Group Support Systems Research Articles

A Repeatable E-Collaboration Process Based on ThinkLets for Multi-Organization Strategy Development

In recent years, multi-organizational collaboration has become more and more important in both business and research. We conducted an action research (AR) intervention with a consortium of Finnish universities that needed to revise its joint strategy. We designed and facilitated a repeatable collaboration process for this multi-organizational strategy development. The process was built using the Collaboration Engineering (CE) approach with thinkLets, which provides expert-level advice for novice facilitators, and it was powered by Group Support Systems (GSS). Our overall impression of CE’s ability to provide valuable design and facilitation support for complex processes is very affirmative. The consortium was satisfied with the intervention, as it saved huge amounts of time compared with conventional strategic work. The process was also seen as more democratic, because the GSS tools enabled equal participation during the session. Our study also provides a ready-to-apply CE process recipe to organizations for revising their strategy. Through this recipe, supplemented with knowledge on thinkLets, the strategy development process may easily be repeated by other facilitators or even practitioners.

Identifying Quality, Novel, and Creative Ideas: Constructs and Scales for Idea Evaluation

Researchers and practitioners have an abiding interest in improving tools and methods to support idea generation. In studies that go beyond merely enumerating ideas, researchers typically select one or more of the following three constructs, which are often operationalized as the dependent variable(s): 1) idea quality, 2) idea novelty, which is sometimes referred to as rarity or unusualness, and 3) idea creativity. It has been chronically problematic to compare findings across studies because these evaluation constructs have been variously defined and the constructs have been sampled in different ways. For example, some researchers term an idea 'creative' if it is novel, while others consider an idea to be creative only if it is also applicable, effective, and implementable. This paper examines 90 studies on creativity and idea generation. Within the creativity studies considered here, the novelty of ideas was always measured, but in some cases the ideas had to also meet additional requirements to be considered creative. Some studies that examined idea quality also assessed novelty, while others measured different quality attributes, such as effectiveness and implementability, instead. This paper describes a method for evaluating ideas with regard to four dimensions--novelty, workability, relevance, and specificity--and has identified two measurable sub-dimensions for each of the four main dimensions. An action-research approach was used to develop ordinal scales anchored by clearly differentiable descriptions for each sub-dimension. Confirmatory factor analysis revealed high loadings among the sub-dimensions that comprise each dimension as well as high discriminant validity between dimensions. Application of this method resulted in high inter-rater reliability even when the method was applied by different raters to different problems and to ideas produced by both manual methods and group support systems (GSS).

Human versus automated facilitation in the GSS context

Many group support systems (GSS) are currently being used with the help of a human facilitator who guides the group members through their use of the decision models. Another way to guide the use of these systems is to embed some facilitation mechanisms into the GSS itself (i.e., automated facilitation). Using the Adaptive Structuration Theory, this study investigated the tradeoffs associated with human facilitation and automated facilitation. Groups using a multicriteria decision model in the context of a resource allocation task were exposed to one of two experimental conditions: (1) human facilitation, or (2) automated facilitation. Results indicated that automated facilitation, embedded in the GSS, was as effective as human facilitation in enhancing the faithfulness of appropriation of the technology.

From the editors

From the editors

The Concept Plot: A Concept Mapping Visualization Tool for Asynchronous Web-Based Brainstorming Sessions

Electronic brainstorming systems have been shown to lead to more ideas, yet unsupported face-to-face brainstorming is still widely preferred. This paper proposes a graphical user interface for a web-based system for design problem-solving or other intellective tasks involving convergent and divergent thinking. Referring to the literature on group support systems and information and knowledge visualization, the study extends features of concept mapping and synthesizes these into a prototype called the Concept Plot (CP). Based on an advertising design task, the paper shows how the CP can be collaboratively constructed in two directions, as text and pictures are uploaded onto nodes, and these nodes scaled up or down as users click to evaluate ideas. The expectation is that this integrated visualization would diminish information overload, while enhancing the social dynamics of the process. Also presented is the pilot deployment of a Flash prototype. The results were inconclusive, yet promising that a study with more participants might demonstrate the functional and affective benefits of the CP.

