Enterprise Collaboration Systems Research Articles

Data Preprocessing for Cross-System Analysis: The DaProXSA Approach

The domain of Social Collaboration Analytics (SCA) is gathering momentum due to the increasing importance of Enterprise Collaboration Systems (ECS) that are used to build performant digital workplaces. ECS collect and store large amounts of digital trace data, which reflect the collaborative work of employees. Collaborative work activity is usually supported by multiple systems, which complicates the analysis of the digital traces. The cross-system analysis of collaborative work is challenging because of the nature of the log files that are stored in heterogeneous formats and at different levels of log granularity. These challenges cannot easily be overcome with the help of existing approaches for data preprocessing. In this paper, approaches and frameworks for data mining, data preprocessing and SCA are adapted to design a special method for Social Process Mining (SPM). The DaProXSA approach was developed to obtain interpretable, high-quality event logs of multiple ECS and builds on existing literature as well as on findings from an analysis of leading ECS. DaProXSA contributes to the aim of discovering and interpreting patterns and processes that occur in computer-mediated collaborative work.

IRECS Framework: Identification of Requirements for Enterprise Collaboration Systems

A review of the literature in the field of CSCW shows that the adoption of Enterprise Collaboration Systems (ECS) is challenging and that there is a need for a structured approach for their implementation. The IRECS Framework (Identification of Requirements for Enterprise Collaboration Systems), described in this paper, addresses this call in the form of a comprehensive classification of the digital support of collaborative work and a complementary taxonomy of empirically observed examples. The IRECS classification comprises five layers – from a high-level business view of collaborative work to a detailed consideration of the software modules that fulfil the functional requirements. The development of the framework followed a ten-year Design Science Research process. The framework is designed to serve the needs of researchers and practitioners alike. The detailed classification provides a valuable analytical lens for research. The framework and its concrete examples can also be used in practice as a guidance and checklist in the software selection process of organisations.

Work Practice Diversity in Enterprise Collaboration Systems: an Analysis of Social Documents

Enterprise collaboration systems are open to interpretive flexibility, resulting in a multitude of approaches to achieving the same task. This exploratory study provides insights into the diverse ways collaboration system professionals use collaboration technology. Data was collected about the systems, applications and type of documents they use for the typical work scenario of preparing and documenting online team meetings. The collected data was translated into visual representations of the collaborative work that happens around social documents. The results of the study reveal that there is no uniform approach and that the information involved in this process is not stored in a defined location but distributed across different systems, spaces and containers. Whilst there are observable similarities in the way employees carry out the scenario, the detailed steps are different for each case. Even within the same organisation there are fewer similarities than might be expected. The fact that the information relating to the same collaboration scenario is distributed across different storage locations reveals potential problems from an information management perspective with regards to information retrievability and accessibility.

Identification and Classification of Adoption Supporting Measures for Enterprise Collaboration Systems

Recent years have seen increased levels of adoption of Enterprise Collaboration Systems (ECS) in organisations. However, to date, there are limited in-depth studies that provide empirically derived insights into Adoption Supporting Measures (ASM) in the context of ECS. The aim of the study presented in this paper is to identify, analyse and classify ASM for ECS from the organisational perspective and the company staff responsible for managing the ECS implementation. The study follows a qualitative and interpretative research design based on the analysis of company case studies. Through a process of inductive coding of six industry case studies we identified and described 41 different ASM in the context of ECS. These 41 ASM were further analysed and classified into seven categories and related subcategories. The resulting classification is visualised and discussed. The findings presented in this paper serve as an essential intermediate step for further in-depth investigations to understand contextual variations in ECS adoption and how these may vary over the life of an ECS project.

