Organizational impacts of collaborative information technologies: Case studies and empirical evidence

Our research focuses on information technology (IT) enabled collaboration systems. We refer to these systems as Collaborative Information Technologies (CITs). Traditional collaboration systems were designed to improve performance of group members or teams by supporting communications and the flow of information. However, modern day CITs have the capabilities to support not only communication and information flow, but also the computing needs of teams/groups engaged in accomplishing tasks/projects. There are many CIT options that organizations can deploy to support team work with varying degrees of virtuality. While some of these technologies have been around for decades (for example, audio conferencing, video conferencing, proprietary groupware, group support systems etc.), others became popular more with the commercialization of the Internet (email, intranets, extranets, web conferencing, data conferencing etc.). Although most CITs support limited functionality for collaboration, integrated e-collaboration tools are beginning to emerge to support a range of functionality required in collaborative efforts [Munkvold and Zigurs 2005]. In recent years, the increasing popularity of CITs has triggered a large number of research investigations and the trend continues to grow. Much of this research has focused on groups as the unit of analysis. There have been only a few large scale organizational level studies exploring CITs. Moreover, for the most part, these studies have investigated specific/individual CITs despite the notion that most collaborative efforts should typically be supported by multiple tools. Some studies exploring adoption of multiple CITs have been undertaken [see Bayo-Moriones and Lera-Lopez 2007; Bajwa et al. 2008]. However, to our knowledge there are no large scale organizational level empirical studies exploring CIT impacts. Here we describe our efforts to explore post adoption impacts of CITs at the organization level

Metrics for Analyzing Social Documents to Understand Joint Work

Social Collaboration Analytics (SCA) aims at measuring and interpreting communication and joint work on collaboration platforms and is a relatively new topic in the discipline of Information Systems. Previous applications of SCA are largely based on transactional data (event logs). In this paper, we propose a novel approach for the examination of collaboration based on the structure of social documents. Guided by the ontology for social business documents (SocDOnt) we develop metrics to measure collaboration around documents that provide traces of collaborative activity. For the evaluation, we apply these metrics to a large-scale collaboration platform. The findings show that group workspaces that support the same use case are characterized by a similar richness of their social documents (i.e. the number of components and contributing authors). We also show typical differences in the “collaborativity” of functional modules (containers)

A Validation Framework for the Long Term Preservation of High Energy Physics Data

The study group on data preservation in high energy physics, DPHEP, is moving to a new collaboration structure, which will focus on the implementation of preservation projects, such as those described in the group's large scale report published in 2012. One such project is the development of a validation framework, which checks the compatibility of evolving computing environments and technologies with the experiments software for as long as possible, with the aim of substantially extending the lifetime of the analysis software, and hence of the usability of the data. The framework is designed to automatically test and validate the software and data of an experiment against changes and upgrades to the computing environment, as well as changes to the experiment software itself. Technically, this is realised using a framework capable of hosting a number of virtual machine images, built with different configurations of operating systems and the relevant software, including any necessary external dependencies.Comment: Proceedings of a poster presented at CHEP 2013, Amsterdam, October 14-18 201

Barriers to EMS assimilation in the US, Australia, Hong Kong, Norway and Switzerland: A Cross regional comparison

Electronic Meeting Systems (EMS) have the capabilities to support group members in task collaboration. While there have been many case studies and lab experiments on how EMS can support group tasks, large scale macro investigations exploring EMS adoption and use have been practically non-existent. Furthermore, while several EMS assimilation barriers have been suggested, their validation across organizations remains unexplored. In this paper, we describe a global initiative to explore information technology support for task-oriented collaboration in the US, Australia, Hong Kong, Norway and Switzerland. We focus specifically on EMS and investigate their adoption, use and assimilation barriers in organizations across the five regions. Our results suggest that EMS adoption and use is limited across all the regions. A further investigation in EMS assimilation barriers suggests that these barriers differ across the regions and there is little agreement over how they are ranked. Implications of our findings are discussed for practitioners and researchers

Understanding and Coping with Hardware and Software Failures in a Very Large Trigger Farm

When thousands of processors are involved in performing event filtering on a trigger farm, there is likely to be a large number of failures within the software and hardware systems. BTeV, a proton/antiproton collider experiment at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, has designed a trigger, which includes several thousand processors. If fault conditions are not given proper treatment, it is conceivable that this trigger system will experience failures at a high enough rate to have a negative impact on its effectiveness. The RTES (Real Time Embedded Systems) collaboration is a group of physicists, engineers, and computer scientists working to address the problem of reliability in large-scale clusters with real-time constraints such as this. Resulting infrastructure must be highly scalable, verifiable, extensible by users, and dynamically changeable.Comment: Paper for the 2003 Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP03), La Jolla, Ca, USA, March 2003. PSN THGT00

Internationalists and Locals: International Research Collaboration in a Resource-Poor System

The principal distinction drawn in this study is between research “internationalists” and “locals.” The former are scientists involved in international research collaboration while the latter group are not. These two distinct types of scientist compete for academic prestige, research funding, and international recognition. International research collaboration proves to be a powerful stratifying force. As a clearly defined subgroup, internationalists are a different academic species, accounting for 51.4% of Polish scientists; predominantly male and older, they have longer academic experience and higher academic degrees and occupy higher academic positions. Across all academic clusters, internationalists consistently produce more than 90% of internationally co-authored publications, representing 2,320% of locals’ productivity for peer-reviewed articles and 1,600% for peer-reviewed article equivalents. Internationalists tend to spend less time than locals on teaching-related activities, more time on research, and more time on administrative duties. Based on a large-scale academic survey (N = 3,704), some new predictors of international research collaboration were identified by multivariate analyses. The findings have global policy implications for resource-poor science systems “playing catch-up” in terms of academic careers, productivity patterns, and research internationalization policies.125149Scientometric

A Framework to Manage the Complex Organisation of Collaborating: Its Application to Autonomous Systems

In this paper we present an analysis of the complexities of large group collaboration and its application to develop detailed requirements for collaboration schema for Autonomous Systems (AS). These requirements flow from our development of a framework for collaboration that provides a basis for designing, supporting and managing complex collaborative systems that can be applied and tested in various real world settings. We present the concepts of "collaborative flow" and "working as one" as descriptive expressions of what good collaborative teamwork can be in such scenarios. The paper considers the application of the framework within different scenarios and discuses the utility of the framework in modelling and supporting collaboration in complex organisational structures

An Overview of Massive MIMO Research at the University of Bristol

Massive MIMO has rapidly gained popularity as a technology crucial to the capacity advances required for 5G wireless systems. Since its theoretical conception six years ago, research activity has grown exponentially, and there is now a developing industrial interest to commercialise the technology. For this to happen effectively, we believe it is crucial that further pragmatic research is conducted with a view to establish how reality differs from theoretical ideals. This paper presents an overview of the massive MIMO research activities occurring within the Communication Systems & Networks Group at the University of Bristol centred around our 128-antenna real-time testbed, which has been developed through the BIO programmable city initiative in collaboration with NI and Lund University. Through recent preliminary trials, we achieved a world first spectral efficiency of 79.4 bits/s/Hz, and subsequently demonstrated that this could be increased to 145.6 bits/s/Hz. We provide a summary of this work here along with some of our ongoing research directions such as large-scale array wave-front analysis, optimised power control and localisation techniques.Comment: Presented at the IET Radio Propagation and Technologies for 5G Conference (2016). 5 page