An Empirical Assessment of the Assimilation Patterns and the Benefits of Collaborative Information Technologies

Abstract

The increasing focus on group work and teams to accomplish tasks has resulted in a parallel increasing need to support collaboration in the modern organization. Information technologies (ITs) are often cited as potentially helpful in this regard and their benefits in supporting collaboration are likely to drive their assimilation in organizations. This study assesses the assimilation patterns of seven categories of information technologies used to support task-oriented collaboration in U.S. and Australian organizations. These include: stand-alone e-mail systems, audio teleconferencing, videoconferencing, dataconferencing, web-based tools, proprietary groupware technology, and electronic meetings systems (EMS). Based upon the availability and utilization of each of the seven collaboration ITs, an assimilation framework is presented to benchmark the current state of practice. An investigation of organization profiles for each IT between the two extreme assimilation sectors suggests that organizations with fewer resources are capable of attaining greater assimilation of certain ITs to support collaboration than their resource rich counterparts. Our findings also suggest that perceptions of benefits of ITs in supporting collaboration vary across the ITs and that perceived benefits of some ITs in supporting collaboration are positively associated with the extent of their assimilation in organizations. Implications of our framework and findings are outlined for future research and practice.