Collaboration occurs when two or more people work together. For this to be successful, feedback and iteration is necessary for the group to achieve the best possible results. The most important drivers of collaboration are communication, content management, and workflow control. Communication’s two main elements are communication skill and availability of effective communication systems. Content management must be organized to insure that one members work does not delete, ignore, or interfere with other group member’s work. Workflow control is a procedure by which content is created, edited, used and disposed. An example of this is creating a website.
Components of a collaboration system are the following: hardware, software, data, procedures, people. Two types of hardware are client servers, which are computers and smart phones, and server hardware, which supports the client software. Programs such as Google docs, Microsoft Groove, and Microsoft SharePoint are all examples of software. Data consists of documents, discussions, task lists, and other types of team data. Procedures are put into two categories, procedures for collaboration software and procedures for conducting collaborative project. People are the most important factor of a collaboration system.
There are two ways to meet. Synchronous communication is face to face. It is becoming rarer to have face to face meetings due to busy schedules and the increase use of other communication tools such as Skype. Asynchronous meetings are when members do not meet at the same time. Conference calls, webinars, multiparty text chat, WebEx, SharedView, video conferencing, email, discussion forums, and team surveys all contribute to an increased use of asynchronous meetings.
Managing content is important as well. Shared content with no control can be a large problem. Sending emails with attachments is an example of this. People may not see or receive the attachment. File servers provide more control than emails. Version management tracks changes to documents. Examples of this are wikis, Google Docs and Spreadsheets, and Microsoft Groove.
Businesses use collaboration to solve problems, to manage a project, and to help decision making. Decision making is one of the most often used reasons for collaboration. Operational decisions concern day to day activities and information systems that support these decisions are called transaction processing systems. There are also managerial decisions and strategic decisions that use collaboration.
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