International Journal of Cooperative Information Systems

More than we realize it, knowledge is often constructed through interactions among people in small groups. The Internet, by allowing people to communicate globally in limitless combinations, has opened enormous opportunities for the creation of knowledge and understanding. A major barrier today is the poverty of adequate groupware. To design more powerful software that can facilitate the building of collaborative knowledge, we need to better understand the nature of group cognition — the processes whereby ideas are developed by small groups. We need to analyze interaction at both the individual and the group unit of analysis in order to understand the variety of processes that groupware should be supporting. This paper will look closely at an empirical example of an online group problem-solving experience and suggest implications for groupware design.

The paper presents an analysis of a collaborative decision-making process related to the selection and implementation of a new corporate solution for collaboration and information management in a Norwegian oil company. Several challenges were identified in the decision-making process, related to ensuring continuity between different phases, enabling efficient communication among the different stakeholder groups, and gaining involvement and commitment from the business areas. The analysis also focuses on the utilization of various collaboration technologies in the different phases of the decision-making process. The use of a common information repository, a well established communications infrastructure, and skilled meeting facilitators, were important factors for successful completion of the project. A more differentiated and role-based access to the information repositories, and more extensive use of online discussion forums were identified as potential means for increasing involvement in the process and closing communication gaps between stakeholder groups. Further, combination of different technologies for supporting multimode interaction was identified as a potential way of enabling more effective interaction in time pressed activities. The study contributes to increase our understanding of collaborative IS decision-making processes, and the role of collaboration technologies for supporting these.

The use of software products in today's world has increased dramatically making quality an important aspect of software development. There is a continuous need to develop processes to control and increase software quality. Software code inspection is one way to pursue this goal. This paper presents a collaborative code inspection process that was designed during an action research study using Collaboration Engineering principles and techniques. Our inspection process was implemented as a sequence of thinkLets, chunks of facilitation skill, that were subsequently field tested in a traditional paper-based and Group Support System (GSS)-based environment. Four inspections were performed on four different pieces of software code in two different organizations. Results show that regardless of the implementation, the process was found to be successful in uncovering many major, minor, and false-positive defects in inspected pieces of code. Overall observations and feedback suggest that the collaborative inspection process was considered to be productive and satisfactory. GSS inspections were more effective, especially in terms of major defects. GSS inspections were also found to be more efficient. Finally, the GSS inspections outperformed the paper inspections from a practical perspective: logging and managing defects in a GSS was far superior.

It is common that, in a long-term asynchronous collaborative activity, groups of users engage in occasional synchronous sessions. In this paper, we analyze the data management requirements for supporting this common work practice in typical collaborative activities and applications. We call the applications that support such work practice multi-synchronous applications. This analysis shows that, as users interact in different ways in each setting, some applications have different requirements and need to rely on different data sharing techniques in synchronous and asynchronous settings. We present a data management system that allows to integrate a synchronous session in the context of a long-term asynchronous interaction, using the suitable data sharing techniques in each setting and an automatic mechanism to convert the long sequence of small updates produced in a synchronous session into a large asynchronous contribution. We exemplify the use of our approach with two multi-synchronous applications.

Fostering interaction between end-users and developers is one of the most important issues when developing groupware. Insufficient interaction leads to groupware systems that do not fulfill the group's requirements and thus to low acceptance. Furthermore, as group processes change dynamically the requirements are not static as well. Groupware system development and use, therefore, have to address users' changing needs. Current design methodologies insufficiently focus on this aspect. Therefore, we propose the Oregon Software Development Process (OSDP) that fosters end-user participation throughout the whole groupware life cycle, structures the interaction between end-users and developers, and emphasizes the use of a shared language between users and developers. We illustrate the application of the process with experiences made in an interdisciplinary development project of a collaborative learning platform.