Collaboration Systems

Concept, Value, and Use

Jay F Nunamaker Jr, Robert O Briggs, Nicholas C Romano Romano Jr

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780765638458
• eBook ISBN: 9781317474227
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Computer Science

This volume emphasises knowledge transfer from the lab to the field and describes collaboration technology through three lenses: Proof of Concept, Proof of Value, and Proof of Use. The contributors focus on work practices that extend collaboration into a structured form where groups can work together to solve real-world complex problems. As with the other AMIS volumes, the contributors comprise internationally known experts in the field of Information Systems.Includes online access.

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION TO COLLABORATION SYSTEMS,
PART 1

A Brief History and Lessons Learned

JAY F. NUNAMAKER JR., ROBERT O. BRIGGS
AND NICHOLAS C. ROMANO JR.

Abstract: Collaboration systems have existed in many forms for a long period of time. It is only recently that they have empowered us with the ability to interact simultaneously and at a distance with electronic computers and data networks. This volume presents collaboration systems from three perspectives: concepts, value, and use. The first introductory chapter sets the stage for the remainder of the volume by providing a brief history of recent events and lessons learned from over four decades of scientific laboratory and field research. Neither the brief history nor the lessons learned are intended to be comprehensive but rather are based on the experiences of the editors, who have played large roles in the area of collaboration systems within the discipline of information systems. We ask the reader to keep this brief history and these lessons learned in mind when reading the remainder of the volume. Chapter 2 presents what the editors believe to be the foundations of modern computer-based collaboration systems and also outlines themes in the remainder of the text.

BRIEF HISTORY OF COLLABORATION

Even at the dawn of the computer age, hackers found useful ways to use computers to support collaboration. Collaboration systems, however, have been around much longer than computers. In the 1940s, for example, collaboration systems were based on conference tables, telephones, teletypes, shortwave radios, Morse code, even carrier pigeons, and the ubiquitous memo. Wide hallways were a critical success factor for information-intensive organizations. During World War II, the hallways in the Pentagon were so full of functionaries hustling memos from one office to another that traffic rules were established to prevent injury accidents at doorways and intersections. Winston Churchill’s war room, which today is an underground museum, consisted of a large conference table surrounded by wall-sized maps. Staff in ancillary rooms monitored cable traffic and other communications and brought in the latest information. Assistants climbed tall ladders to update the maps with the latest information.

Collaborative computing had a small, almost insignificant beginning. Programmers of early systems started leaving messages in files on shared storage devices where other programmers would be likely to find them. While most computer users were still punching cards and optimizing algorithms, however, Douglas Engelbart envisioned a fully interactive, fully integrated, fully collaborative multimedia computer system for qualitative, creative, synergistic effort on complex human problems. In 1962 he released a report titled “Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework,” which opened with this statement:

By “augmenting human intellect” we mean increasing the capability of a man to approach a complex problem situation, to gain comprehension to suit his particular needs, and to derive solutions to problems. Increased capability … is taken to mean a mixture of the following: … the possibility of gaining a useful degree of comprehension in a situation that previously was too complex, … and the possibility of finding solutions to problems that before seemed insoluble. And by “complex situations” we include the professional problems of diplomats, executives, social scientists, life scientists, physical scientists, attorneys, designers—whether the problem situation exists for twenty minutes or twenty years. We do not speak of isolated clever tricks that help in particular situations. We refer to a way of life in an integrated domain where hunches, cut-and-try, intangibles, and the human “feel for a situation” usefully co-exist with powerful concepts, streamlined terminology and notation, sophisticated methods, and high-powered electronic aids. (Engelbart, 1962)

The technology to realize Engelbart’s vision did not yet exist, but progress was rapid. Engelbart and his colleagues went to work to create a user interface that would integrate computers seamlessly with human thinking processes. They developed a number of approaches to let users interact with content on a screen. In 1963, Engelbart invented a mouse to control the cursor (which he called a bug) for screen selection. Extensive testing showed that the mouse had substantially higher usability than light pens and a host of other approaches. With that solution in hand, the team went to work on the first graphical user interface.

Meanwhile, at the 1964 World Fair, AT&T demonstrated the world’s first video conferencing based on two analog simplex 1 Mhz video lines and one analog audio channel. In 1965, a proto-email system called MAILBOX and an early messaging system called SNDMSG were developed at MIT. These tools used a flat file approach to enable communication among people sharing the same computer. At that time computers were stand alone; they could not communicate with other computers.

In 1967, however, the ARPANET (Advance Research Projects Agency Network, the predecessor to the Internet) went live with the first packet-switch architecture. Up to that time, computers were only connected point to point. Packet switching allowed many computers to interconnect as a network. The first two nodes on the ARPANET were UCLA and Engelbart’s team at the Stanford Research Institute. Engelbart’s team was working on the oN Line System (NLS), the first integrated digital collaborative environment. In 1968 Engelbart demonstrated the NLS to an audience of 1,000 in what came to be called “The Mother of All Demos.”

