collaboration

Collaboration in Organisations: Theories, Tools, Principles, and Practices

by Paola Di Maio

IEEE/DEST DIGITAL ECOSYSTEMSTUTORIAL PISANULOK, THAILAND26 FEBRUARY 2008

OVERVIEW

Definition and classification Theories Benefits Principles Tools Practices Open Clinic

COLLABORATION/COMMUNICATION ARE ESSENTIAL TO:

TRANSFORMATION AGILITY INFORMATION CONVERGENCE PROCESS INTEGRATION RESOURCES OPTIMIZATION LEAN MANAGEMENT

DEFINITION:

“collaboration” = Latin “colaborare” — “to labor together.”

a process by which entities (people, organizations, and organisms) work together to accomplish a common goal.

CLASSIFICATION 1/1

Esther Dyson “Framework for Groupware” focused on three

different types of “locus of control,” based on the entity that will be

benefiting from the groupware: 1. User-centered 2. Work- or object-centered 3. Process-centered

CLASSIFICATION 2/

1. Tools — these would be the most granular layer; for example,

documents, messages, file

2. Channels — channels allow transfer of information among users, like communication exchange including repositories with multiple user access.

3. Structures — structures have the capability to add additional layers of meaning or information; anything that would allow the modification of tools is a collaboration structure.

4. Process — this is the collaboration layer where group decisions can be made and implemented; this would include anything from brainstorming to project management tools.

TYPES: INTERNAL VS EXTERNAL

Typically, collaboration can be internal or external; in contemporary extended organizations, however, these firm boundaries are increasingly flexible. For example, economies today rely heavily on outsourcing, and therefore all processes must allow for some degree of external collaboration. This is also true when considering the importance of collaboration in the supply chain and the adoption of service-oriented architectures (SOAs) in general.

1. Improving communication flow and knowledge exchange 2. Making organizational processes more efficient 3. Effectively leveraging and making use of the social capital;

that is, the hidden network of resources that is available to any organization via the social networks but that too often is tacit and hidden due to lack of social knowledge and communication

Transcending the boundaries ( ORGANIZATIONAL/INFORMATION)

BENEFITS OF COLLABORATION

THEORIES

A Dynamic Theory of Collaboration, Laura Black

Collaboration, knowledge, and trust are actually part of a wider and complex dynamic model. There they assert that “the domain of IT inherently crosses boundary, therefore requires a high degree of collaboration.”

Proceedings of the 36th Hawaii International Conference on System

Sciences, 2002 (http://csdl.computer org/comp/proceedings/hicss/2003/

1874/03/187430092c.pdf

THEORY OF PERMUTATION OF ACTION

Social worlds theory — one of the foundations of collaboration

theory, where social worlds are units of collective action and

working spheres characterized by fluid boundaries, diverse, and

multiple components — is in turn based on Anselm Strauss’Theory

of Continual Permutation of Action, as an analytical framework to

understand and explore the interwoven nature of mutually

dependent actions of collaborating actors. This idea is still

contemporary in our age of digital, interactive communication.

CO-EVOLUTION

EVOLUTION OF INTERACTION

GROUP PSYCHOLOGY

SOCIAL THEORY/SOCIAL NETWORKSPEOPLE+RELATIONSHIPS+TECHNOLOGY

SOCIAL SYSTEMS ARE COMPLEX

Complex systems share at least two common traits:

(1) system components can change internal states by interacting with other components

(2) the rules of behavior change dynamically following interaction. The complexity of open, flexible social systems is increased by a

higher number of participants, with each participant covering multiple roles, heterogeneous environments, different languages, and cultures. Given a social system formed by an unlimited number of actors, which in turn have unlimited interaction potential, the resulting picture looks somewhat chaotic.

LEVELS OF COLLABORATION

networking, coordination, cooperation, collaboration

Cooperation and collaboration do not differ in terms ofwhether or not the

task is distributed, but by virtueof the way in which it is divided; in

cooperation thetask is split (hierarchically) into independent subtasks;in

collaboration cognitive processes may be (heterarchically) divided into

intertwined layers. Dillenbourg et al.

TRANSCENDING THE ORGANIZATIONAL BOUNDARIES

Boundaries Aristotelian logic, which prevails in Western thinking,

teaches us to separate to discern. In Western logic, boundaries

are necessary to make systems work

in Eastern logic, a lot of importance is attached to the connecting space between entities that is considered essential for closed systems to expand.

