A Seven-Layer Model of Collaboration: Separation of Concerns for Designers of Collaboration Systems

Designers of collaboration systems address many interrelated issues in a social-technical context. The volume, complexity, and variety of issues can invoke cognitive overload, causing deficiencies in system designs. We use inductive logic to derive seven key areas of concern for designers of collaboration support systems. We use deductive logic to argue that these areas address collaboration at differing levels of abstraction, and so may be organized into a seven-layer model, affording separation of concerns at design time. The layers are: Goals, Products, Activities, Patterns, Techniques, Tools, and Scripts. Design changes at one layer may not necessitate changes to layers above it, but may require changes to layers below it. At each layer and between each layer there are different issues and outcomes that may be addressed with different concepts, techniques and tools. This separation of concerns may reduce cognitive load for designers and may help to improve completeness and consistency of their designs, yielding higher productivity for collaborating groups

MANAGERS AND COLLABORATION TECHNOLOGY: A BUSINESS PERSPECTIVE FOR IMPROVING MANAGEMENT SUPPORT SYSTEMS

Over the last years managers have expanded their role in operations and nowadays they make decisions faster than in the past. Collaboration technology promises to support managers in doing so. Hence, the present situation is favorable for a redesign of management support systems (MSS) incorporating collaboration technology. To examine such technology, we consider analyst - and consumer -type managers´ perspectives and cover collaboration technology for different devices. Based on findings from a literature review and arguments validated in structured manager interviews, we propose four initial design guidelines facilitating collaboration for managers: (1) Coordination: MSS should indicate the availability of other users, send read confirmations, and provide document sharing. (2) Communication: MSS should enable on-topic annotations and sending them to other users at the push of a button. (3) Cooperation: MSS should provide a comprehensive managerial self-service search function. (4) Devices: For shared documents and textual annotations tablets have become managers most wanted smart device type

Managerial interventions in multicultural virtual teams: A review and synthesis of the literature

Teams distributed across cultural, geographic and temporal boundaries, also known as multi-cultural virtual teams (MVTs), have been prevalent in international organizations. To provide guidance for MVT managers and support accumulation of prior experience, we establish a management model based on the extended adaptive structuration theory (EAST) and verify the model with 55 empirical studies from leading publications in related fields. The findings contribute a comprehensive set of empirically verified managerial intervention in MVTs and suggest that managers can improve MVT outcomes through manipulating five sets of struc-tural characteristics (i.e., organization, team, individual, technology and task) before and dur-ing the task process. Based on the findings, we generate a holistic view of managerial inter-vention, which explains the mechanisms of managerial intervention in MVTs

Collaborative Requirements Engineering Notation for Planning Globally Distributed Projects

Requirements engineering represents a critical phase of the software development lifecycle in which requirements describing the functional and non-functional behaviors of a system are elicited, modeled, analyzed, negotiated, agreed, and specified. In traditional software systems these tasks are typically performed in face-to-face meetings between requirements engineers and the project level stakeholders. However, in today’s global software development environment, it is becoming increasingly commonplace for stakeholders to be dispersed across multiple geographical locations and time zones. Under these circumstances, face-to-face meetings become expensive, and often impossible to facilitate, and as a result the success of the requirements process relies, at least partially, on tools and processes that support distributed communication and collaboration. To investigate the challenges and effective practices for performing requirements activities in distributed environments, we conducted a series of in-depth interviews with project managers and business analysts who have worked with non-co-located stakeholders. Since many project managers fail to plan and deploy the necessary infrastructures to support quality communication, and in practice requirements are often elicited and managed via email exchanges; we introduced a visual modeling notation to help project managers proactively plan the collaboration infrastructures needed to support requirements-related activities in globally distributed projects. An underlying meta-model defines the elements of the modeling language, including locations, stakeholder roles, communication flows, critical documents, and supporting tools and repositories. The interview findings were further analyzed to identify practices that led to success or created significant challenges for the projects; resulting in a set of patterns for globally distributed requirements engineering

Collaboration software adoption: Factors affecting adoption of collaboration software in organizations

Objectives of the Study The objective of the study was to find out what kind of factors was influencing the adoption of collaboration software. The study included two different social groups that were examined and compared with each other. The first group was formed by young university and high school students, the other was professionals working in the IT-industry. The different possible factors were also compared with each other to see which one had a larger effect. A case study of moving away from email in order to use other types of collaboration software was taken to illustrate the transfer of one system to another. Methodology A theoretical model was built based on the literature review. The theoretical model consisted of four different factors, constructs that were affecting the adoption of collaboration software. The empirical data was collected in December 2012 by conducting a web-based questionnaire for the two groups in question, and it gathered a total of 109 responses. The data was analyzed with quantitative statistical methods; more precisely the method chosen was partial least squares analysis (PLS). Findings and conclusions From the four factors ease of use and usefulness of email seemed to have the largest effect towards adopting other collaboration software. Also the attitudes towards technology usage had a significant effect with the group of professionals. Social norms in the other hand couldn't be backed up with the data extracted