A COLLABORATIVE SOFTWARE CODE INSPECTION: THE DESIGN AND EVALUATION OF A REPEATABLE COLLABORATION PROCESS IN THE FIELD

The use of software products in today's world has increased dramatically making quality an important aspect of software development. There is a continuous need to develop processes to control and increase software quality. Software code inspection is one way to pursue this goal. This paper presents a collaborative code inspection process that was designed during an action research study using Collaboration Engineering principles and techniques. Our inspection process was implemented as a sequence of thinkLets, chunks of facilitation skill, that were subsequently field tested in a traditional paper-based and Group Support System (GSS)-based environment. Four inspections were performed on four different pieces of software code in two different organizations. Results show that regardless of the implementation, the process was found to be successful in uncovering many major, minor, and false-positive defects in inspected pieces of code. Overall observations and feedback suggest that the collaborative inspection process was considered to be productive and satisfactory. GSS inspections were more effective, especially in terms of major defects. GSS inspections were also found to be more efficient. Finally, the GSS inspections outperformed the paper inspections from a practical perspective: logging and managing defects in a GSS was far superior.

On theory-driven design and deployment of collaboration systems

Early efforts to design and deploy collaboration systems were more art than science, but they produced some solid successes. Commercial groupware products now support millions of collaborations per year. Under certain circumstances teams that use group support systems perform far better than groups that do not. However, as impressive as the achievements are in this field, we can do better. A rigorous theoretical approach to the design of collaboration technology and process can lead us to non-intuitive design choices that produce successes beyond those possible with an intuitive, seat-of-the-pants approach. This paper explains the simple structure of a rigorous scientific theory and offers examples of theory-driven design choices that produced substantial benefits. It then differentiates rigorous theory from several classes of theory that have intuitive appeal, but cannot inform design choices. It concludes that the logic of the theory-driven design approach suggests that the most useful focus for collaboration technology researchers would be the technology-supported work-process, rather than just the technology.

The use of group support systems in focus groups: Information technology meets qualitative research

This paper explores focus groups supported by group support systems (GSS) with anonymous interaction capability in two configurations: same time/same place and same time/different place. After reviewing the literature, we compare and contrast these anonymity-featured GSS-supported focus groups with traditional focus groups and discuss their benefits and limitations. We suggest directions for future research concerning GSS-supported focus groups with respect to technological implications (typing skills and connection speeds), national culture (high and low context; power distance), and lying behavior (adaptation of model of Hancock, J. T., Thom-Santelli, J., & Ritchie, T. (2004). Deception and design: The impact of communication technology on lying behavior. Proceedings of the 2004 conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 129-134), whereby lying is a function of three design factors: synchronicity, recordability, and distributedness).

Technology supported collaborative learning for higher education: Comparative case studies in Tanzania

To learn, a person has to be able to communicate effectively with others about the knowledge to be learned. Communication processes in classrooms can be supported by Group Support Systems (GSS), that enable students to communicate anonymously and in parallel. Group Support Systems experiences suggest that the technology increases observed learning, self-reported learning, on-task participation, and satisfaction with the learning experience. The authors discuss case studies from higher education in Tanzania. The particular benefit of GSS in this environment was threefold: First, it encouraged meaningful interaction among students and between students and teachers. Local culture normally hinders this. Second, it allowed all participants to discuss sensitive topics freely. Finally, it exposed students to collaborative technologies that are expected to play a pivotal role in (global) collaborative development activities. Clearly, the use of collaborative technologies enables the participation of a broader range of students. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Supporting Distributed Groups with Group Support Systems

