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This article aims to identify how knowledge workers develop their own collaboration strategies and techniques for getting their work done in complex, dynamic knowledge intensive work environments. Three case studies have been conducted to explore the nature of routines in different collaborative working settings as they provide sufficient detail to better understand the actual state and problems regarding collaborative work processes among knowledge workers. Evidences from these cases show that coordination and control of projects, tasks, information, and little support by collaboration tools in all work patterns seem to be the biggest issues and there is a need for better understanding of collaboration culture as well as harmonious and integrated redesign of collaboration routines with new collaborative working environment technologies. The analysis of the cases also shows that there are considerable differences in ways of how actors communicate and coordinate their work which leads varying degrees of quality in knowledge intensive work. The results can be used to achieve a smoother collaborative working phase through innovative technical developments.

This article aims to identify how knowledge workers develop their own collaboration strategies and techniques for getting their work done in complex, dynamic knowledge intensive work environments. Three case studies have been conducted to explore the nature of routines in different collaborative working settings as they provide sufficient detail to better understand the actual state and problems regarding collaborative work processes among knowledge workers. Evidences from these cases show that coordination and control of projects, tasks, information, and little support by collaboration tools in all work patterns seem to be the biggest issues and there is a need for better understanding of collaboration culture as well as harmonious and integrated redesign of collaboration routines with new collaborative working environment technologies. The analysis of the cases also shows that there are considerable differences in ways of how actors communicate and coordinate their work which leads varying degrees of quality in knowledge intensive work. The results can be used to achieve a smoother collaborative working phase through innovative technical developments.

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This paper aim s to provide two real SMEs company cases on how livin g-lab methodology could be appli ed to support adoption of ICT by organisation. This study is part of CoVES proj ect which aim s to dev elop advance collabor ation technologi es which ar e affordabl e by SMEs to support th eir vir tu al comm unication an d collabor ations. As th e outcom es of this study, th e CoVES livin g-lab methodology has prov en to be successful, despi te th e di ff er en t degr ees of adap tation on introduc ed ICT at two pr es en ted cas es. KeywordsLivin g-lab, SMEs, Collabor ation, proce edin gs, Product Innov ation, Real tim e comm unication INTRODUCTIONTo collaborate with different project partners or customers across different locations is becoming a common practice for many engineers (Katzy and Sung, 2005;Brynjolfsson 1994; Scott and Timmerman,1999). Apart from good planning and scheduling of works, effectiveness of collaboration between different collaboration partners thus becoming a critical factor for ensuring the ongoing progress and success of projects. The objective of the CoVES (Collaborative Virtual Engineering for SMEs) project is to provide solutions and methods to support engineers who are collaborating in distributed and virtual environment. Although there are already many different types of collaboration solutions in the market (i.e. Skype, Sharepoint, Yahoo Messenger and many others), but most of these solutions are developed by different vendors, hence difficult to synchronise the information across these different solutions. On the other hand, the actual productivity gains through using these collaboration solutions are still not very visible (Brynjolfsson and Yang, 1996). Therefore to understand how these collaboration solutions are used by the users will help to better reveal the productivity gain.Several ICT researchers (Orlikowski,1992;Orlikowski,1993;Scherer and Keller, 2002) have addressed that to better understand how ICT are adopted by organisations, more studies on how ICT are adopted in real organisation settings will provide more insight than control lab experiment. In Orlikowski (1993) adopted structuration theory framework, she has pointed out the importance to address the organisation, technology and individual users at same time to get a good understanding on how IT, organisation and individual users are influencing each other, and hence have better understandings on how IT are adopted. Therefore the objective of this paper will not focus the technical details on how different communication technologies are integrated or synchronised, but to illustrate how SMEs are adopting these technologies, productivity gain and lessons learned. Living Lab methodology which focuses on involving users in research and development processes has been used by several researchers (Folstad, 2008;Katzy, Loeh, and Sung, 2005) as a method to quickly capture user behaviours and obtain fast feedbacks into development requirements. In this way, better understanding on how collaboration solutions are adopted ...