The NLS had computer-based chat, video conferencing, and screen sharing. It provided for joint interactive near-WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) authoring of digital multimedia (text and graphics) documents with cut-copy-paste and text formatting, and it allowed users to annotate content. It also provided features for visible and invisible hyperlinks in text and in graphics, and it had a “hierarchical view controller” that let the users browse the hyperlinked layers of content. NLS had a directory structure for user content. It demonstrated for the first time document retrieval based on both simple keyword searching and multiple weighted keyword searching. The architecture of the system foreshadowed what we now call a service-oriented architecture. NLS was decades ahead of its time. It established the core concepts that are now integral to end-user computing. It also firmly established the potential of computers to serve as tools for human collaboration.

In 1970, a group led by Murray Turoff (now professor emeritus at the New Jersey Institute of Technology) developed a mainframe-based system using dumb terminals and long-distance telephone lines to support a Delphi process among large groups of geographically separated participants. Validation studies demonstrated that groups of twenty to thirty people could successfully contribute to complex collaborative decision processes. In 1971, they adapted the Delphi system to create the EMISARI system, and deployed it in the field to support the federal Office of Emergency Preparedness (OPE), which had just taken responsibility for President Richard Nixon’s Wage and Price Freeze program.

In 1972, the first fully realized email came to the ARPANET with the formalization of the SMTP email protocol that made it possible to address a message to a specific user on any computer attached to the network. By 1976, the first commercial email packages had appeared, and email grew to account for three-quarters of the traffic on the ARPANET. Other packet-switching networks also emerged, such as Tymenet and Telnet. Each ran on its own protocols, so data could not move easily between networks. By 1977, the personal computer revolution was well under way, accompanied by the emergence of a variety of local area networking technologies like Ethernet from Xerox Park and IBM’s Token Ring. As with the wide area networks, local area networks ran on their own protocols and thus data did not move easily between them. The standardization of the TCP/IP protocol in 1982 made it possible to transmit data from computers on any kind of network to computers on any other kind of network, giving rise to the network of networks that eventually became the Internet. Networked computers, in turn, provided the platform for the Group Decision Support Systems (GDSS) movement.

The GDSS movement had its roots in several academic disciplines, among them software requirements engineering, decision support systems, and the social sciences. In the 1960s, as the scope and impact of information systems grew, so too did the number of stakeholders who had a say in system requirements. In 1965, Daniel Teichroew initiated the ISDOS (Information System Design and Optimization System) project with the goal of automatically generating computer code from system requirements captured in the form of problem statements. As a first step, Teichroew and his team created the Problem Statement Language, a structured English representation of system requirements that could be read by both humans and computers. In 1966, Jay Nunamaker worked with Teichroew to develop the Systems Optimization and Design Algorithm (SODA), a program that could convert PSL (Problem Statement Language) problem statements into a system design that consisted of system architecture models and data models.

In 1973, the team tested key parts of its approach on a large inventory system for a U.S. Navy shipyard. More than 4,000 stakeholders had a say in the requirements for that system. The team suggested that the users record their requirements in PSL so that they could be automatically checked for completeness, consistency, and correctness. They were surprised to discover, however, that most of the users refused to write their requirements in the structured English of PSL, because it seemed far too technical. The Navy had to hire hundreds of analysts to sit with the users and capture their requirements in PSL. A quick calculation revealed that there would be not be enough analysts in the world to capture system requirements in this fashion.

While Teichroew continued to work on computer-aided software engineering (CASE), Nunamaker began to focus on how to support work processes by which thousands of stakeholders might be able to generate, organize, evaluate, and reach agreements on the requirements for complex large-scale systems, working in natural language without the intermediation of consultants. In 1977, Nunamaker and Benn Konsynski developed an early collaborative electronic brainstorming tool running on a VAX minicomputer as a part of the PLEXSYS system. Each participant started with a different electronic page. Each time a participant added an idea to a page, the system would jump the participant to a different page containing ideas contributed by others. There they could add another idea, and jump again to a new page. Field and laboratory experiments with the approach demonstrated that, under certain conditions, groups using the page-swapping tool could produce many more ideas of higher quality than could groups using conventional brainstorming techniques and nominal group techniques. Further, with the electronic tool, the larger the group, the more ideas it produced, up to groups of size forty (the number of terminals they had available at the time). This latter finding delayed publication of the early results for three years because it contradicted well-established evidence that groups larger than five became less productive with each additional person added to the group. Some reviewers charged that the data must have been faked. Eventually, though, sufficient evidence of the value of the approach overcame reviewers’ concerns, and findings were published. The brainstorming tool was re-implemented on LAN-based PCs, and additional tools were added for generating, organizing, evaluating, and elaborating ideas.

In the late 1980s, Gary Dixon and his team at University of Minnesota began work on the SAMM (Software Aided Meeting Management) system and pioneered experimental research on social and psychological topics using group decision support systems. In 1989, the first commercial GDSS products, GroupSystems and VisionQuest, appeared in the marketplace.