The leadership role facilitates group process by structuring group interaction. How leadership affects group performance in GSS settings remains one of the least investigated areas of GSS research. In this study, the presence of a group leader is found to make a significant difference in objective decision quality and satisfaction with the decision process. At the same time, perceived decision quality and consensus are not significantly different in groups with a leader and those without one. A content analysis of comments by group leaders shows that group leaders are effective when making comments on clear group objectives and interaction structure in the early stages of group interaction. In the later stages, however, it becomes more important for group leaders to offer comments encouraging interaction and maintaining group cohesion

Sampling and pooling of decision-relevant information: Comparing the efficiency of face-to-face and GSS supported groups

Past research has suggested that decision-making groups, when communicating face-to-face (FtF), suffered from information sharing biases that affected the quality of the final decision: they tended to discuss previously-shared information before they started to discuss information not known to all, and discussed more of previously-shared than unshared information. In our study we examined these effects in groups that interacted FtF or using a group support system (GSS). Four-member groups discussed a requirements elicitation task in which some requirements were known to all members before starting their discussion, while other requirements were known only to two members of the group. Both GSS and FtF groups exchanged a large percentage of the shared requirements. However, the GSS groups were more effective in communicating unshared requirements. On average, FtF groups discussed shared requirements sooner and unshared requirements later than did GSS groups. Our study also compared empirical results with predictions from an information-sampling model of group discussion in order to assess the effectiveness of the model in computer-mediated group communication.

ThinkLets: a collaboration engineering pattern language

Under the right circumstances, teams that use professional facilitators and Group Support Systems (GSS) experience significant gains in productivity and quality of work life. However, because of the expense, facilitators are not available to many teams that could benefit from their interventions. The emerging field of Collaboration Engineering aims to formulate an approach for designing high-value recurring collaboration processes that capture the best practices of master facilitators and packaging the processes in a fashion that can be transferred to practitioners to execute for themselves without the ongoing intervention of professional facilitators. Towards that end, Collaboration Engineering researchers have developed thinkLets, an Alexandrian design pattern language. A thinkLet is a named, packaged facilitation technique, captured as a pattern that collaboration engineers can incorporate into process designs. These patterns can be instantiated at design time in such a way that a practitioner can use them to recreate a predictable pattern of collaboration. This paper articulates the details of thinkLet design patterns and explains the utility that facilitators, collaboration engineers, researchers and practitioners are deriving from thinkLets in the field. It examines the parallels and differences among the goals and structures of the thinkLets pattern language, Alexander's architectural patterns and software design patterns.

Rules as received practice: historical perspective and implications for managers

PurposeTo report on an exploratory study on unwritten rules carried out in Australia, place this study in the context of the historical development of thought on rules and discuss implications for management learning.Design/methodology/approachThis paper has three parts. The first part reviews the theoretical scholarly writings on rules as social structures from the early sociology of the nineteenth century to the organizational theory of the present day. Theories of structural functionalism and institutionalism are acknowledged as historical influences on rules and the assumptions likely to be made by managers about compliance and implementation. In the second part, the research is described in which staff members from five organizations were invited to technology‐supported focus groups. The data collection was supported by group support systems technology, which allowed anonymous inputs. Staff were asked, in various ways, about both official rules and unwritten rules. These included the use of scenarios, reported here. In the third part, the findings are discussed and three implications for management learning are suggested.FindingsThe research produced evidence that rules exist, are acted upon and require a view of the rule‐implementer as complex and holistic. The findings supported Giddens' theory of structuration which suggests that the individual rule taker draws on rules and also personal sensibility when involved in social encounters.Originality/valueThis paper provides contemporary data on rules as perceived practice which is presented within the context of the historical development of relevant management theory. Attention is drawn to three implications for management learning, which are: what rules mean, assumptions of managers, and deep listening as social responsibility. The future research agenda should be of value to those considering a practical contribution to this original field of institutional inquiry.