Is the Structure of “Regular Working Days” about to Dissolve? Changes in Employees’ Time-Use Patterns Working in Enterprise Collaboration Systems During the COVID-19 Pandemic

The measures taken during the COVID-19 pandemic have strengthened Work from Home and the use of digital communication technologies and digital collaboration. The resulting flexibility in terms of control over time and place of work can support workers in improving their work-life balance. In this paper, we investigate whether workers using digital communication technologies made use of this flexibility and changed the distribution of their work hours across the week and day. To answer this question, we investigate the use of an Enterprise Collaboration System in 2019-2022. Using real-world data, a MS Power BI dashboard was created following the steps suggested by the Social Collaboration Analytics Framework (SCAF). The dashboard shows that the system use increased during the COVID-19 pandemic. Furthermore, an expansion of work on weekends and outside of regular working hours can be observed. Although, timely adjustments of use-patterns were highest in the beginning of the pandemic, long-term trends could be observed as well. The results indicate that knowledge workers used digital collaboration technologies to restructure working days, according to their specific personal and business needs while working from home. The paper is a valuable starting point in the context of a long-term interdisciplinary research project on the digitalisation of the workplace.

Collaborative Actions on Documents Ontology (ColActDOnt)

The analysis and interpretation of collaborative work in the Digital Workplace requires an in-depth understanding of the user actions carried out in Enterprise Collaboration Systems (ECS). The academic discipline of Process Mining (PM) provides us with methods and tools for the analysis of event logs. For PM to work successfully, we need event logs that are formatted using a standard (e.g. XES) that can be processed by existing PM tools. This is a challenge for the analysis of collaborative work because collaboration processes frequently span across multiple software products, which record user activity in their own proprietary log format. The data from different systems needs to be transformed and aggregated before it can be used by PM tools. To address this issue, we developed a novel concept for the harmonisation and aggregation of log files from collaboration systems. In this concept, events are described as user actions on documents. We formalised the concept in the Collaborative Actions on Documents Ontology (ColActDOnt). ColActDOnt specifies the concepts and properties of collaboration events. The ontology has been made publicly available in a machine-readable format and provides a basis for the analysis of cross-system collaboration.

The Use of Benefits Scorecards for Identifying and Measuring Benefits from Enterprise Collaboration Systems

Commercial business software represents a large part of the IT spending of organizations. Whilst the cost of software operations and licenses is relatively easy to determine, organizations find it difficult to measure the benefits that are gained from providing the software to their employees. This is especially problematic for software that is of supportive nature and does not support key business processes as in the case of Enterprise Collaboration Systems (ECS). To address this problem, we demonstrate and evaluate Benefits Scorecards (BSC), a newly developed method for measuring and long-term monitoring of benefits gained from collaboration technology. Due to its innovative nature, the application of BSC has not been widely evaluated in practice yet. We extracted content and usage data from an operational large-scale ECS with more than 5.000 users, developed KPIs using the BSC method and visualized these KPIs in MS PowerBI dashboards. The research presented in this paper is an important step in the successful evaluation of the Benefits Scorecards method.

Use Cases and Collaboration Scenarios: how employees use socially-enabled Enterprise Collaboration Systems (ECS)

In recent years we have seen the emergence of a new type of collaboration software, the so-called “Enterprise Social Software”. The “social features” of this software type have stimulated a renewed interest in Enterprise Collaboration Systems (ECS). In this article we present findings from a longitudinal research project on the introduction and use of ECS in companies. We argue that ERP Systems and ECS are inherently different and that the process-paradigm that is common to ERP cannot be applied identically to ECS. To address this issue, we suggest the two concepts use case and collaboration scenario for the analysis and description of collaboration activity in companies. From the literature and 26 case studies we identified typical use cases and collaboration scenarios that can serve as blueprints for ECS introduction projects. The longitudinal objective of our research is to assist companies with their ECS initiatives and to provide them with a catalog of existing use cases and collaboration scenarios from various industry settings.

Enterprise collaboration systems: addressing adoption challenges and the shaping of sociotechnical systems

This article examines the adoption challenges organizations encounter when they introduce enterprise collaboration systems (ECS) and the measures that can be used, i.e. actions that can be taken, to address these challenges. The aim of the article is to provide an overview of the multitude of different ECS adoption challenges and measures, and based on these, to lay the theoretical and analytical basis for studying the shaping of such complex sociotechnical systems. For this purpose, a qualitative meta-analysis of the academic literature and interviews with companies were conducted, which resulted in a collection of ECS challenges and measures classified and analyzed with regard to their specific spatiotemporal aspects. Drawing on the results of this study, research imperatives, which include the call for studying ECS over multiple time frames and settings, are presented. These will be examined in greater depth as part of our wider, multidisciplinary research program that focuses on enterprise collaboration systems use in the emerging digital workplace.

