The adoption of collaboration support technologies forms a complementary coordinating technique or approach to coordinating work through the explicit division of labour within a distributed environment. The support technologies aid in facilitating the working together of teams over geographic distances, through the provision of tools that assist communication, coordination and problem solving processes. The ‗support‘ for such cooperative work has been the subject and theoretical construct of the multidisciplinary research field of Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW). This investigatory field examines the potential, possibilities and effects of technological support for individuals
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involved in collaborative work, advancing the concept that collaborative work can be supported by software tools.
The propagation of personal computers and their corresponding networks, has made the electronic support of geographically distributed groups feasible, cost-effective and realistic. Computerised support for collaboration is recognised as necessary when the collaborating users are physically distributed. This scenario has become more common, with the advances in networking technologies and the increasing popularity of the Internet and the World Wide Web (Israel et al., 2008). Holt (1988) advocates that coordination technologies should express tasks, their diverse relationships and connexions to each other and the people responsible for them, in a flexible and well- integrated manner, while accounting for unpredictability. Distributed teams often turn to software systems, which incorporate groupware, project management, business process modelling tools, and Workflow Management Systems (WFMS), in an endeavour to fulfil their requirements and to satisfy their coordination needs. These coordination support technologies range from the customarily strictly defined and asynchronously executed business processes, as with most WFMS, extending to those that provide communication and cooperation support for groups dealing with more fluid and ill-structured processes, as in most groupware (e-mail, shared workspaces) or combinations thereof.
While there is no consensus on classification schemes relative to these technologies, the degree of human participation in the coordination process and the level of task automation are currently utilised. The scope of support spans from fully automated coordination decision support systems, to those which simply facilitate human interaction through communication, in order that coordination is realised. To provide a foundation for the development of an artefact which can support coordination effectively in distributed environments, this chapter explores certain technological fields: cooperative groupware, workflow management, and virtual communities. Figure 3.1 portrays the collaborative tools, relative to their level of support for task-automation and process- structure, on a grid adapted from Dustdar and Gall (2002). Their focus, with an overview, is explored further in Section 3.
In many organisations where there is reliance upon groups to execute and accomplish tasks well-structured, individually performed procedures usually coexist with ill- structured undertakings requiring cooperative work processes. This results in both types of processes requiring concurrent support.
Although, these technologies may mutually co-exist, for the purposes of this discussion they are considered separate, to assist in effectively accounting for and comprehensively reviewing their usefulness and limitations in the analysis.
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Figure 3.1: The Collaborative Tools Grid
Customarily, support for business processes focuses either on supporting coordination aspects of generally asynchronously based individually executed business processes (WFMS) or on providing communication and cooperation support for groups dealing with more fluid, unstructured or ill-defined processes (e-mail, shared workspaces). Table 3.1 presents a summary of the properties of collaboration tools, reflecting their similarities and differences. While cooperative groupware tends to support more unpredictable and ad-hoc interaction groups, workflow extends automatic strategies and provides predefined procedures to guide individualised tasks. Virtual communities are often caught in the middle and closer to extremes in some cases, with the capability of leveraging both worlds as the situation presents itself, while accounting for a large number of people. Despite this, their overall objective remains constant and consistent: to increase the combined effectiveness of groups or teams engaged in the achievement of a shared goal.
Cooperative Groupware
technologies focus on group-level unstructured taskmanagement. Unstructured tasks cannot be standardised owing to their innate characteristics, which include their being not easily predictable, and therefore, having no obvious structure. For these tasks no abstract work models describing the steps necessary for performing a task exist, as shown in Figure 3.1. Instead, the groupware system must offer as much flexibility as conceivable to teams, in order for them to execute the actions they deem correct or necessary to achieve a particular goal. Groupware provides a shared environment for people engaged in a common task. Ellis et al. (1991) classify groupware as a computer-based system, which provides an interface to a shared environment, in order to support groups of people engaged in accomplishing a common task or goal. This often requires a high degree of group awareness, with co-
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workers and role-players being cognisant of past and present actions within a shared environment. Groupware provides mechanisms for synchronising cooperative behaviour.
Table 3.1: Summary of Collaborative Tools Properties
PROCESS MEMBER AWARENESS
LEVEL INTERACTION DOCUMENTATION/TRACKING COOPERATIVE GROUPWARE (Formal teams/group formation of known members) Unstructured/unpredicta ble assumes dynamically shifting goals Group awareness of
past/present co-workers asynchronous ad-Synchronous/ hoc Formal/informal communication/shar
ed work space
No- obvious structure Difficult to keep track
of activities + interactions WFMS Individual functions in departments – Organisational Mostly Predictable (highly structured- semi-structured formal model) Assumes well-defined business goals Individual activity awareness Organisation process model specific
Formal (work list) Asynchronous communication
Easy documentation and tracking made
VC Dynamic teams/groups formation in larger community of known/unknown members Dynamic degrees of semi-structured to unstructured Somewhat-defined +dynamically shifting goals Ad-hoc /informal community/group/ individual activity level and real-time action running
commentary and presence Social protocols Synchronous/ asynchronous ad- hoc formal/informal communication Shared work space
Fairly balanced easy documentation/
tracking
Groupware does not typically control the activities of the user, unlike WFMS, and notably neglects support for automatic execution and monitoring of processes. This form of coordination control frequently does not incorporate facilities for process definition and constraint configuration. Rather, the category predominantly provides synchronous and/or asynchronous communication capabilities to facilitate human to human interaction as a means to coordinate collaborative work. Ordinarily, knowledge and information sharing within a work group, rather than the ordering of their tasks, characterises these applications. This denotes that they customarily deal with ad-hoc work-processes within an organisation. As such, any enabling technology, where predominantly human interaction or decision-making is facilitated in order to promote coordination between geographically distributed users, supporting ill-structured processes, is classified as groupware.