Enhancing information sharing in group support systems (GSS)

Decision-making groups collectively have a larger information pool than any individual within the group. When groups employ group support systems (GSS) for discussion, task-relevant information that is common to all is exchanged more frequently than information that is unique to one person alone. Not only that, GSS groups also exhibit a lack of information processing with regards to unique information that members contribute during group discussion. A laboratory experiment was used to evaluate (1) the level of information exchange in GSS groups and (2) the effects of expertise role-assignment on the pooling and processing of unique information in GSS groups given two different pre-discussion information distributions. Forty-eight 3-members groups participated in a group judgment task, which required them to decide the most likely murderer from 3 suspects, in a murder case. Results indicated that regular GSS groups tend to pool more common information and partially shared information as compared to unique information. When role-assigned, GSS groups pooled more unique information during discussion and retained more unique information after discussion than non-role-assigned groups. As a result, role-assigned GSS groups had sufficient information to identify the most likely murderer in the murder mystery, as compared to regular GSS groups.

Using Causal Mapping with Group Support Systems to Elicit an Understanding of Failure in Complex Projects: Some Implications for Organizational Research

This paper reflects upon the use of causal mapping supported by a Group Support System (GSS) in a particular legal setting. The mapping method and GSS tool was used for the forensic analysis of eight major engineering and construction projects where the contractor intended to claim significant compensation (typically in excess of $20m). Necessarily detailed records were kept of every aspect of the analyses and processes adopted. This paper is an examination and reflection upon analysis of these records, with particular attention to the process. The task of capturing the way in which participants (witnesses) in a project ‘make sense’ of a cost and time overrun is an important aspect of forensic analysis as they have an experience based perspective, that has often involved dealing with high levels of complexity as projects move from planned order through to what they describe as “absolute chaos”. In addition the requirement to account for, and be held responsible for, behaviors that that may in retrospect be seen as incompetent raises interesting issues in determining the validity of the data capture and analyses. Moreover, participants’ views regarding the complex causality of outcomes, reflected in the causal map, are tested through the use of a simulation model replicating the causal map. The implications of this approach as a research method for undertaking organizational research are thus considered by drawing upon experiences of using the approach to develop the case for litigation in several disruption and delay claims. In particular the paper addresses the issues related to defensiveness of participants, anonymity, accessing multiple perspectives in a group setting, organizational learning and the ‘changing of mind’ of participants, and developing an organizational memory.

GSS for Multi-Organizational Collaboration: Reflections on Process and Content

Multi-organizational collaboration has become the norm for modern organizations as they seek to survive and prosper in increasingly turbulent times. These collaborations can take many forms, but face problems due to different management styles, different cultures, and different operating modes of the participant organizations. These differences usually cause difficulties for the multi-organizational teams that are set up to make the collaboration operational. Group Support Systems (GSSs) is one possible way of supporting these multi-organization collaboration teams (MCTs). This paper builds and describes a conceptual framework that highlights the critical characteristics of these teams and how GSS might support their activities. The framework is based on a detailed analysis of three case studies using three different GSSs.

A Tale of Two Cities: Case Studies of Group Support Systems Transition

Research shows that, under certain circumstances, people using GSS can be substantially more productive than people who do not. However GSS has been slow to transition into the workplace. This paper argues that the Technology Transition Model (TTM) may be a useful way to explain this seeming paradox. The paper presents a case study of GSS transition in two organizations – one where a self-sustaining and growing community of users emerged, and one where it did not. Following TTM, it explores the frequency with which users perceived cognitive, economic, affective, political, social, and physical value from using the system. Comparison of the cases reveals differences in perceptions of value along several of these dimensions that are consistent with TTM. The findings suggest the model may be a useful way to explain the transition of collaboration technology, but more research will be required to test the model more rigorously.

