ECollaboration: On the nature and emergence of communication and collaboration technologies

Abstract

The past decades yielded fundamental changes to the ways in which value creation is being organized. Globalization and market deregulation motivate businesses to expand into new, often remote markets, which requires them to decentralize and distribute work and often to partner with local organizations, which in turn brings with it changes to the ways in which people need to organize their work (Bleecker 1994). Also, shorter product life-cycles and the pressure to constantly innovate have led many businesses to experiment with new organizational structures (Quinn 1992). This leads to a situation, in which businesses today need to manage numerous external collaborative relationships with other parties in the marketplace (Ebers 1999). Furthermore, traditional internal structures are being broken up in order to give way to more flexible and responsive work setups. The ramifications of these developments are that people increasingly work in dispersed setups and are involved in changing, multi-project setups with others from different organizational backgrounds and geographical sites (Belanger et al. 2003; Lipnack and Stamps 2000; Weinkauf et al. 2004). Hence, since people often do not share the same organizational and physical environments with their direct work associates, they have to rely on technology to create shared virtual work environments. In the above context, eCollaboration as a topic refers to all issues of ICT-based collaborations within and between organizations. More specifically, the term eCollaboration describes practices of communication, coordination and collaboration between people in distributed contexts, such as projects, (virtual) teams, or processes in and between organizations, which are enabled by Information and Collaboration Technology, in essence: eCollaboration systems. Alternative terms exist to describe this class of ICT, such as: Groupware system, CSCW system, Workgroup Computing, Collaborative Software or Cooperation systems. eCollaboration systems have come a long way since the first experimental systems were piloted and spearheaded by the Computer-Supported Collaborative Work (CSCW) research community (Greif 1988; Schmidt 1991; Teufel 1996; Wendel 1996). Today, fuelled by advances in software and in particular Internet technology (e.g. Web 2.0 interface techniques) many new systems and technologies have emerged. However, while technology vendors stress the new possibilities offered by their products for managing collaborations, the realities in distributed projects, virtual teams, and inter-organizational networks quite often paint a different picture. E-Collaboration is a complex, precarious, and too often rather ineffective undertaking. While the resulting (virtual) work environments present manifold managerial challenges, at the same time the respective eCollaboration technologies are still emerging at a fast pace. Computer software and telecommunications technology are increasingly converging to create new integrated eCollaboration platforms, while the K. Riemer (*) The University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia e-mail: k.riemer@econ.usyd.edu.au