ORGANISATIONAL BOUNDARY

MORE BOUNDARIES

osiris.sund.ac.uk/~cs0gco/IFIP/img001.GIF

BA

“Ba” is a Japanese word meaning “space” and, in knowledge management, is used to indicate a “shared context in motion where knowledge is created, shared and used.”

Where Does Collaboration Belong?

Where do we place this issue?

Whose job is this?

How does it fit in our chart?

What weight should it have on our budgets?

What priority should it have in our schedules?

Is collaboration more a business or a technology issue?

Should it be the responsibility of the human resources or

the IT manager?

PERSPECTIVES

From the business viewpoint, collaboration consists mainly of a

set of behaviors and practices that can shape the technological infrastructure and impact the entire process chain.

From the technology viewpoint, collaboration refers to a set of

tools and IT services, as well as new types of open architectures

and innovative system designs devised to support a connected

and dynamic organization. Collaboration is a driver in pro-

moting a shift in thinking where the question is no longer about

setting boundaries but rather about transcending them.

BEHAVIOURS

Collaboration is a driver in promoting a shift in thinking where the question is no longer about setting boundaries but rather about transcending them.

This leads to another fact that is becoming obvious across all sciences: the blurring of cognitive boundaries as they have been imposed by “conventional” value systems. It’s becoming accepted that, realistically, nothing simply fits a single category anymore; everything is in a state of flux and changing fast.

INTERDISCIPLINARITY

Disciplinary: Epistemologies, assumptions, knowledge, skills, methods within the boundary of a discipline. g.  Physics; History; Psychology

Multidisciplinary: Using the knowledge/understanding of more than one discipline. eg Physics and History; Biology and Architecture

Interdisciplinary: Using the epistemologies/methods of one discipline within another. g. Biochemistry; Ecophilosophy; Astrophysics

Transdisciplinary: Focus on an issue such as pollution or hunger both within and beyond discipline boundaries with the possibility of new perspectives

www.hent.org/transdisciplinary.htm

KNOWLEDGE TREE

TECHNOLOGY, MANAGEMENT, POLICY - MIT

INTERDISCIPLINARITY

PRINCIPLES

10 PRINCIPLES OF COLLABORATION

Nonaka, Toyama, Scharmer describe 10 principles of dynamic configuration of places for maximum knowledge exchange, as

TOOLS

GROUPWARE

http://www.ead.anl.gov/project/images/pa/47.gif

SOCIAL NETWORK VISUALIZATIONS

Social Network

Source: www.ymatsuo.com/papers/foafws04/asada/

PEOPLE NETWORKS USING FOAF Source: kengo.preston-net.com/archives/foaf_semaview.jpg

Source:myunderstanding.wordpress.com

Collaborative Tagging

COMPONENTS OF THE SSD

THE VISION

http://www.collectiveintelligence.info/

novaspivack.typepad.com/nova_spivacks_weblog

http://mikeg.typepad.com/perceptions/2007/05/index.html

REALITY CHECKS

ONTOLOGY SEMANTIC CONSISTENCY INTELLIGENT SYSTEMS SELF ORGANISING SYSTEMS

COLLABORATIVE ONTOLOGY

professional-learning.eu

IMPACT ON THE ORGANISATION

Thanks also to increased speed and quantity of information exchanged among individuals — the faster the interaction between members of a community, the faster it transforms — organizations have started recognizing that departments should not necessarily be viewed separately.

ENTERPRISE INTEGRATION

HIERARCHY

HOLARCHY

weblogs.asp.net/ralfw/archive/2005/06.aspx

HOLONS

A holon (Greek: holos, "whole") is something that is simultaneously a whole and a part. The word was coined by Arthur Koestler in his book The Ghost in the Machine (1967, p. 48).

