Gwendolyn L. Kolfschoten

A conceptual foundation of the thinkLet concept for Collaboration Engineering

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. One of the key concepts in Collaboration Engineering is the thinkLet-a codified facilitation technique that creates a predictable pattern of collaboration. Because thinkLets produce a predictable pattern of interactions among people working together toward a goal they can be used as snap-together building blocks for team process designs. This paper presents an analysis of the thinkLet concept and proposes a conceptual object model of a thinkLet that may inform further developments in Collaboration Engineering.

A Design Approach for Collaboration Processes: A Multimethod Design Science Study in Collaboration Engineering

Collaboration engineering is an approach for the design and deployment of repeatable collaboration processes that can be executed by practitioners without the support of collaboration professionals such as facilitators. A critical challenge in collaboration engineering concerns how the design activities have to be executed and which design choices have to be made to create a process design. We report on a four-year design science study in which we developed a design approach for collaboration engineering that incorporates existing process design methods, pattern-based design principles, and insights from expert facilitators regarding design challenges and choices. The resulting approach was evaluated and continuously improved in four trials with 37 students. Our findings suggest that this approach is useful to support the design of repeatable collaboration processes. Our study further serves as an example of how a design approach can be developed and improved following a multimethod design science approach.

ThinkLets: a collaboration engineering pattern language

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, Alexanders architectural patterns and software design patterns.

The collaboration engineering approach for designing collaboration processes

Collaboration Engineering is an approach to design and deploy collaboration processes that can be executed by practitioners for high value recurring tasks. A collaboration engineer designs collaboration processes and transfers them to practitioners in an organization. Through the recurring nature of the task, combined with lower investment in training, the approach is more likely to be successful in organizations because it is easier to adopt and sustain collaboration support in this way. In order to be successful, collaboration engineers need to develop collaboration process designs that have many more functions and requirements than traditional process agendas of facilitators. This paper describes a step-by-step approach for the design of such collaboration processes. The approach was evaluated in a number of iterations. The evaluation results provide support for the usefulness of the approach.

Challenges in collaborative modelling: a literature review and research agenda

Modelling is a key activity in conceptual design and system design. Through collaborative modelling, end-users, stakeholders, experts and entrepreneurs are able to create shared understanding about a system representation. This paper reports on a literature review to provide an overview of the commonalities and differences in collaborative modelling research. We develop a framework of analysis and conduct a quantitative meta-analysis to understand the challenges in collaborative modelling. Next, we performed a qualitative analysis to further elicit these challenges and discuss requirements for tools to support collaborative modelling, using Group Support Systems (GSSs) or Interactive Whiteboards (IWBs). We found critical challenges in supporting the understanding and adoption of modelling rules, and in integration of sub-models and different perspectives of systems to achieve shared understanding visualised in a system representation.

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.

Challenges in collaborative modeling: A literature review

Modeling is a key activity in conceptual design and system design. Users as well as stakeholders, experts and entrepreneurs need to be able to create shared understanding about a system representation. In this paper we conducted a literature review to provide an overview of studies in which collaborative modeling efforts have been conducted to give first insights in the challenges of collaborative modeling, specifically with respect to group composition, collaboration & participation methods, modeling methods and quality in collaborative modeling. We found a critical challenge in dealing with the lack of modeling skills, such as having a modeler to support the group, or create the model for the group versus training to empower participants to actively participate in the modeling effort, and another critical challenge in resolving conflicting (parts of) models and integration of submodels or models from different perspectives. The overview of challenges presented in this paper will inspire the design of methods and support systems that will ultimately advance the efficiency and effectiveness of collaborative modeling tasks.

Facilitation Roles and Responsibilities for Sustained Collaboration Support in Organizations

Research shows that under certain conditions, groups using collaboration technologies such as group support systems (GSS) can gain substantial improvements in the effectiveness and efficiency of their work processes. GSS, however, have been slow to develop self-sustaining communities of users in the workplace. Organizations that use collaboration technology may require two kinds of support: process support and technology support. Both types of support involve (1) design tasks (e.g., designing a work process and designing the technology to support the process), (2) application tasks (to apply the process and to use the technology), and (3) management tasks (to monitor and control the process and to oversee the maintenance of the technology). This paper explores how these tasks and associated roles can be anchored in organizations, and the relationship of task allocation patterns to the sustained use of collaboration technology in organizations.

Assessing the Quality of Collaborative Processes

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.

Tool Support for GSS Session Design

Research has demonstrated the added value of Group Support Systems (GSS) when they are applied under the right circumstances. However, the design of a GSS session remains a complex task and is vital for successful intervention using the technology. GSS supported sessions are dynamic and mostly unpredictable events, and preparation is therefore difficult. This paper presents a suite to support novice facilitators in the design of GSS sessions. The suite contains several tools and supports not only the design process of a GSS session but also the learning process of a novice facilitator during the preparation. The paper will explain the theoretical basis of the suite, the tools within the suite and a first evaluation of the added value of this suite for novice facilitators.