Abstract
Employee collaboration and knowledge sharing is vital for manufacturing organisations wishing to be successful in an ever-changing global market place; Product Development (PD) teams, in particular, rely heavily on these activities to generate innovative designs and enhancements to existing product ranges. To this end, the purpose of this paper is to present the results of a validation study carried out during an Engineering Education Scheme project to confirm the benefits of using bespoke Web 2.0-based groupware to improve employee collaboration and knowledge sharing between dispersed PD teams. The results of a cross-sectional survey concluded that employees would welcome greater usage of social computing technologies. The study confirmed that groupware offers the potential to deliver a more effective collaborative and knowledge sharing environment with additional communication channels on offer. Furthermore, a series of recommended guidelines are presented to show how PD teams, operating in globally-dispersed organisations, may use Web 2.0 tools to improve employee collaboration and knowledge sharing.
Highlights
The last two decades have been characterised by technological advancement highlighted by the birth of the World Wide Web (WWW) and the development of social computing technologies, such as social networking sites, social bookmarking and micro-blogging tools; this has resulted in many opportunities for manufacturing organisations operating globally, and significant challenges, especially in terms of employee and project collaboration, with companies today needing to enhance communication channels between geographically-dispersed and co-located employees and external partners
The purpose of this paper is to report on an investigative validation study conducted following the development and deployment of a bespoke Web 2.0-based groupware, which is introduced in section V, within a leading ADI organisation, BAE Systems’ Electronic Systems, Rochester, and Tonbridge School, a secondary school based in Kent, UK
The validation study demonstrated clearly that the groupware offers the capability of delivering an effective collaborative and knowledge sharing environment with additional communication channels on offer to end users
Summary
The last two decades have been characterised by technological advancement highlighted by the birth of the World Wide Web (WWW) and the development of social computing technologies, such as social networking sites, social bookmarking and micro-blogging tools; this has resulted in many opportunities for manufacturing organisations operating globally, and significant challenges, especially in terms of employee and project collaboration, with companies today needing to enhance communication channels between geographically-dispersed and co-located employees and external partners.The Aerospace and Defence Industry (ADI) is an industrial sector which plays a key role in global manufacturing and where the UK enjoys a continuing reputation as a world leader [1]. The last two decades have been characterised by technological advancement highlighted by the birth of the World Wide Web (WWW) and the development of social computing technologies, such as social networking sites, social bookmarking and micro-blogging tools; this has resulted in many opportunities for manufacturing organisations operating globally, and significant challenges, especially in terms of employee and project collaboration, with companies today needing to enhance communication channels between geographically-dispersed and co-located employees and external partners. In the UK, for example, there are currently over 2600 companies operating in the sector [4] and within Europe the sector accounts for over 1.9% of total employment [5]; the majority of these employees are often co-located or geographically dispersed around their home countries, but typically conduct business and collaborate with colleagues based overseas as they are often part of large multi-national organisations
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