an alliance with the University of Arizona. During the past three years, the project has grown from initial support for a single site to 33 IBM sites, with more on the way. Over 15,000 people have used the ever-expanding and evolving EMS tool kit. Use of EMS has improved group performance by an average of 55 percent, with even more dramatic reductions in project calendar time. The lessons learned and success factors at IBM can assist managers in effectively introducing EMS to their organizations.

Experience at IBM with group support systems: A field study

Abstract Although numerous laboratory studies have been conducted, virtually no attention has been given to how well an operational Group Support System functions in a real-world, organizational setting. This paper presents the results of a Group Support System field study conducted at an IBM site. Data collected included session pre- and post-session questionnaires and facilitator observations plus followup interviews with managers and participants. Process and outcome effectiveness, efficiency,, and user satisfaction were consistently higher for Group Support Systems compared to no automated support. Further, those who had used the automated system before consistently had a higher mean score on questions of process effectiveness. A comparison of man-hours expended resulted in a reported 56% savings attributable to Group Support System use. The overwhelmingly positive results of this field study contradict some laboratory experiment findings and support others. Directions for future field and experimental research to resolve apparent differences and provide further clarification are identified.

Adaptiveness in Virtual Teams: Organisational Challenges and Research Directions

Computer supported teams are capturing the attention of academics and practitioners as organisations increasingly put them into practice as virtual teams. The practical relevance of current research into computer supported teams could be increased if greater attention is paid to organisational challenges as they form the context within which virtual teamwork takes place. A model of organisational challenges mapped against processes of adaptation is developed to highlight principle factors affecting virtual teams. A sample of current research groups studying computer-supported teams is plotted onto this map to reveal the extent to which current research addresses these contextual factors. From this map insights are distilled with respect to what is known and is not known about virtual teams. This paper concludes with specific research needs in the study of virtual teams.

Agent-based negotiation and decision making for dynamic supply chain formation

Modern businesses are facing the challenge of effectively coordinating their supply chains from upstream to downstream services. It is a complex problem to search, schedule, and coordinate a set of services from a large number of service resources under various constraints and uncertainties. Existing approaches to this problem have relied on complete information regarding service requirements and resources, without adequately addressing the dynamics and uncertainties of the environments. The real-world situations are complicated as a result of ambiguity in the requirements of the services, the uncertainty of solutions from service providers, and the interdependencies among the services to be composed. This paper investigates the complexity of supply chain formation and proposes an agent-mediated coordination approach. Each agent works as a broker for each service type, dedicated to selecting solutions for each service as well as interacting with other agents in refining the decision making to achieve compatibility among the solutions. The coordination among agents concerns decision making at strategic, tactical, and operational level. At the strategic level, agents communicate and negotiate for supply chain formation; at the tactical level, argumentation is used by agents to communicate and understand the preferences and constraints of each other; at the operational level, different strategies are used for selecting the preferences. Based on this approach, a prototype has been implemented with simulated experiments highlighting the effectiveness of the approach.

Group support systems in Hong Kong: an action research project

The last dozen years have seen a considerable investment of resources into the research and development of group support systems (GSS) technology. This paper describes how GSS was used to support a process improvement project in a Hong Kong accounting firm. Although the project encountered many difficulties, the application of action research facilitated the adaptation of the GSS to the shifting circumstances, and the project was successfully completed. A variety of lessons concerning the use of GSS are presented, while increased use of action research in complex organizational contexts is recommended.

Using group support systems for software inspections

Software engineering sometimes appears to be years behind other disciplines in terms of predictability and quality. But we like to argue that the software industry is facing problems now that other industries have yet to face. Constructing a high-quality, million-line program is daunting. Fortunately, progress is occurring and merging two important areas: software process improvement and technological support. The authors describe their experience implementing a group support system (GSS) for software inspections in an industrial environment. The results confirm their belief that such support can improve the efficiency and effectiveness of inspections, provided the inspections are properly conducted.

