CSCW and Enterprise 2.0 - Towards an Integrated Perspective

In CSCW we are researching support for collaboration in work groups for several decades now. Web 2.0 and Social Software entered this field from another starting point recently, and quickly expanding towards support for collaboration in enterprises (Enterprise 2.0). However, the interaction between both fields is minimal. In this paper I am trying to contribute to bridging the gap by identifying the core contributions of the two fields, and how they can be integrated or used to the benefit of both fields

The future of enterprise groupware applications

This paper provides a review of groupware technology and products. The purpose of this review is to investigate the appropriateness of current groupware technology as the basis for future enterprise systems and evaluate its role in realising, the currently emerging, Virtual Enterprise model for business organisation. It also identifies in which way current technological phenomena will transform groupware technology and will drive the development of the enterprise systems of the future

Using Web2.0 to support the independent film production process

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The Management and Use of Social Network Sites in a Government Department

In this paper we report findings from a study of social network site use in a UK Government department. We have investigated this from a managerial, organisational perspective. We found at the study site that there are already several social network technologies in use, and that these: misalign with and problematize organisational boundaries; blur boundaries between working and social lives; present differing opportunities for control; have different visibilities; have overlapping functionality with each other and with other information technologies; that they evolve and change over time; and that their uptake is conditioned by existing infrastructure and availability. We find the organisational complexity that social technologies are often hoped to cut across is, in reality, something that shapes their uptake and use. We argue the idea of a single, central social network site for supporting cooperative work within an organisation will hit the same problems as any effort of centralisation in organisations. We argue that while there is still plenty of scope for design and innovation in this area, an important challenge now is in supporting organisations in managing what can best be referred to as a social network site 'ecosystem'.Comment: Accepted for publication in JCSCW (The Journal of Computer Supported Cooperative Work

Determination and evaluation of web accessibility

The Web is the most pervasive collaborative technology in widespread use today; however, access to the web and its many applications cannot be taken for granted. Web accessibility encompasses a variety of concerns ranging from societal, political, and economic to individual, physical, and intellectual through to the purely technical. Thus, there are many perspectives from which web accessibility can be understood and evaluated. In order to discuss these concerns and to gain a better understanding of web accessibility, an accessibility framework is proposed using as its base a layered evaluation framework from Computer Supported Co-operative Work research and the ISO standard, ISO/IEC 9126 on software quality. The former is employed in recognition of the collaborative nature of the web and its importance in facilitating communication. The latter is employed to refine and extend the technical issues and to highlight the need for considering accessibility from the viewpoint of the web developer and maintainer as well as the web user. A technically inaccessible web is unlikely to be evolved over time. A final goal of the accessibility framework is to provide web developers and maintainers with a practical basis for considering web accessibility through the development of a set of accessibility factors associated with each identified layer

Pervasive CSCW for smart spaces communities

Future pervasive environments will take into consideration not only individual users' interest, but also social relationships. In today's scenarios, the trend is to make use of collective intelligence, where the interpretation of context information can be harnessed as input for pervasive systems. Therefore, social CSCW applications represent new challenges and possibilities in terms of use of group context information for adaptability and personalization in pervasive computing. The objective of this paper is to present two enterprise scenarios that support collaboration and adaption capabilities through pervasive communities combined with social computing. Collaborative applications integrated with pervasive communities can increase the activity's quality of the end user in a wide variety of tasks

Shared Workspaces of the Digital Workplace: From Design for Coordination to Coordination for Flexible Design

The emergence of new digital platforms and social software at work changes workplaces and how people coordinate their work. To date, coordination has only been minimally studied in the context of the social software enabled digital workplace. Through a qualitative analysis, we identify different coordination mechanisms (CM) in various practice areas as envisioned and used with the same collaboration platform by three healthcare workplace teams. The findings illustrate the flexibility of shared workspace designs of the digital workplace where CM cannot be anticipated a priori by researchers and software developers. We end with a discussion of the findings from a sociomaterial perspective to encourage studies that monitor the flexible and complex enactment of temporally emerging shared workspace designs

Introduction of Enterprise Collaboration Systems: In-depth Studies Show That Laissez-faire Does Not Work

Inspired by the perceived success of the Social Media, an increasing number of companies have started to introduce social-media-like software systems (Enterprise Collaboration Systems). In order to study the issues and challenges that such introduction projects bring about, we selected a sample of companies and conducted interviews with managers, IT experts and users. The analysis of the responses shows that the experiences among the companies and among people in the same roles in these companies are very similar. All case companies used an approach that could be described as experiential, or laissez-faire, meaning that they installed the system and invited their staff to use it – without clear instructions or management controls. This led to a certain degree of insecurity and the adoption rate was lower than expected. We argue that the laissez-faire approach did not stimulate (the full potential of) project success. The findings also show that the introduction of social software brings about cultural rather than technical challenges. These cultural challenges can be anticipated and should be managed ex ante, not ad hoc

A context-aware framework for CSCW applications in enterprise environments

Future pervasive environments will take into consideration physical and digital social relationships. Nowadays it is important to use collective intelligence, where the interpretation of context information can be harnessed as input for context-aware applications, especially for group collaboration. For collaborative applications this represents opportunities, but also new challenges in terms of using collective information for adaptability and personalization in pervasive environments. This paper presents the challenges in design and development of a context-aware framework CSCW supporting pro-behaviour capabilities in pervasive communities