Avaliação de um protótipo de suporte a reuniões electrónicas através da metodologia Perceived Value

Tese de mestrado, Informática, Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de Ciências, 2010Hoje em dia verifica-se que muitas organizações procuram adoptar tecnologias destinadas a melhorar a sua produtividade, designadamente ferramentas de suporte a reuniões electrónicas. Com o desenvolvimento destas ferramentas surgem os problemas de avaliar se a tecnologia se adapta à organização e qual a tecnologia que melhor serve as suas necessidades. Estudos recentes indicam que existe ainda espaço para o desenvolvimento de metodologias de avaliação de sistemas organizacionais que sejam simples e de baixo custo. É dada alguma relevância a estas características, estudando-se como podem estas metodologias ser uma mais-valia para a organização, evitando-se um custo acrescido e por outro lado permitir uma avaliação das tecnologias ao longo do seu processo de desenvolvimento. O principal objectivo deste trabalho é avaliar uma metodologia com as características mencionadas numa organização real. São também objectivos deste trabalho analisar as dificuldades encontradas no desenvolvimento do processo de avaliação, assim como identificar outros factores relevantes para a avaliação, assumindo o ponto de vista centrado na organização.Nowadays many organisations strive to adopt technologies to improve their productivity, especially concerning electronic meetings. The emergence of these tools has led to problems in assessing whether the technology is well suited to the organisation and what technology best serves its needs. Recent studies show that there is still room for the development of assessment methodologies for organisational systems which are simple and low cost. These factors are addressed in this study wich seek to understand how the evaluation methodologies can benefit the organisation, avoiding added costs while also enabling the technologies to be evaluated throughout their development process. The main goal of the study is to assess such a methodology in a real organisation. We also seek to analyse the difficulties encountered in developing the assessment process, and identifying other relevant factors for the assessment, looking at the issue from the organisation’s point of view

Modeling and exploitation of the traces of interactions in the collaborative working environment