A Critical Analysis of Decision Support Systems Research

This paper critically analyses the nature and state of decision support systems (DSS) research. To provide context for the analysis, a history of DSS is presented which focuses on the evolution of a number of sub-groupings of research and practice: personal DSS, group support systems, negotiation support systems, intelligent DSS, knowledge management-based DSS, executive information systems/business intelligence, and data warehousing. To understand the state of DSS research an empirical investigation of published DSS research is presented. This investigation is based on the detailed analysis of 1,020 DSS articles published in 14 major journals from 1990 to 2003. The analysis found that DSS publication has been falling steadily since its peak in 1994 and the current publication rate is at early 1990s levels. Other findings include that personal DSS and group support systems dominate research activity and data warehousing is the least published type of DSS. The journal DSS is the major publishing outlet; US ‘Other’ journals dominate DSS publishing and there is very low exposure of DSS in European journals. Around two-thirds of DSS research is empirical, a much higher proportion than general IS research. DSS empirical research is overwhelming positivist, and is more dominated by positivism than IS research in general. Design science is a major DSS research category. The decision support focus of the sample shows a well-balanced mix of development, technology, process, and outcome studies. Almost half of DSS papers did not use judgement and decision-making reference research in the design and analysis of their projects and most cited reference works are relatively old. A major omission in DSS scholarship is the poor identification of the clients and users of the various DSS applications that are the focus of investigation. The analysis of the professional or practical contribution of DSS research shows a field that is facing a crisis of relevance. Using the history and empirical study as a foundation, a number of strategies for improving DSS research are suggested.

Leveling the Organizational Playing Field—Virtually

One of the most heralded features of group support systems (GSSs) is their ability to democratize group processes. Through minimizing barriers to communication, GSSs are proposed to create greater opportunities for member influence than those created in groups meeting face-to-face. To test this notion, a meta-analysis was conducted examining the aggregate impact of GSS use on six influence variables across 48 experiments. Results indicate that groups using a GSS experience greater participation and influence equality, generate a larger amount of unique ideas, and experience less member dominance than do groups meeting face-to-face. The impact of GSS use on decision shifts is moderated by the national culture of participants. The implications of these findings for research on GSS use are examined, and directions for future research are offered.

Idea generation through computer‐mediated communication

PurposeBrainstorming is a well‐known group process for generating new ideas and stimulating creativity. Important as well as robust findings have been achieved in determining which factors contribute most to facilitating or hindering the group's ideas productivity. Research aimed at comparing face‐to‐face (FTF) with computer‐mediated communication (CMC) led to the conclusion that this latter shared with the nominal group technique the advantages of avoiding either the blocking effect or the identification of the source. More recently, attention has turned to the possible effects of group support system (GSS) in the mediating cognitive processes of generating new ideas. The present study aims to examine the effects of the type of tool and of the anonymity condition on the quality, quantity and diversity of the generated ideas, as well as on group members' satisfaction.Design/methodology/approachUses a 2 × 2 factorial design combining two different GSS tools (topic commenter vs EBS) with anonymity versus non‐anonymity.FindingsIt was found that anonymity generated more satisfaction among the group members. A marginal effect on satisfaction was also found to be related with the type of tools. Contrary to expectations, the EBS tool was not found to generate greater diversity of ideas. An interesting finding not anticipated was the impact of technology on the flow of ideas and on the emergence of new conceptual categories, probably due to alternative strategies of task structuring.Research limitations/implicationsThe use of students as subjects, and the running of the experimental work in a scholarly context, could have contributed to the elimination of fears and to freeing the participants from any inhibition in the anonymity conditions. Within an organisational context with higher social stratification, such anonymous procedures could have significant outcomes. Future research will have to examine whether this effect is relevant to other types of topics and other populations. Another aspect that it is important to re‐examine is the effect of anonymity on the emergence of minority ideas, which could stimulate innovation.Practical implicationsThe type and characteristics of tools were shown to be a decisive factor in the participants' satisfaction, in the communication process and in the idea generation and clustering processes. Although tenuous, this set of data could mean that the characteristics of the tools interfere with the cognitive mechanisms present in the brainstorming technique.Originality/valueExamines the effect of the technology and anonymity in ideas generation within a group context on the satisfaction of the participants.