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Keywords and Definitions Around "Collaboration"

By Ramona Winkler, SAP AG – 09/12/2002

Abstract

This article defines major terms related to the field of collaboration: what it means to collaborate, what the goals and current research findings of the CSCW are (target groups of collaborative tools, processes of collaboration, time/place paradigm), and finally what the term groupware stands for.

Tuesday. 10 a.m. Mrs. Smith sips her café au lait while preparing for the meeting at 11 a.m. Having finished lengthy e-mail conversation with her colleagues overseas and discussed all the important work steps with her four office mates, she is now reviewing the list of people she will see at the upcoming meeting. Of course, telephone conferencing with colleagues in other countries is a daily affair. Thus, she knows most of her colleagues from France and Spain "acoustically", but has not met them yet. "That's all going to change today", Mrs. Smith thinks, smiling with excitement: the French and Spanish team members will no longer just be "voices" anymore but people of flesh and blood, with their own individual expressions – her five-person office widens as it welcomes the new colleagues…

Mrs. Smith, this imaginary employee at an international company, could be your colleague too. She gets up five days a week to go to work, drinks her coffee, and attends to her duties of organizing and sharing information, making decisions, communicating information, and collaborating with colleagues – in person, but also using computer technology. She is part of a personal network she has set up, and belongs to a team, a department, maybe a community, an organization – on that most probably maintains a business-to-business (B2B) network. Thus, once Mrs. Smith enters the office, she is integrated into a variety of personal and professional networks. She has to deal with people from those networks: she depends on their work and vice versa. She has to collaborate.


Collaboration

For now, let's leave Mrs. Smith to finally attend the videoconference she has longed for. Let's examine collaboration on a more general level and clarify all concepts related to it. Although all of us know what it means to collaborate from daily work experience, here is a quick, comprehensive definition:

"Collaboration is broadly defined as the interaction among two or more individuals and can encompass a variety of behaviors, including communication, information sharing, coordination, cooperation, problem solving, and negotiation."
(From Intelligence Community Collaboration, Baseline Study Report, 1999)

If a company is small enough, employees can meet in the conference room daily to discuss the progress of their work – they can collaborate by meeting face-to-face. But most organizations today are faced with the integration of geographically and globally dispersed teams and colleagues. This is exactly where CSCW and groupware come into play.


CSCW

Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) is the field study of the way people collaborate and how special technologies (see groupware) impact collaboration. Researchers from various disciplines are concerned with the way collaborative work in companies is carried out and how technologies support this type of work. Thus, CSCW is not technology-dependent but socially dependent, as it develops guidelines and descriptions for the type of technologies that best support collaboration and interaction.

"Computer Supported Collaborative Working (CSCW) combines existing technology such as: groupware, virtual reality, knowledge management, document management, decision support and videoconferencing with human and social sciences, such as: ergonomics (i.e. Human Computer Interaction, or HCI) sociology, psychology, and socio-anthropology."
(From Open Directory Project)

"CSCW is the specific discipline that motivates and validates groupware design. It is the study and theory of how people work together, and how the computer and related technologies affect group behaviour."
(From Greenberg 1991, page 1)

Therefore, CSCW researchers not only define what it means to "collaborate", but also what types of collaborative interactions exist. They then investigate what types of collaborative tools best enhance the work of each type of collaborative group. But the multidisciplinarity of CSCW researchers often leads to conflicts in definitions of collaboration and best technological solutions. Nevertheless, there are some well-known and widely used ways of differentiating and characterizing collaborative tools, such as target groups, collaborative processes, and the time/place paradigm.

Target Groups of Collaborative Technologies

In considering collaboration, you can differentiate between the number of people taking part on the one hand, and the tasks and goals underlying the collaboration process on the other:

Processes of Collaboration

Collaboration is always operating through certain group processes – processes of communication, coordination, cooperation, but also information sharing. These processes do not work independently of one another but are usually intermingled and determined by each other. True collaboration tools will try to provide help for all those collaboration processes, but their main focus is mostly on one of these areas.

Table 1 illustrates collaborative technologies differentiated by the collaboration processes they support. (The section below entitled "Groupware" explains some of the examples of collaborative technologies in more detail; see also the Collaboration Glossary for a quick overview of terms.)