Les sciences humaines et le progrès social ne peuvent pas se poursuivre sans collaboration. Avec le développement rapide des technologies de l'information et la popularité des appareils intelligents, le travail collaboratif est beaucoup plus simple et plus fréquents que jamais. Les gens peuvent travailler ensemble sans tenir compte de leur emplacement/ location géographique ou de la limitation de temps. Les environnements de travail de collaboration basés sur le Web sont conçus et consacrés à supporter/soutenir le travail individuel et le travail en groupe dans divers domaines: la recherche, les affaires, l'éducation, etc. N'importe quelle activité dans un système d'information produit un ensemble de traces. Dans un contexte de travail collaboratif, de telles traces peuvent être très volumineuses et hétérogènes. Pour un Environnement de Travail Collaboratif (ETC) typique Basé sur le Web, les traces sont principalement produites par des activités collaboratives ou des interactions collaboratives et peuvent être enregistrées. Les traces modélisées ne représentent pas seulement la connaissance, mais aussi l'expérience acquise par les acteurs via leurs interactions mutuelles ou les interactions qu'ils ont avec le système. Avec la complexité croissante de la structure de groupe et les besoins fréquents de collaboration, les interactions existantes deviennent de plus en plus difficiles à saisir et à analyser. Or, pour leurs travaux futurs, les gens ont souvent besoin de récupérer des informations issues de leurs activités de collaboration précédentes. Cette thèse se concentre sur la définition, la modélisation et l'exploitation des différentes traces dans le contexte d'Environnement de Travail Collaboratif et en particulier aux Traces Collaboratives dans l'espace de travail partagé de groupe (ou l'espace de travail collaboratif). Un modèle de traces de collaboration qui peuvent efficacement enrichir l'expérience du groupe et aider à la collaboration de groupe est proposé et détaillé. Nous présentons ensuite et définissons un type de filtre complexe comme un moyen possible d'exploiter ces traces. Plusieurs scénarios de base d'exploitation des traces collaboratives sont présentés. Pour chacun d'entre eux, nous présentons leurs effets et les avantages procurés par ces effets dans l'environnement de travail collaboratif. En effet, un cadre de l'exploitation des traces général est introduit et nous expliquons mis en œuvre dans un ETC. Trois approches collaboratives générant des traces sont discutées à l'aide d'exemples: l'Analyse SWOT, l'intégration de modèle de maturité de la capacité (CMMI) et le Système de Recommandation de Groupe. Une expérimentation de ce modèle a été réalisée dans le cadre de la plate-forme collaborative E-MEMORAe2.0. Cette expérience montre que notre modèle de trace collaborative et le cadre d'exploitation proposé pour l'environnement de travail collaboratif peuvent faciliter à la fois le travail personnel et de groupe. Notre approche peut être appliquée comme un moyen générique pour traiter différents sujets et problèmes, qu'il s'agisse de collaboration ou de l'exploitation des traces laissées dans un ECT.Human science and social progress cannot continue without collaboration. With the rapid development of information technologies and the popularity of smart devices, collaborative work is much simpler and more common than ever. People can work together irrespective of their geographical location or time limitation. In recently years, Web-based Collaborative Working Environments (CWE) are designed and devoted to support both individual and group work to a greater extent in various areas: research, business, learning and etc. Any activity in an information system produces a set of traces. In a collaborative working context, such traces may be very voluminous and heterogeneous. For a typical Webbased Collaborative Working Environment, traces are mainly produced by collaborative activities or interactions and can be recorded. The modeled traces not only represent knowledge but also experience concerning the interactive actions among the actors or between actors and the system. With the increasing complexity of group structure and frequent collaboration needs, the existing interactions become more difficult to grasp and to analyze. And for the future work, people often need to retrieve more information from their previous collaborative activities. This thesis focuses on defining, modeling and exploiting the various traces in the context of CWE, in particular, Collaborative Traces (CTs) in the group shared/collaborativeworkspace. A model of collaborative traces that can efficiently enrich group experience and assist group collaboration is proposed and detailed. In addition, we introduce and define a type of complex filter as a possible means to exploit the traces. Several basic scenarios of collaborative traces exploitation are presented describing their effects and advantages in CWE. Furthermore, a general traces exploitation framework is introduced and implemented in CWE. Three possible traces based collaborative approaches are discussed with comprehensive examples: SWOT Analysis, Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) and Group Recommendation System. As a practical experience we tested our model in the context of the E-MEMORAe2.0 collaborative platform. Practical cases show that our proposed CT model and the exploitation framework for CWE can facilitate both personal and group work. This approach can be applied as a generic way for addressing different types of collaboration and trace issues/problems in CWE.COMPIEGNE-BU (601592101) / SudocSudocFranceF

Coopération asynchrone colocalisée dans l'habitat intelligent en santé

Le Québec vit un vieillissement marqué de sa population et doit faire face aux problèmes que cela engendre. Cette situation soulève des enjeux sociaux et économiques liés à la santé comme l'augmentation des problèmes chroniques de santé en fin de vie, le maintien de la qualité des soins à la population et plus généralement le financement du domaine de la santé. Le Centre de recherche sur les habitats intelligents (CRHI) de l'Université de Sherbrooke cherche à développer une solution technologique socialement acceptable à ces enjeux. Les travaux qui y sont faits visent à favoriser l'autonomie de personnes atteintes de troubles cognitifs afin de leur permettre de demeurer à domicile le plus longtemps possible. Cette recherche doctorale porte spécifiquement sur l'utilisation des technologies de l'habitat intelligent pour soutenir le travail coopératif entre les professionnels de la santé, les intervenants sociaux et les proches aidants. On y aborde la problématique du travail "même lieu/temps différents" dans l'équipe hétérogène sous l'angle du travail coopératif assisté par ordinateur (TCAO). Un collecticiel asynchrone distribué dans l'habitat intelligent a été développé à titre de preuve de concept. Des activités de communication, de coordination et de production des intervenants ont été scénarisées afin de démontrer le fonctionnement du prototype. Le collecticiel C4C intègre notamment des outils de travail éprouvés comme le système de mesure de l'autonomie fonctionnelle (SMAF) qui est utilisé pour déterminer et suivre le niveau de service à offrir à une personne en perte d'autonomie. Notre recherche a permis d'élaborer : - une infrastructure distribuée de services sous l'approche par réseau de pairs pour un habitat intelligent ; - un modèle de gestion de l'information dans une perspective historique et spatiale intérieure tridimensionnelle ; - un modèle de gestion de la coopération en mode "pousser de l'information" basé sur le contexte de travail. Ensemble, ces contributions structurent et définissent le mode de travail dans l'équipe de soins et de maintien à domicile. En facilitant la coopération dans l'habitat intelligent, notre recherche vise la continuité accrue des soins pour permettre à plus de personnes souffrant de limitations cognitives ou physiques de vivre à la maison dans leur communauté