Eleanor Wynn

How virtual are we? Measuring virtuality and understanding its impact in a global organization

Abstract.  Employees in global corporations are increasingly involved in ‘virtual teams’ on a regular basis. Conflicting definitions of virtuality make it hard to measure such things as how much virtual teaming occurs and how virtual teaming affects performance. As a consequence, it is hard to allocate funding and to design infrastructures and software to support this specific mode of working. Using the concept of discontinuities, or changes in expected conditions, we propose a virtuality index to assess how ‘virtual’ a given setting is. The discontinuities used include geography, time zone, organization, national culture, work practices, and technology. The index separately measures these aspects of virtuality and their effect on perceived team performance. Data collected at a large multinational corporation clustered into three overarching discontinuities: team distribution, workplace mobility, and variety of work practices. The study revealed that being distributed in and of itself had no impact on self‐assessed team performance. Work practice predictability and sociability mitigated effects of working in discontinuous environments, while variety of practices (cultural and work process diversity) and employee mobility negatively impacted performance.

Virtuality and Team Performance: Understanding the Impact of Variety of Practices

Abstract In many corporations today, it is common to have teams with members located in different geographic locations, different time zones, and even different countries. These virtual teams are strategically important to organizations as they adapt to constantly changing market and political conditions such as global outsourcing. Despite the research and investment in technologies supporting virtual work, it remains unclear how virtuality, or the conditions under which virtual teams work, affects performance. Prior research suggests performance of virtual teams runs the gamete from failure to success. A global understanding of the specific impacts of virtual work on performance, positive or negative, remains elusive because researchers have not yet ascertained which aspects of virtuality are especially relevant in a given setting. In this study conducted at Intel Corporation, we examine how different components of virtuality influence specific aspects of performance of virtual teams. We use both quantitative and qualitative data in our analysis. Our findings indicate that variety of practice creates significant negative influence on several aspects of performance, including communication and trust in team members, and ability to meet commitments and complete projects on time. Also, members experiencing more variety of practice perceived less risk-taking in their teams and less ability to focus the team on the right questions for the projects being undertaken.

Global and organizational discourse about information technology

Over the past 20 years, the field of information systems has grown dramatically in theoretical diversity and global reach. This growth is reflected in the language that policy makers and organizational stakeholders use when they talk about their IT plans. As information technology penetrates further into organizational and global life, it becomes ever more important to articulate assumptions embedded in the discourse. This will help to clarify the complex and yet conceptually improvised or pasted-up worldview that becomes embodied in systems. The assumptions point to particular domains of discourse. The discourse sets up conventions and boundaries. It thus shapes what can or cannot legitimately be talked about, researched, addressed, or solved within the scope of IT. A number of practical and theoretical topics are discussed in detail, including: *Globalization, development, and space; *Mobilization of power; *ERP systems; *IS planning and projects; *Critical research and the study of discourse; *Public institutions; *Analytical frameworks. This book contains the selected proceedings of the Working Conference on Global and Organizational Discourse About Information Technology, sponsored by the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) and held in Barcelona, Spain in December 2002.

The life and times of files and information: a study of desktop provenance

In the field of Human-Computer Interaction, provenance refers to the history and genealogy of a document or file. Provenance helps us to understand the evolution and relationships of files; how and when different versions of a document were created, or how different documents in a collection build on each other through copy-paste events. Though methods for tracking provenance and the subsequent use of this meta-data have been proposed and developed into tools, there have been no studies documenting the types and frequency of provenance events in typical computer use. This is knowledge essential for the design of efficient query methods and information displays. We conducted a longitudinal study of knowledge workers at Intel Corporation tracking provenance events in their computer use. We also interviewed knowledge workers to determine the effectiveness of provenance cues for document recall. Our data shows that provenance relationships are common, and provenance cues aid recall.

On the Study of Complexity in Information Systems

This article addresses complexity in information systems. It defines how complexity can be used to inform information systems research, and how some individuals and organizations are using notions of complexity. Some organizations are dealing with technical and physical infrastructure complexity, as well as the application of complexity in specific areas such as supply chain management and network management. Their approaches can be used to address more general organizational issues. The concepts and ideas in this article are relevant to the integration of complexity into information systems research. However, the ideas and concepts in this article are not a litmus test for complexity. We hope only to provide a starting point for information systems researchers to push the boundaries of our understanding of complexity. The article also contains a number of suggested research questions that could be pursued in this area.

Conversational conventions and participation in cross-functional design teams

The benefit of participatory teams—their cross-functional and diverse nature—presents a converse challenge to communicate in a common “language”, using shared conventions, against the backdrops of an unfamiliar speech context and the tacit organizational social structure. This paper employs constructs from several language-use theories to identify mismatched conventions and consequent confusion that impede or inhibit full participation in settings like system design or work-process redesign.

Relevance conventions and problem boundaries in work redesign teams

Presents findings from a study undertaken to identify some of the conversational issues in the production of knowledge in cross‐functional work redesign groups. Illustrates what may be key sources of miscommunication based in differing conversational relevance. Postulates that the recognition of relevance and, by extension, the recognition of a valid contribution, is influenced by the manner of discourse or speech style. Feels that the language behaviours as disclosed in the analysis can be inhibiting to the work of cross‐functional teams responsible for a variety of organizational change processes, including IS development and workflow redesign.

Placing Language in the Foreground: Themes and Methods in Information Technology Discourse

We are pleased to bring you this volume of papers prepared for the IFIP Working Group 8.2 Conference held in Barcelona in December 2002. The subject of organizational discourse about information technology, and its counterpart, the discussion of technology as part of globalization, have been constant themes in Information Systems (IS) and within IFIP Working Group 8.2 for many years. However, this is the first time that discourse has been the explicit focus of an IFIP Working Group 8.2 conference, and only the second or third time that discourse has been the focus of a conference about Information Systems.

The Social Context of Software Maintenance

Software maintenance is a highly collaborative activity whose social context is rarely addressed. To explore this context, we conducted an ethnographic study at a large technology company involving participant observation with software engineers. Thirty-six participants (nine managers and twenty-seven software engineers) at the company participated in semi-formal interviews, while six months of participant observation produced insights about the work practice. The paper presents nine key observations that demonstrate the social context of maintenance activities. These observations provide a description of how work was divided between groups, the social dependencies that exist between groups, challenges in managing branches, the role of small projects, issues of making cross-group changes to source code, how dependencies are identified, problems of confidence in testing, and the impacts of working across widely different time-zones. The paper also highlights implications these observations have for software engineering research and practice.

3D Global Virtual Teaming Environment

Based on research conducted at a large multinational corporation, we identified several unique requirements for global team collaboration. Our findings included that two-thirds of employees work on distributed teams and the same percentage also work on multiple teams. These and other data led us to seek a solution that would seamlessly support the complexities discovered while enhancing team and personal productivity. To adequately represent the complexities, we needed an object-oriented information workspace where the use of a 3D user interface allows users to retain multiple contexts. We chose an environment already developed by Intel Research, Miramar, as a prototyping vehicle