Communication Coordination Cooperation Information Sharing
  • E-mail
  • Audio- and videoconferencing
  • Telephone
  • Instant messaging
  • Chat
  • Fax
  • Screen sharing systems
  • Workflow management
  • Calendar and scheduling
  • Project management
  • Electronic meeting systems
  • Group authoring software
  • Whiteboards
  • Application sharing
  • Knowledge management
  • Threaded discussions

Table 1: Collaborative tools differentiated by the collaboration processes supported – communication, coordination, cooperation, and information sharing (adapted from the seminary paper "Definition und Klassifikation der Begriffswelt um CSCW, Workgroup Computing, Groupware, Workflow Management" by Dominik Stein, 1997)


Time/Place Paradigm of Collaborative Technologies

When setting up standards and guidelines for creating collaborative tools, CSCW categorizes these technologies not only according to the group's focus processes (communication, coordination, cooperation, information sharing), the users these technologies are designed for (work groups, teams, departments, and so on), and the tasks and goals these collaboration groups need to fulfill, but also on two other dimensions: time and place.

Collaboration can take place at the same time ("synchronous" collaboration) or at different times ("asynchronous" collaboration). Accordingly, collaboration may occur in the same place, for example, in the same room ("colocated" collaboration) or in different places ("remote" collaboration).

Thus, collaborative hardware and software can be categorized according to whether users can use them synchronously or asynchronously, and colocated or remote. Table 2 gives examples of collaborative tools differentiated by the place/time paradigm. (The next section, entitled "Groupware", explains some of the examples of collaborative technologies in more detail; see also the Collaboration Glossary for a quick overview of terms.):

  Same Time
"synchronous"		 Different Time
"asynchronous"
Same Place
"colocated"
  • Presentation support
  • Shared computers
  • E-mail
  • Shared files
  • Electronic bulletin boards
  • Workflow systems
  • Group calendaring
Different Place
"remote"
  • Chat
  • Shared applications
  • Videoconferencing
  • E-mail
  • Workflow systems
  • Shared files
  • Electronic bulletin boards
  • Group calendaring

Table 2: Collaborative tools differentiated by the time/place paradigm (adapted from the Usability First and the Intelligence Community Collaboration Study)

It is clear from table 2 that there are more tools listed in the second column under the "Different Time" heading. So, from this first selection of collaborative tools alone you can see that the focus is on the time dimension, that is, developing collaborative tools for people who have to collaborate at different times.

Let's now turn our attention to the implementation of the insights gained from the CSCW research. The realization of cooperation, communication, coordination, and information sharing systems for enhancing the work of any type of collaborative group taking into account the place/time paradigm is called groupware.


Groupware

Groupware is a general term for the range of technologies that enhance and support the work of groups through the use of computers (hardware and software). These technologies are not meant to replace people, but to extend and to facilitate the collaboration process. Moreover, there is a strict distinction between single user and groupware applications: whereas single user applications focus on the isolation of the user for performing an independent task, groupware is conceived to help two or more users performing their shared task.

"Groupware is software that runs on a network, and aids people using the software on the network (typically a team) to participate in a joint project, which can range from simple to complex."
(From Open Directory Project)

As mentioned above, some important questions come up and have to be addressed in the process of designing software and hardware for multiple users with the aim of enhancing and facilitating their communication, information sharing, and communication:

Many groupware applications have already been developed and are in use today. Some of them are mentioned above. Their functionalities, that is their use for collaborative purposes, are described here in brief:

More explicit descriptions of these and other groupware examples can be found on the Websites listed under sources. (See also the Collaboration Glossary for a quick overview of terms.)


Final Word

Intuitively, everyone in the professional world knows what it means to collaborate. It's such a part of everyday business that the technology already used to enhance the collaboration process is usually taken for granted. Take, for example, e-mail – the most widely-used and recognized technology for exchanging information. One tends to forget that there are many things to consider when designing and developing groupware, such as the target group, its tasks, and whether the members of the group work at different places or times. Well-designed groupware also takes into account the psychological aspect of the technology – how do people in small groups work together compared to a group of 20,000 people, and the technological side – what possibilities exist to transform the psychological findings into groupware.


Having been bombarded with all those definitions, we have completely forgotten about Mrs. Smith. But she was preoccupied, too - with seeing her French and Spanish colleagues in person in the videoconference. From now on, every time Mrs. Smith talks to one of these colleagues on the phone, they will seem more real. Thus, collaboration and groupware is not just about technology, but also about technology making the collaborative process seem more human and social.

 

Sources

 

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