Assessing GDSS empirical research

Abstract GDSS experiments can differ from one another in many important dimensions. To interpret the results of a particular experiment in the context of the literature, it is necessary to find similar experiments for comparison. In this paper we present a method for finding the appropriate peer experiments. This method involves defining a set of variables to classify experimental conditions, defining scales for each variable, capturing the difference between experiments by measuring the average distance between them, and by using multi-dimensional scaling as a way of representing the positioning of experiments graphically. The method is applied to experiments analyzed by Pinsonneault and Kraemer (1990) based on the classification scheme they propose. Detailed data and graphs are presented. The results show that the method is a robust way of identifying experiments that are similar and distinguishing among experiments that are fundamentally different from one another.

ECollaboration: On the nature and emergence of communication and collaboration technologies

The past decades yielded fundamental changes to the ways in which value creation is being organized. Globalization and market deregulation motivate businesses to expand into new, often remote markets, which requires them to decentralize and distribute work and often to partner with local organizations, which in turn brings with it changes to the ways in which people need to organize their work (Bleecker 1994). Also, shorter product life-cycles and the pressure to constantly innovate have led many businesses to experiment with new organizational structures (Quinn 1992). This leads to a situation, in which businesses today need to manage numerous external collaborative relationships with other parties in the marketplace (Ebers 1999). Furthermore, traditional internal structures are being broken up in order to give way to more flexible and responsive work setups. The ramifications of these developments are that people increasingly work in dispersed setups and are involved in changing, multi-project setups with others from different organizational backgrounds and geographical sites (Belanger et al. 2003; Lipnack and Stamps 2000; Weinkauf et al. 2004). Hence, since people often do not share the same organizational and physical environments with their direct work associates, they have to rely on technology to create shared virtual work environments. In the above context, eCollaboration as a topic refers to all issues of ICT-based collaborations within and between organizations. More specifically, the term eCollaboration describes practices of communication, coordination and collaboration between people in distributed contexts, such as projects, (virtual) teams, or processes in and between organizations, which are enabled by Information and Collaboration Technology, in essence: eCollaboration systems. Alternative terms exist to describe this class of ICT, such as: Groupware system, CSCW system, Workgroup Computing, Collaborative Software or Cooperation systems. eCollaboration systems have come a long way since the first experimental systems were piloted and spearheaded by the Computer-Supported Collaborative Work (CSCW) research community (Greif 1988; Schmidt 1991; Teufel 1996; Wendel 1996). Today, fuelled by advances in software and in particular Internet technology (e.g. Web 2.0 interface techniques) many new systems and technologies have emerged. However, while technology vendors stress the new possibilities offered by their products for managing collaborations, the realities in distributed projects, virtual teams, and inter-organizational networks quite often paint a different picture. E-Collaboration is a complex, precarious, and too often rather ineffective undertaking. While the resulting (virtual) work environments present manifold managerial challenges, at the same time the respective eCollaboration technologies are still emerging at a fast pace. Computer software and telecommunications technology are increasingly converging to create new integrated eCollaboration platforms, while the K. Riemer (*) The University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia e-mail: k.riemer@econ.usyd.edu.au

Fifteen years of GSS in the field: a comparison across time and national boundaries

It has been over two decades since group support systems (GSS) emerged on the information technology (IT) scene. GSS have now been commercialized and are present in an increasing number of domestic and international contexts but only lightly studied in real organizational settings. A criticism of studies has been that many of the organizations involved had a vested interest in the outcome that extended beyond that which would normally occur in a typical organization. An additional challenge has been made with respect to the generalizability of field study results across corporate and national cultures. This paper compares and contrasts findings from International Business Machines (IBM) and Boeing Aircraft Corporation in the US with those from two European companies: Nationale-Nederlanden (NN), the largest insurance firm in the Netherlands and European Aeronautic Defense and Space company, Military division (EADS-M). Attention is given to aspects of efficiency, effectiveness, and user satisfaction as well as group dynamics.

Group support systems in practice: experience at IBM

The authors present the results of a group support system field study conducted at an IBM site. Data collected included session pre- and postquestionnaires and facilitator observations plus follow-up interviews with managers and participants. Process and outcome effectiveness, efficiency, and user satisfaction were consistently higher with group support systems. A comparison of man-hours expended showed a 56% savings attributable to group support system use. The results of this field study contradict some laboratory experiment findings and support others. Directions for future field and experimental research to solve apparent differences and provide further clarification are identified.<<ETX>>