A Workspace Typology for Enterprise Collaboration Systems

The global COVID-19 pandemic and the need for organisations to provide digital support for work-from-anywhere has put collaboration software into the centre of attention for IT managers. In this paper we examine (self-managed) workspaces in (integrated) Enterprise Collaboration Systems (ECS) that provide the environment for asynchronous communication and exchange of information. Our aim is to better understand how employees use the ECS to support their work. Based on a structured literature review and an in-depth case study of an ECS user company we developed a generic typology of workspaces containing three main categories (community, team and non-work-related) and 5 different types of workspaces. The types are characterised by their purpose, characteristics and possible metrics for their identification. The findings contribute to our understanding of collaborative user activity in enterprise collaboration environments and provide the basis for Social Collaboration Analytics.

Social Collaboration Analytics Framework: A framework for providing business intelligence on collaboration in the digital workplace

Enterprise collaboration systems (ECS) have become the core of the digital workplace in many organizations. More and more companies have introduced this new business software for supporting computer-mediated collaboration among employees. The emergence of ECS in the technical and strategical landscape of companies leads to new challenges in business intelligence and reporting. In contrast to traditional business software such as ERP systems, there are no established methods for decision-making in ECS projects. The collaboration professionals responsible for managing the ECS require insights into the use of an ECS to understand how employees use these systems. By developing the Social Collaboration Analytics Framework, this work provides a framework for establishing the analysis of collaboration activities in the digital workplace (social collaboration analytics) as part of organizations' business intelligence. The Social Collaboration Analytics Framework consists of distinct phases and guides the analysis of ECS data. It includes working steps, recommendations, and guiding questions developed based on the findings from longitudinal research in a university-industry collaboration context and a comparison of established data mining process models.

A Method for Developing and Applying Metrics Profiles for the Benefits Management of Enterprise Collaboration Platforms

Abstract In recent years, Enterprise Collaboration Systems (ECS) have increasingly been introduced as core components of the digital workplace. Organizations have a range of different goals that they want to achieve when they implement a new collaboration software. In our paper, we argue that traditional controlling indicators with a focus on delivery dates and costs are not suitable to measure the return on investment and the benefit that a user company can achieve from the digital support of work. Conventional indicators provide limited value because they cannot be used to directly attribute the contribution of a digital collaboration project to the achievement of corporate goals. The research described in this paper is part of a long-term university-industry research initiative and the findings contribute to a broader understanding of the metric-based analysis of benefits from ECS use in organizations. We present a method for developing and applying “metrics profiles” to ECS, which makes it possible to analyze the realization of benefits over time. The method was tested and evaluated using non-reactive ECS data from an operational collaboration platform that has been in operation for more than seven years.

Traces of design activity: the design of coordination mechanisms in the shaping of enterprise collaboration systems

Enterprise collaboration systems (ECS) are evolving, heterogeneous and sociotechnical systems. They begin life as empty shells without content and their meaning and value unfold over time as users interact with and shape the system to their needs. This paper is part of our research to understand how ECS are being shaped and designed through use. In this paper, we examine coordination mechanisms (CM) as traces of design activity in ECS. Through a structured analysis of two ECS communities we identify key examples of user-designed coordination mechanisms and show how they are used to inscribe specific purposes into ECS communities. Our findings reveal preliminary insights into the ways users are using CM to shape ECS, thus designing them to meet their specific needs. The paper concludes with a discussion of the value of using CM to identify traces of design activity and proposes a future research program to investigate the multiple paths of ECS transformation.

Designs for the Digital Workplace

In this paper, we present the findings of a study to identify digital workplace designs through an analysis of 13 Enterprise Collaboration Systems (ECS) using organizations. Our findings reveal six distinctive workplace designs. Three people-focused designs supporting different levels of sophistication of interaction between people working together to create and share information, and three process-focused designs supporting joint work towards business improvement projects and integration with business processes and with other enterprise systems. The findings show how the digital workplace is being interpreted differently and being shaped by organizations to meet specific organizational requirements.

