Enterprise Collaboration Platforms: An Empirical Study of Technology Support for Collaborative Work

Abstract

Collaboration and communication technologies are increasingly transforming work, bringing changes in the work processes and practices of individual employees and organisations. In the absence of a single technology solution to provide support for collaborative work, organisations are combining multiple systems, tools and applications to form an Enterprise Collaboration Platform that provides comprehensive support for the different forms of collaborative activities. In this paper we present the findings of a study that i) examines the complex collaborative technology landscape in order to characterise and understand the evolving portfolios of collaboration software currently in use in organisations; ii) develops a framework to visualise and analyse the assemblages of tools that are being combined to form emerging enterprise collaboration platforms. The framework is then applied to visualise and compare the emerging ECPs for two organisations and the findings are discussed in the context of the long-term management of information.