Emerging Collaboration Routines in Knowledge-Intensive Work Processes

Abstract

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.

Emerging Collaboration Routines in Knowledge-Intensive Work Processes

“…Planning, concept and structure development, dividing detailed work, integration and review form the "productive steps" in all cases. Coordination strategies differ • greatly and seem to explain a considerable part of the performance differences between the cases (Hoegl et al, 2004;Sari et al, 2007). We can however not answer the question whether the seemingly "best" coordination approach is really suitable for all settings.…”

Enabling Context-Adaptive Collaboration for Knowledge-Intense Processes

“…Knowledge workers solve complex problem. According to Sari et al (Sari et al, 2007) knowledge work seems to be not routinisable because of the uniqueness of the results and the unique constellation of actors involved. When knowledge workers collaborate in distributed teams, they need many different tools (IT systems; e.g., CAD/CAM environments, ERP systems, IDEs).…”

“…Our idea is to address these problems by enabling context-adaptive collaboration in an integrated shared work environment that integrates the different tools of the team members and adapts the behavior of the shared work environment according to the group context. Though not routinisable, knowledge work shows high similarity across very divergent situations (Sari et al, 2007). We want to identify such recurring situations and possibilities to improve the current interaction by analyzing the context and adapting the behav-ior of the shared work environment to best meet the current situation.…”