The challenge of understanding the range of collaboration products available in the marketplace is complicated by several realities. There are currently more than 2,000 collaboration software products in the marketplace, 1 and collaboration technology vendors continue to introduce new products and upgrades at the rate of more than a dozen per week. These numbers may continue to increase as software development methods become more streamlined, reducing the cycle times for introducing new products to the marketplace.

Organizations depend on their work practices to focus employees' knowledge, skills and attention on value creating activities that support organizational goals. Researchers have made considerable progress in developing tools and processes that improve the design and development of new work practices, but far too often new work practices are not widely and readily accepted in the workplace. The Value Frequency Model has been proposed as one way to explain and predict when intended users would be willing to change to a new work practice. In the four years since its introduction much has been learned through the use and study of this model. This dissertation elucidates the model's theoretical foundations and clarifies the mechanisms and inter-relationships that underpin the model to propose an updated research model. It then presents the results from the first-ever large-scale empirical study of the Value Frequency Model. A revision to the theory and validated tools that could increase the likelihood of successful development and deployment of new work practices are presented.

The IT community has a long history of developing theory to explain when people will change their behaviors to adopt new technology systems. Two current technology adoption theories, the Technology Adoption Model and the Value Frequency Model, draw from different groups of referent theory: Reasons Theories (RTs) and Expectancy Value Theories (EVTs). RTs and EVTs make different assumptions about how people form attitudes toward behavioral changes (i.e., to adopt or not). Having a better understanding of how people make judgments that affect their behavioral choices could help guide the choice of referent theory when developing new IT theory. This study examined how people responded to attitude-shaping scenarios as a way to gain insight into the assumptions that could be guiding their choices. Their responses indicated a tendency to assign values in ways consistent with the assumptions and processes articulated in EVTs.

Patterns were originally developed in the field of architecture as a mechanism for communicating good solutions to recurring classes of problems. Since then, many researchers and practitioners have created patterns to describe effective solutions to problems associated with disparate areas such as virtual project management, human-computer interaction, software development and engineering, and design science research. We believe that the development of patterns is a design science activity in which an artifact (i.e., a pattern) is created to communicate about and improve upon the current state-of-practice. Design science research has two critical components, creation and evaluation of an artifact. While many patterns have been created, few, if any, have been evaluated in this sense. In this paper, we propose a framework to evaluate patterns in any domain and provide examples of how to use the evaluation framework. This process of evaluation could help researchers refine extant patterns and improve the possibility of creating sustainable best practices for a given domain. We believe this evaluation framework begins an important dialogue related to the evaluation of patterns as artifacts of design science research. We draw upon the literature associated with patterns, evaluation of design science research, and research methods to develop this framework for evaluating patterns in a more consistent and rigorous manner.

Collaboration Engineering (CE) is an approach to designing collaborative work practices for high-value recurring tasks and transferring those designs to practitioners to execute for themselves without the ongoing intervention of professional facilitators. Because CE projects can entail considerable cost, it would be useful to have a way to predict whether a group would be likely to adopt a collaborative work practice were one developed for them. In this paper we present an interview protocol for that purpose. Using the logic of the Value Frequency Model (VFM), we derived the protocol with two layers of questions. The first layer is for discovering potential collaboration engineering opportunities; the second is for evaluating the degree to which practitioners might be willing to adopt a new work practice were one offered. We used the protocol in two field studies; one with a team of experienced collaboration engineers working in the headquarters of a large multi-national organization, and one with a group of students with no CE experience working with a variety of for-profit and non-profit organizations in their community. The qualitative and quantitative outcomes of these studies suggest that the interview protocol may be a useful means for discovering and evaluating CE opportunities. Outcomes also provide support for VFM, the theory from which the protocol was derived.

Virtual worlds provide technology capabilities that could transform education, communication and collaboration, and project management.

Information systems (IS) researchers have made considerable progress on defining and formalizing structured methods to support collaborative development of information systems. Concepts and methods for transferring IS artifacts to practitioners in ways that give rise to sustained use nonetheless remain more an art than a science. A better understanding of the mechanisms that give rise to willingness or unwillingness to change could help IS developers predict whether intended users would be willing to embrace a new system if it were offered to them. Such understanding might also help IS researchers to develop more effective and reliable deployment concepts and methods for their solutions. This paper reports the findings of an action research study of change-of-work-practice among 17 groups at the headquarters of a 3,000-person organization. All of the groups considered changing to a new project-trackingand-status system which supported a new collaborative project management approach. Five of the groups adopted the new system while 12 either did not adopt, or adopted but then abandoned, the new IS. The goal of this study was to explore whether the change-of-practice behaviors and choices that manifested in the field were consistent or inconsistent with the Value Frequency Model (VFM), a new causal theory for willingness-tochange that emerged from the Collaboration Engineering literature. Observed outcomes were consistent with the theory, which suggests that the constructs and relationships proposed by the VFM may provide useful insights to help explain and predict willingness to change to new information technologies and the work practices in which they are embedded.

Metaverses are immersive three-dimensional virtual worlds in which people interact as avatars with each other and with software agents, using the metaphor of the real world but without its physical limitations. The ubiquitous availability of high speed Internet access has spurred enormous interest in virtual worlds like Second Life and World of Warcraft, both in terms of user gaming and as a new technological platform for global virtual collaboration. These environments have potential for richer, more engaging collaboration, but their capabilities have yet to be examined in depth. Of particular interest in this paper is the use of metaverses for virtual team collaboration. We develop a conceptual model for research in metaverses that is based on five key constructs: (1) the metaverse itself, (2) people/avatars, (3) metaverse technology capabilities, (4) behaviors, and (5) outcomes. We present an in-depth characterization of metaverse technology capabilities from a socio-technical view that recognizes the potential for variation in emergent interaction and in outcomes. Example propositions and a discussion of key issues and challenges show how the model can be used to further research and practice in virtual teams in the context of these new environments.

