Abstract
Collaboration engineering is defined as an approach to designing collaborative work practices for highvalue recurring tasks, and deploying those designs for practitioners to execute for themselves without ongoing support from professional facilitators (Briggs, Kolfschoten, Vreede, & Dean, 2006; Briggs, Vreede, & Nunamaker, 2003; Vreede & Briggs, 2005). To enable the transition of collaboration support skills and their application by practitioners we need to be able to design easy to use, robust collaboration support, both in terms of process support and technology support. Collaboration Engineering research therefore addresses both a design and deployment challenge, that when overcome enable more sustained implementation of collaboration support. In this article, we will further explain the collaboration engineering approach; the challenge it addresses, the details of the approach and the research challenges it poses.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Collaboration Engineering Designing (verb): To create, document and validate a collaboration process design (Briggs et al., 2006).
Recurring Task: A task that must be conducted repeatedly, and that can be completed using a similar process design each time it is executed (Briggs et al., 2006).
Collaboration Engineering: An approach to designing collaborative work practices for high-value recurring tasks, and deploying those designs for practitioners to execute for themselves without ongoing support from professional facilitators (Briggs et al., 2006).
Collaboration Engineering Design (noun): An artifact defining the sequence and logic of a set of steps for attaining some set of objectives, and the conditions under which these steps will be executed (Briggs et al., 2006).
Collaboration: Joint effort towards a group goal (Briggs et al., 2006).
Deploying (verb): Implement the collaboration process and support in a way that it becomes a self-sustaining practice within an organization (Briggs et al., 2006).
High-Value Task: A task from which an organization derives substantial benefit or forestalls substantial loss by successful completion (Briggs et al., 2006).
Goal: A desired state or outcome (Locke & Latham, 1990).