Workflow management systems
relate to more structured processes thangroupware, with the tasks involved frequently formalised by a detailed model, clearly describing and specifying the steps requisite for completing the task. Typically, each task is assigned a role corresponding to an active individual or group, who actually executes the task.
The workflow management approach often involves fully automated, computer driven coordination as shown in Figure 1. Despite the possibility of several people being involved in attaining a common objective, each acts individually in an assigned, precise stage of the work process. Table 3.1 presents a summary of the properties and focus of WFMS. Workflow management systems are being increasingly applied to handle the
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coordination of structured tasks, as well as the execution of the individual steps associated with these tasks. Workflow is generally associated with the concept of business processes, through representation of it in a machine readable format. The business process is considered to be a set of procedures or directly related activities that collectively contribute to the realisation of a business objective (Mueller, 2001). The Workflow Management Coalition (WFMC) defines workflow as the whole or partial automation of a business process, in which documents, information or tasks are sent from one participant to another to influence their actions, in accordance with a set of established rules. As such, the issues which concern automatic scheduling and the ordering of tasks that require little or no human intervention to manage formalised or structured processes at runtime are considered workflow technology-oriented. This kind of coordination is most suitable for routine and highly repetitive business processes, whereas a process model can be fully defined in advance (Marjanovic, 2005). Therefore, as opposed to groupware, the workflow automated systems reduce the need to communicate.
The strength of WFMS lies in the system-driven process definition and its controlled enactment or execution, which enables various features, incorporating: status and history tracking as well as automatic scheduling. However, most WFMS have problems supporting non-structured or incomplete processes. Thus, complementary synergy with groupware is often explored, and will be discussed in further detail later in this treatise. Also, WFMS mostly focuses on coordinating and controlling the activities of an individual user in pursuit of efficient scheduling of the actions of the user in a particular situation, rather than providing cooperative support for groups of users in defining and executing dynamic collaborative business processes. The need to pursue approaches that allow collaborative systems to evolve over time has been suggested. It has also been established that no representation of workflow in any organisation can be wholly complete (Bannon & Schmidt, 1996; Marty, 2005). This underscores the need to develop collaborative systems that are capable of co-evolving to meet requirements that cannot be predicted in advance and this issue is explored with virtual communities.
Virtual communities influence tele-cooperation, a construct that describes the
cooperation among spatially distributed partners, supported by computer driven telecommunication systems. Virtual communities can provide support for the three areas of collaborative business processes which comprise communication, coordination and cooperation. As shown in Figure3.1, virtual communities maintain a hybrid state, with the possibility of a mixed composition of both groupware and workflow properties, as described in Table 3.1. Virtual communities can account for a larger scale of collaborating partners, contrary to groupware, in which coordination functions and64
relationships become cumbersome when situations involve a larger number of users, or workflow where coordination is often focused on individually driven activities. De Moor and Weigand (2006) deem that in an increasingly networked society, with a need for global and flexible ways of professional or social interaction, virtual communities are the natural candidates to fill collaborative gaps in traditional, hierarchical organisations. Virtual communities exhibit dynamic properties, which include: flexibility, adaptability, scalability, and robustness. To support collaboration and to optimise the effective use of limited resources, organisations adopt new organisational structures, which facilitate flexible and decentralised work management. This has led to flatter, coordination- centred organisational forms, such as networked organisations (Malone & Crawston, 1994) and virtual organisations (Mowshowitz, 1997) to account for the business processes that extend across organisational boundaries (Mehandjiev, et al., 2003). This leads to virtual communities being capable of representing flexible networks consisting of independent, globally distributed entities (individuals or institutions) that share knowledge and resources and work towards a common goal. They can form, disband, and re-form to meet fluctuating, spontaneous and emerging situations. In addition, they transcend geographic locations and time constraints, thereby enabling anywhere, anytime access.
Virtual communities such as social networks, like Facebook, focus on bringing unknown people with similar interests together, mediated by technology to facilitate social interaction through contact initiation and knowledge sharing; and they are dependent on social protocols or norms for coordination (Chiu, Hsu, & Wang 2006; Porter, 2004). From a business oriented view it is conceived of as virtual cooperation, which represents collaboration or alliances formed to achieve a common objective, through the extensive use of ICT to enable vertical integration and collaboration (Leimeister et al., 2006). For example, the Dell supply chain is leveraged for ‗just in time‘ production or ecommerce web sales. Transactions are satisfied by other work organisations that find, package and ship the products.
Aside from the unique characteristic of bringing widely distributed people or businesses with shared interests together dynamically, virtual communities can be leveraged to account for groupware and workflow functions, commonly at different levels of granularity. Similar to the way that workflow and groupware technologies can benefit from each other by embracing the human-to-human interaction paradigms and adding explicit and consistent process definition and enactment respectively, virtual communities can subsume both functions towards collaborative business process support. The collaboration process, in this instance, extends beyond a single department, organisation or enterprise, often supported by existing workflow
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technologies. This enables a virtual community to facilitate the cooperation and execution of inter-organisational processes. Moreover, it can be leveraged to bring people or institutions with shared pursuits or concerns together; provide them with opportunities to collaborate and exchange ideas; and can extend beyond the use of simple social protocols, as the need arises to coordinate activities across organisational boundaries. This is done by utilising the Internet platform. Gupta and Kim (2004) stress the significance of virtual communities in their capacity to build trust, relations and commitment over the Internet.
To understand the lessons in practice, the subsequent section introduces the socio- technical components influenced by these collaborative technologies, to account effectively for their functionalities and limitations.