This study examines convergence under differing divergent starting conditions in order to identify techniques which could lead to more creative outcomes and more satisfied session participants. Specifically our research asked whether or not groups in a convergence activity are more creative and satisfied based on whether they start with pre-defined ideas (i.e., examples to start with) or brainstorm on their own first. The results of the lab experiment suggest that groups who rely on pre-defined ideas when working on a convergence activity are both more creative and more satisfied than groups who brainstorm to start.

Patterns were originally developed in the field of architecture as a mechanism for communicating good solutions to recurring classes of problems. Since then researchers have created patterns to provide guidance and solutions associated with virtual project management, software development and engineering, human computer interaction, and design science research. However, there has been limited emphasis on developing guidelines for evaluating the validity of patterns. In this paper, we propose an evaluation framework for patterns that draws upon the literature associated with patterns, philosophy y of science and research methods. The evaluation framework can be used to validate patterns in a more consistent and rigorous manner.

Collaboration Engineering is 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. Collaboration Engineers design collaboration processes that are combinations of fundamental patterns of collaboration. This paper contains the results of a meta analysis of literature related to the following six fundamental patterns of collaboration: generate, reduce, clarify, organize, evaluate, and build consensus. We describe each fundamental pattern of collaboration with common subtypes of these patterns. Ideation, gathering, and reflecting are subtypes of generation. Filtering, summarizing, and abstraction are subtypes of reduction. Sense making and building shared understanding are subtypes of clarification. Categorizing, outlining, sequencing, creating causal decomposition, and modeling are subtypes of organization. Choice and preference communication are subtypes of evaluation. Building agreement and building commitment are subtypes of consensus building. This article clarifies these patterns and describing common subtypes. It also describes the key interventions required to evoke them, we also describe constructs used in the literature to measure these patterns. Together, the fundamental patterns, subtypes, and constructs used to measure these subtypes are combined into a framework for the explication and measurement of interventions in collaborative work.

Collaboration engineering (CE) projects can run for months and can require substantial expenditures of effort and resources. CE is an approach to designing collaborative work practices for high-value recurring tasks and transferring those designs to practitioners to execute for themselves without the ongoing intervention of professional facilitators. Because CE projects can entail considerable cost, it would be useful to establish a basis for predicting whether such efforts would be likely to result in a self-sustaining and growing community of practice for the resulting work practice. In this paper we use the value frequency model (VFM) to derive an interview protocol to identify new CE opportunities and to assess whether a CE solution would be likely to succeed. We then test the protocol in two cases; one with experienced collaboration engineers in a large multinational organization and a second with a group of knowledge workers with no CE experience working with a variety of profit and non-profit organizations. The findings appear to be consistent with the theory, suggesting that the interview protocol may be a useful tool for discovering and assessing CE opportunities. We propose several directions for future research.

The rise of the global marketplace and the advancing of the World Wide Web have given impetus to rapid advances in groupware. Hundreds of products now exist in the groupware marketplace, and more appear monthly. To ease the cognitive load of understanding what groupware technologies are, what capabilities they afford, and what can be done with them, we analyzed hundreds of computer-based collaboration-support products and distilled their attributes into two complementary schemas – a classification scheme and a comparison scheme. The classification scheme provides a way to organize the many products from the rapidly expanding groupware arena into a small set of relatively stable categories. The comparison scheme provides the means to compare and differentiate collaboration technologies within and across categories. Taken together, the classification and comparison schemas provide a basis for making sense of collaboration technologies and their potential benefits to the collaboration community.

Group Support Systems (GSS) have been used to support facilitated ideation sessions for years and have been studied from a number of different perspectives. Throughout this time the norm for running electronic brainstorming sessions has been for participants to work on their own workstations. A review of applicable literature suggests that pairing participants at GSS workstations could result in higher quality inputs and participant satisfaction. This proposition is examined with a lab experiment to test for differences between paired and unpaired facilitated GSS sessions. The results of the experiment suggest that pairing participants does yield higher quality ideas from facilitated ideation without negative perceptions relating to production blocking.

Collaboration engineers design collaborative work practices for high-value recurring tasks and transfer them to practitioners to execute for themselves without the on-going intervention of professional facilitators. It would be useful to increase the predictability of developing self-sustaining and growing community of practice around these designed processes. This paper reports a field study that applies the Value Frequency Model (VFM) for change-of-practice to the deployment of an engineered work practice to groups in a large global organization. The results suggest that VFM provides useful insights for discovering candidate tasks for Collaboration Engineering (CE) interventions, for designing new work practices, and for designing transition interventions for creating a self-sustaining and growing community of practice.

This chapter introduces Collaboration Engineering as an approach to developing more effective collaborative sessions for interdisciplinary teams. Collaboration is the foundation for success for many academic teams; however, the benefits of collaborative sessions can be lost when group processes are not well understood and the needs of interdisciplinary teams are not met. As such, this chapter will identify key facets of how interdisciplinary teams develop and evaluate potential solutions. Groupthink and disciplinary ethnocentrism are also presented, as these factors can negatively impact interdisciplinary teams, and techniques are proposed that can help teams avoid these potentially negative effects. The central position of this chapter is that Collaboration Engineering based on proven group processes and guided by design recommendations specific for interdisciplinary team collaboration can result in session designs that improve outcomes for interdisciplinary teams.