HOLONS

HOLONIC ARCHITECTURES

HOLONIC INFORMATION NETWORK

www.lboro.ac.uk/.../Holonic-Small-Enterprise.jpg

HOLONIC ARCHITECTURES

weblogs.asp.net/ralfw/archive/2005/06.aspx

CONNECTORS BETWEEN LEVELS

weblogs.asp.net/ralfw/archive/2005/06.aspx

MORE HOLONIC INTEGRATION

weblogs.asp.net/ralfw/archive/2005/06.aspx

IN PRACTICE

BARRIERS TO COLLABORATION 1. Lack of unplanned contact 2. Knowing who to contact about what 3. Difficulty in initiating contact 4. Inability to communicate effectively 5. Lack of trust and willingness to communicate openly

David Atkins from Oregon University discusses lessons learned in a global collaboration effort at Lucent Bell Labs and identifies the following five main obstacles to collaboration:

TOP 10 COLLABORATION FEARS

Technological (levels of security and access, efficiency

of retrieval, IT skills)

Cultural (how can company policy be enforced?; what are the legal risks of handling spontaneous content?; how productive really is the use of the new technology?; how are we going to manage all this unstructured information?; what’s the ROI?).

The Seven Pillars of Collaboration, Michael Sampson

1. Shared access to team data 2. Location-independent access to team data, people, and

applications 3. Real-time joint editing and review 4. Coordinating schedules with team-aware scheduling

software 5. Building social engagement through presence, blogs, and IM 6. Enterprise action management 7. Broadening the network through automatic discovery

services

CONDITIONS:

A collaborative culture develops when two conditions are true:

(1) individuals feel free to express themselves creatively without fear of judgment,

(2) individuals feel free to modify and evolve what has been expressed by others without fear of disrupting anything. Freedom and lack of fear are seldom present in the workplace

EXAMPLE: Open Source Philosophy

The most prominent contemporary school and best example of

collaborative practice is the open source movement. Open source does not apply just to intellectual property or code development but also — and perhaps more importantly — to a cognitive model where every piece of output, be it physical and/or knowledge, can be used and reused by others to produce additional transformations. In social worlds, intelligence and creativity are incremental; they exist and develop thanks to aggregation. In order to facilitate this, collaboration must be enabled and supported. Exciting new project frameworks like open research, (OpenCourseWare at MIT, Creative Commons)

GOALS SETTING? (SOME)

Define specific goals and document the anticipated value-added of collaboration to those goals.

Ensure alignment of goals with organizational culture. Obtain buy-in to goals from all participants. Define metrics to gauge progress toward goals. Define schedule or ongoing mechanism to realign goals based

on system evolution.

Integration of Collaborati on Processes

Deconflict collaborative processes with existing work paradigms. Define who needs to be online to achieve collaboration goals. Specify criteria for system access. Define types and classification level of data to be on the system. Integrate groupware into existing systems and data flow. Define and document roles and responsibilities. Designate responsibility and process for content management. Define and document the role of facilitators within the system. Support evolving needs of users and organizations. Ensure availability of data and personnel resources.

http://collaboration.mitre.org/prail/IC_Collaboration_Baseline_Study_Final_Report/3_0.htm

COLLABORATION IN PRACTICE“for on-line collaboration to be most effective, participants must:

(1) see the value of expending the (considerable) effort required,

(2) be comfortable with and trust the medium,

(3) be comfortable with and trust their instructor (or facilitator) and their fellow collaborators,

(4) feel as though they are immersed in a rich, engaging, and rewarding social experience.”

Sandra C. Hughes et al.

Beyond Teams: Building the collaborative Organization, 10 principles

1. Focus collaboration on achieving business results 2. Align organizational supportsystems to promote ownership 3. Articulate and enforce “a few strict rules” 4. Exploit the rhythm of convergence and divergence 5. Manage complex tradeoffs on a timely basis 6. Create higher standards for discussions, dialogue, and information sharing 7. Foster personal accountability 8. Align authority, information, and decision making 9. Treat collaboration as a disciplined process 10. Design and promote flexible organizations

COLLABORATION CULTURE

Study - suggests that high performance tea ms believe seven things:

1) That each member of the team is accountable 2) trustworthy & competent, 3) willing to give & take, 4) honest and open, 5) willing to share credit & responsibility for the results, 6) optimistic about the outcome of the project, and

7) that their collective mission is important.

GETTING STARTED

Foster a collaboration culture Identify and remove barriers to adoption Explore all horizons but don’t necessarily set fixed goals Provide training if necessary Highlight and promote professional and organizational benefits Reward innovation Set up regular “open” brainstorming sessions and follow up plans and ideas by

using virtual collaboration tools Manage by letting it happen Measure unquantifiable parameters Be ready for long-term organizational change Provide organisational support and skills Set aside play time Prepare for change management/conflict resolution

QUESTIONS AND DISCUSSION

Contact: paola.dimaio@gmail.com