In the early 1990s, the GDSS movement split into two branches: the electronic meeting systems (EMS) branch, which was later renamed group support systems (GSS), and the computer-supported cooperative work branch (CSCW). The CSCW branch focused on improving the user experience for small, unstructured groups. They developed a wide selection of tools for communication and for co-creation of texts and graphics. They noted that people engaged in computer-mediated communication lost important nonverbal social cues, and so focused on restoring what cues they could and synthesizing new cues for those that could not be restored. Among the many contributions of the CSCW community were, for example, presence indicators to let people know the identity and status of people with whom they were working; awareness indicators so that people could know immediately who was taking what actions and what were the effects of those actions; and telecursors and avatars, so that people could communicate at a distance with gestures. Some in the CSCW community were philosophically opposed to designing group processes in advance, positing that group processes should emerge naturally as the group worked to maximize creativity and satisfaction.

Researchers in the GSS branch of the movement, by contrast, focused fully on designing structured collaborative work practices that would improve the effectiveness and efficiency of complex collaborative tasks involving large numbers of stakeholders, and providing technology to support those structured processes. GSS grew into suites of five to ten highly configurable tools to support a variety of kinds of interactions in a variety of workplace tasks, and results in the lab and field were promising. In 1986, a year-long study of about 30 production-problem resolutions projects in an IBM plant showed a 50 percent reduction in labor hours, a 90 percent reduction in project cycle times, and better-quality work products. A follow-up study the following year at five plants showed similar results.

In 2001, Robert O. Briggs and G.J. de Vreede founded the field of collaboration engineering, an approach to designing collaborative work practices for high-value recurring tasks and deploying them to practitioners to execute for themselves without ongoing support from collaboration experts. In 2004, eighteen collaboration engineering researchers from around the world met for a week in a castle in Omaha, Nebraska to formalize the definition and map out a ten-year research agenda for the field. Much of that research has been conducted and published. Briggs and Vreede began work on the ThinkLets design pattern language for collaborative work practices, a collection of named, scripted techniques that predictably invoke known variations on six patterns of collaboration identified by the collaboration engineering research community: generate, reduce, clarify, organize, evaluate, and build commitment. Gwendolyn Kolfschoten advanced that work by developing a conceptual model for collaboration design patterns that made the techniques independent of the technologies upon which they were instantiated, so a designer could implement the same work practice on a wide variety of technical platforms and yet obtain the same predictable group dynamics.

The collaboration engineering research community also developed and tested theories to explain key outcomes of interest to collaborators—for example, productivity, creativity, consensus, idea quality, technology transition, willingness to change, and satisfaction. Before the advent of collaboration engineering, it typically required a year of apprenticeship for a novice to attain competence with a GSS. With the concepts of collaboration engineering, users only require about two days of training to achieve competence. While that gain is substantial, the underlying problem still remains: without training, people cannot realize the potential benefits of group support systems. In 2008, this insight gave rise to a new research question for the collaboration engineering community: “How can we package collaboration expertise with collaboration technology in a form that nonexperts can use successfully with no training on either the techniques or the technologies?” Work on that question proceeds on many fronts at a number of universities.

The mid-2000s also gave rise to a variety of new social computing systems—wikis, blogs, content-sharing systems based on tag clouds and folksonomies, and large-scale social networking systems like Facebook and LinkedIn. It may be that we are only just beginning to see potential of such systems to create value for society. The history of collaboration systems is far from complete.

LESSONS LEARNED

Hundreds of studies from dozens of universities working on a wide range of complex collaborative tasks produced similar results. A number of key lessons emerged from these studies, among them:

Anonymity Can Be a Valuable Tool for Improving Group Outcomes

Industrial and organizational psychologists at IBM initially opposed a feature that allowed people to contribute ideas to a brainstorming session anonymously, arguing that (a) it would lead to irresponsible flaming and buffoonery, and (b) their organization had a healthy, open culture, so anonymity yielded no benefit. Both lab and field studies revealed, however, that people contributed more and higher quality ideas when they were allowed to do so anonymously. An archetypal example emerged when the president of IBM participated in a GSS demonstration with his top twelve executives to address the brainstorming question, “What are the last details we must address before final roll-out of our new strategic plan?” The anonymous responses said things like, “This plan will never work. We’ll spend all this money and we’ll still be in trouble. This plan is doomed from the start.”

The president asked, “We’ve been working on this plan for a year-and-a-...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Series Editor’s Introduction
• 1. Introduction to Collaboration Systems, Part 1: A Brief History and Lessons Learned
• 2. Introduction to Collaboration Systems, Part 2: Foundations
• Part I. Proof of Concept
• Part II. Proof Of Value
• Part III. Proof of Use
• Part IV. Future Directions
• Editors and Contributors
• Series Editor
• Index