A Program of Collaboration Engineering Research and Practice: Contributions, Insights, and Future Directions

Abstract

Collaboration Engineering (CE) is an approach for the design and deployment of repeatable collaborative work practices that can be executed by domain experts without the ongoing support of external collaboration professionals. Since 2001, CE has been an active and productive topic of research that has attracted scientists from different backgrounds and disciplines. CE research started with studies on ways to transfer professional collaboration expertise to novices using a pattern language called thinkLets. Subsequent research focused on the development of theories to explain key phenomena, the development of a structured design methodology, training methods, technology support, design theories, and various field and experimental studies focusing on specific aspects of the CE approach. This paper details the contributions from CE research and practice based on a literature assessment of 331 publications. It extracts the key insights from the body of CE research thus far, identifies significant areas of inquiry that have not yet been explored, and looks ahead at the CE research opportunities that are emerging as our society, organizations, technologies, and the nature of collaboration evolve.

Key words and phrases:

• Collaboration Engineering
• collaboration
• thinkLets
• patterns of collaboration
• online collaboration

Acknowledgments

We are thankful to Raven Chapman and Naif Alawi who worked tirelessly to collect and manage the CE publications. We are also grateful to the reviewers for their constructive feedback.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Gert-Jan de Vreede

Gert-Jan de Vreede ([email protected]) is a Professor of Information Systems and Decision Sciences at the Muma College of Business at the University of South Florida and Interim Dean at the College of Business at the University of South Florida Sarasota-Manatee. He received his Ph.D. in Systems Engineering from Delft University of Technology in The Netherlands. He is co-founder of Collaboration Engineering as a scholarly discipline and co-inventor of the thinkLets design pattern language. His research focuses on crowdsourcing, collaboration engineering, convergence, and creativity. He published in such journals as Journal of Management Information Systems, MIS Quarterly Executive, Journal of the Association for Information Systems, Small Group Research, and others.

Robert O. Briggs

Robert O. Briggs ([email protected]) is a Professor of Management Information Systems at the Fowler College of Business at San Diego State University. He earned his Ph.D. in Information Systems from University of Arizona. Dr. Briggs researches the cognitive foundations of collaboration and uses his findings to design and deploy new collaboration systems and new collaborative work practices. He is co-founder of Collaboration Engineering as a scholarly discipline and co-inventor of the thinkLets design pattern language. He has published over 250 peer-reviewed manuscripts related to economic, social, political, cognitive, emotional, and technological aspects of collaboration. Dr. Briggs is the inventor of Computer Assisted Collaboration Engineering, platforms for rapid design, development, and deployment of task-specific collaboration systems that enable practitioners to execute well-designed collaboration processes with no training on either the tools or the techniques. He has acquired $10 million in external grant funding to support that research. He lectures around the world on the logic of scientific inquiry.