Briggs, Robert O.

English

AIS Electronic Library (AISeL)

PROFILEInterview with Jay Nunamaker on ‘‘Computer-SupportedCooperative Work and Social Computing’’Robert O. BriggsPublished online: 18 April 2015 Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden 2015Jay F. Nunamaker Jr., Ph.D.Regents’ Professor of MISSoldwedel Chair in Management Information SystemsUniversity of Arizona1130 E. Helen St.Tucson, Arizona 85721-010USAjnunamaker@cmi.arizona.eduJay F. Nunamaker Jr. is Regents Professor and Sold-wedel Professor at the University of Arizona. He foundedthe MIS department at University of Arizona in 1974, andthe Center for the Management of Information in 1985. Dr.Nunamaker has over 40 years of experience in analyzing,designing, testing, evaluating, and developing informationsystems. His multidisciplinary research is built on a foun-dation of computer supported collaboration, decision sup-port, deception detection and determination of intent.Nunamaker’s research has led to major breakthroughs incollaboration, decision support systems, and automatedsystems analysis and design. He is known for developinggeneralizable solutions to important classes of unsolvedreal-world problems, and testing his systems with scientificrigor. He was elected a fellow of the Association for In-formation Systems in 2000, and in 2002, he was the re-cipient of the LEO (lifetime achievement) Award from theAssociation of Information Systems, at ICIS in Barcelona,Spain. In a 2005 article in Communications of the Asso-ciation for Information Systems, he was recognized as oneof the most productive information systems researchers,ranking no. 4–6 for the period from 1991–2003 based onthe number of papers in top IS journals. He received hisPh.D. in systems engineering and operations research fromCase Western Reserve University.BISE: You were a pioneer in the field of group supportsystems. What do you see as some of the major accom-plishments of the early years of collaboration systems,CSCW, and Social media?Nunamaker: Perhaps the most fundamental break-through was conceptual – the notion that teams could usetechnologies in ways that made them more successful.Once we had the concept, there were a lot of opportunitiesto explore. A lot of studies showed that groups using groupsupport systems (GSS) could cut their project cycle timesby 90 %, and cut labor hours by 50 %, while producinghigher-quality deliverables. You may have heard the oldsaying, ‘‘Faster, better, cheaper – you can have any two,but you can’t have all three.’’ Well, collaborative workwith GSS could faster, better, and cheaper – so it was aparadigm shift.Prof. R. O. Briggs (&)College of Business Administration, San Diego State University,5500 Campanile Drive, San Diego, CA 92182-8230, USAe-mail: rbriggs@mail.sdsu.eduURL: http://cbaweb.sdsu.edu/faculty/profile/Robert-O.-Briggs123Bus Inf Syst Eng 57(3):217–220 (2015)DOI 10.1007/s12599-015-0380-6Even after we built the first systems, took them into thefield, and got good results, we could not explain why im-provements were so big. It surprised us. It surprised thereviewers, too. It took us 3 years to get some of the firstGSS studies published, because they contradicted decadesof evidence that the effectiveness of groups larger than fivepeople declined with each additional person added to thegroup. Reviewers were concerned that we might be makingup the data.It was a breakthrough when we framed the effects ofGSS in terms of process gains and losses – things thatadvance a group process and things that interfere withgroup process. We analyzed every study available at thetime to derive the general model of process gains andlosses that we published in the 1991 CACM paper onelectronic meeting systems (Nunamaker et al. 1991). It wasone of our major contributions up to that point.BISE: What research have you seen that grew out ofthat paper?Nunamaker: Even though we were up to our elbows infield research at the time, when we brought all the inputconstructs together in the general model, it was still sur-prising how many were related to group outcomes. Wenever could have guessed that from our desk chairs. Whenwe gathered all the constructs into one model, we could seethe scope and complexity of collaboration for the first time.It’s been a handy reference for people working on ex-periments and field trials. Each construct is a research topicon its own, and there are interactions among multipleconstructs. It’s more than a single researcher or researchgroup could investigate in a lifetime. It’s been cited almost2000 times by people all over the world, and people arestill working on it.BISE: What are some of the highlights from thatresearch?Nunamaker: One of the most interesting to me was thevalue of anonymity for some parts of a collaborative workprocess. During idea generation, for example, we know thatpeople are reluctant to propose an unpopular idea, espe-cially if it’s unpopular with the boss. When we usedelectronic brainstorming in the lab, the people who con-tributed anonymously generated significantly more usefulideas of higher quality. When we went into the field,though, we not only got the good ideas, but we also got tothe elephant in the room. It’s especially valuablein situations there is a difference of power among par-ticipants. We once ran a session for the president of IBMand the 12 senior executives who reported to him. Thequestion was, ‘‘What are the last details we must addressbefore we launch our new strategic plan?’’ For the nexthalf-hour he got answers like, ‘‘This plan will never work.We’ll spend all that money and it will still cost us marketshare’’. When the anonymous brainstorming session wasover, he asked, ‘‘Why is this the first time I’m hearing thesethings? Why did you not tell me this sooner?’’The executives said, ‘‘We did tell you! You asked, ‘Howis the plan coming?’ and we said, ‘There are problems, Sir,but we’re working on them…’’ Anonymity turned out to bea powerful tool, not only for idea generation, but also foridea evaluation and idea organization. It’s a tool though,not a universal solution. It can even be counter-productivewhen a group is trying to create shared understanding orworking to build consensus. As much as we know aboutanonymity, we still have more questions than answers. Itstill a rich research opportunity. One still-unexplored areais whether and why people in power will tolerate frankanonymous input. We’ve seen cases where leaders whoembrace anonymous responses took action that benefitedthe organization and increase their standing. We’ve seenother cases where leaders cut off anonymous brainstormingwhen the first negative comments appeared. That’s a rich,undeveloped research stream.From sitting in on a number of sessions, I’ve come toappreciate the diversity of opinion that comes from allsegments of the organization. As state funding for myuniversity declined, for example, we had to find othersources of income. We had a real challenge to build con-sensus around adding fees for special programs. We raneight or ten anonymous brainstorming sessions for stake-holder groups up and down the organizational chart and allover campus. We got a lot of diverse opinions. More thanyou could have imagined. There were surprising insightsthat were helpful for establishing special fees that stake-holders could accept, and these fees now generate atremendous amount of income. The anonymous sessionsgave us a much-more sophisticated understanding of whatwas needed and why, and how the students would benefitfrom it. We use the fees for things like 24/7 computer labswith hardware and software for courses like SystemsAnalysis and Database. We also use it for additionalteaching assistants to help the students succeed. Withoutthe collaboration system, we could not have designed a feestructure that the students and others would support. Wewould not have been able to include students, faculty, ad-ministrators, and the board of advisors in the samesessions.BISE: What were some of the early contributions fromother universities that might have impressed you at thetime?Nunamaker: The University of Minnesota’ garnered alot of attention with their ‘Minnesota Experiments.’ In thedays of mainframe computers and monochrome monitors,Minnesota focused on the role of color and graphics indelivering information to decision makers, and in theirunderstanding of the information. Minnesota, Gary Dixonin particular, was probably the first to bring rigorous123218 R. O. Briggs: Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, Bus Inf Syst Eng 57(3):217–220 (2015)scientific experimentation into MIS. I came from anEngineering background, where the focus was not on sci-ence, but design. The methods of Engineering focused onexploratory research and trial-and-error, so Minnesota’sapproach was sort of new to me. Bringing science anddesign together – it was a lightbulb going off. Now it’s soobvious, but at the time, it wasn’t so obvious. Their workinspired me to use experimental methods in the col-laboration systems research.BISE: Were there any early CSCW contributions thatyou particularly admired?Nunamaker: ShredIt. It’s a contraction of Shared Edit.Shredit was Clarence Ellis’s approach to collaborationsystems – he was out of computer science. ShredIT wasone of the earliest examples of an editor to which multiplepeople could contribute simultaneously. Ellis was a leaderin CSCW. He observed and studied what was going on atthe time, then went off and did something different. It wasa solid starting point for a lot researchers who followedafter. University of Michigan borrowed his approach fortheir early work. I was on the NSF review team for Ellis’sproject, and was impressed by what he was doing. It was asystematic approach to building collaborative tools. He wasamong the first to do that.BISE: The CSCW and group support systems researchstreams split in the early 1990s. What was the issue there?Nunamaker: In the end, it came down to designingcollaborative processes. People in the CSCW stream be-lieved that all structure was bad, and that all group pro-cesses should ‘emerge naturally.’ The GSS communityfound that some process structure could be useful to forgetting things done. We did not impose structures ongroups from the outside. We used our knowledge to helpgroups design processes that they liked. Empirical evidenceof our successes did not seem to persuade the early CSCWcommunity that structure isn’t always bad. The bigger thegroup gets, the more important it is to design a good pro-cess in advance. Jimmy Carter once ran a GSS session of200 people to develop ideas for improving the quality oflife in Atlanta, GA. It would have been impossible to runthat session with that many people without a well-designedprocess.BISE: Turning your attention to the present, whatamong the current research catches your attention?Nunamaker: The Collaboration Engineering (CE) re-search has come a long way over the past 15 years, andthey are on the leading edge in some areas. We saw that,even with triple-digit ROIs on GSS installations, organi-zations had a hard time maintaining a GSS capability inhouse. GSS depended on an expert facilitator, and the ex-pert facilitators tended to get promoted pretty quickly, andthen there was nobody left to run the software for theteams. In 1999, we posed the ‘‘Facilitator-in-a-box’’challenge at a collaboration conference: How can wepackage enough collaboration expertise with the col-laboration technology in a form that non-experts can exe-cute a well-designed process with no training on either thetools or the techniques? The collaboration engineering re-searchers took up the challenge. They have done lot ofconceptual work to codify the tacit knowledge of col-laboration experts into reusable chunks of knowledge; forexample, the ThinkLets design pattern language and theSix Layer model of collaboration. In 2013, Bob Briggs andsome of his colleagues published a JMIS paper about aprototype facilitator-in-a-box system prototype called Ac-tionCenters, and showed that non-experts could use it torun a well-designed process with no training. There is a lotmore research to be done there, but it’s a good milestone.The collaboration engineering community recently startedextending its approach to crowd-sourcing, too. Now youare talking about tens-of-thousands of people collaborating.That’s a big step forward.BISE: Where would you like to see the collaborationsystems/CSCW/Social Media research go in the future?Nunamaker: It’s all about automation. I get a sense thatthe hostility the CSCW community used to feel towarddesigned collaborative work practices is fading – they arestarting to see the benefits of process design for some kindsof collaboration. As CSCW and collaboration systems re-search streams converge, I think we’ll see some outstand-ing work on automating the role of the expert facilitator –the use of AI for preliminary classification and clusteringthousands of ideas; the use of digital avatars as group fa-cilitators; the use of expert systems to help novice groupsdesign effective collaborative work systems for them-selves. The output of such technology-assisted processdesign sessions could be automatically generated processsupport applications, tailored specifically to the group’sdesired process. With the six layer model of collaboration,and all the concepts it organizes, we know enough aboutcollaboration processes to make that a real possibility.It also looks like social media, collaboration systems,CSCW, and even computer operating systems are con-verging. The whole computer experience will become so-cial and collaborative, and all work will becomecooperative.If we’ve learned anything over the last 30 years,thought, it is that good technology is not enough. Goingback to our 2009 CACM paper on principles for virtualteams (Nunamaker et al. 2009), we’re going to have tofocus on, for example, realigning reward structures tomotivate teamwork. There is a saying in the US Navy, ‘‘Upto a certain point in your career, you earn medals for whatyou do. After that point, you earn medals for what you leadothers to do.’’ We’re going to need an analog for that toreward teamwork in organizations. We’re going to have to123R. O. Briggs: Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, Bus Inf Syst Eng 57(3):217–220 (2015) 219realign reward structures to reward not what ‘‘I’’ do, butwhat ‘‘we’’ do.We’re also going to have to find new ways to focusattention on tasks. In the 1960s, Herbert Simon predicted,‘‘In the future, the scarcest resource will be human atten-tion.’’ That future is here. We’re in it. We are overrun withinformation. How can we know what we should pay at-tention to? I get so many emails that I miss key messages.Then, sometimes my emails get quarantined by the fire-wall, sometimes for a few days. When they finally getplugged in, they are way down my list. More and morepeople are going to instant messaging instead of email.That just shifts the problem to a new device. It’s likely tobecome worse than email because there are many fewertools for managing it. Email and messaging are just the tipof the iceberg. The next big challenge for collaborationresearchers, I think, will be conservation about attention.ReferencesNunamaker JF Jr, Dennis AR, Valacich JS, Vogel DR, George JF(1991) Electronic meeting systems to support group work.Commun ACM 34(7):40–61Nunamaker JF Jr, Reinig BA, Briggs RO (2009) Principles foreffective virtual teamwork. Commun ACM 52(4):113–117123220 R. O. Briggs: Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, Bus Inf Syst Eng 57(3):217–220 (2015)

Interview with Jay Nunamaker on ‘‘Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing’’

https://aisel.aisnet.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1337&amp;context=bise

Interview with Jay Nunamaker on ‘‘Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing’’

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

AIS Electronic Library (AISeL)