Supporting group collaboration in an annotation system

Annotation has become a common practice when interacting with digital documents, allowing the addition of information to existing data without corrupting them. Restricting visibility of annotations to groups of users, as usually enforced in enterprise collaboration systems, turns annotations into a tool for focused collaboration among users with common interests. However, providing different levels of visibility in an open Web-based environment is challenging, due to conflicting needs: to keep the annotation process simple, to ensure adequate levels of privacy and confidence to users, and to allow users to filter out irrelevant information. We describe a suite of services for group formation and management, integrated into the existing MADCOW annotation system. We also propose a formal characterisation of groups, introducing atomic operations on which complex functionalities are based. The paper discusses different scenarios and applications and argues for the usability of the proposed integration by presenting the results of experimental tests.

Enterprise Collaboration Systems: An Analysis and Classification of Adoption Challenges

In this paper we present the findings of the first part of a research project examining the adoption, appropriation and long-term use of enterprise collaboration systems (ECS). The aim of the study is to identify the challenges that organizations encounter during the introduction and use of an ECS. Through a meta-analysis and classification of the academic literature and corroborating company interviews five adoption challenge areas were identified: culture, business/ operation, technology in use, benefits, and attitude/ behavior. The challenges and the associated sub-challenges are described and their nature and implications for both theory and practice are discussed.

Adding Structure to Enterprise Collaboration Systems: Identification of Use Cases and Collaboration Scenarios

Abstract In recent years we have seen the emergence of a new type of collaboration software, the so-called “Enterprise Social Software”. The “social features” of this software type have stimulated a renewed interest in Enterprise Collaboration Systems (ECS). In this paper we present findings from a longitudinal research project on the introduction and use of ECS in companies. We argue that ERP Systems and ECS are inherently different and that the process-paradigm that is common to ERP cannot be applied identically to ECS. To address this issue, we developed and tested the IRESS framework which supports companies in their requirements analysis for ECS projects. From the literature and 14 case studies we identified typical use cases and collaboration scenarios that can serve as blueprints for ECS introduction projects. The longitudinal objective of our research is to assist companies with their ECS initiatives and to provide them with a catalogue of existing use cases and collaboration scenarios from various industry settings.

Using social media to drive metadata optimisation

At their core, all enterprise collaboration systems, web content management systems and social networks serve the same fundamental purpose: the sharing of information between teams and of providing new ways for them to connect. A key failure of most organisations is in the ongoing management of metadata taxonomies after deployment. Many companies treat taxonomy creation as a static activity, building out their platform and related taxonomy once, deploying it to the organisation and then moving on to the next project. What happens is that the organisation is slow to adopt the new tools and processes. They cut corners around the application of metadata. They do not implement governance policies. As a result, the relevance of the original taxonomy diminishes, making the system more difficult to use. In the evolution of the enterprise application, social computing is quickly becoming the de facto method for search. The most difficult part of building any social computing strategy is translating end user requirements into achievable and measurable actions that help to meet business objectives. End users want the technology to fit the way they work. The trick is to deliver what they want in a way that makes sense to the business and can be tracked and measured. The key to making social computing work — and for helping end users collaborate, connect with each other and, ultimately, find the content they need to be successful — is managing the metadata.

Enterprise Collaborative Management System Design for Dynamic Alliance

Information sharing is crucial to construct the networked manufacturing dynamic alliance. In dynamic alliance, the enterprise collaborative management system is an effective way to share information. Combining the confirming methods of system circumstance, the design features of Enterprise collaborative management system in Dynamic Alliance are analyzed, the system model and the architecture were built a to prosecute enterprise cooperation under the conditions of information. The knowledge in different enterprises was shared through the system to develop knowledge representing and handling capability.

An enterprise collaborative management system – a case study of supplier relationship management

In this paper, a server‐based enterprise collaborative management system using enterprise application integration technology is developed for trial implementation at Honeywell Consumer Products (Hong Kong) Limited, in the area of supplier relationship management. The system facilitates supplier selection using an integrative case‐based supplier selection and help desk approach to select the most appropriate suppliers, based on their past performance records from a case‐based warehouse. Discusses a case study to integrate Honeywell's supplier rating system and product coding system by case‐based reasoning technique to select preferred suppliers during the new product development process. Finds that the outsource cycle time from the searching of potential suppliers to the allocation of orders is greatly reduced while performance of suppliers can be monitored simultaneously.