Abstract
This paper takes a socio-technical perspective and presents preliminary findings from a study of a partnership between two organisations—where a virtual team, made up of members from both organisations, came together to codevelop a product. The authors assess what is gained and what is lost in substituting technology for the traditional (same place, same time) working environment and share lessons learned about the use of collaborative technology and processes.
The original version of this chapter was revised: The copyright line was incorrect. This has been corrected. The Erratum to this chapter is available at DOI: 10.1007/978-0-387-35404-0_19
Chapter PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Ackerman, Mark. (Ed.) (1996). Proceedings of the ACM 1996 conference on computer supported cooperative work. New York: ACM Press.
Albrechtsen, H. and Jacob E. (1998). The dynamics of classification schemes as boundary objects in electronic libraries. In Classification in the electronic environment edited by Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star. Library Trends, 47(2), Fall 1998, 293–312 (background paper)
Argyris, C. and Schon, D. A. (1996). Organizational Learning II, Reading, MA.: Addison-Wesley
Bannon, L., and Schmidt, K. (1989). CSCW: Four characters in search of a context, EC-CSCW ‘89, Proceedings of the First European Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, Gatwick, London, 13–15 September 1989.
Baskerville, R. and Wood-Harper, T. (1996). A critical perspective on action research as a method for IS research. Journal of Information Technology 11(4), 235–246.
Brown, J. S. and Duguid, P. (1991). Organizational learning and communities of practice: Toward a unified view of working, learning, and innovation. Organization Science 2 (1), 58–82
Brown, J. S. and Gray, E. S. (1995). After reengineering: The people are the company. Fast Company, Premiere issue, 78–81.
Carstensen, Peter H. (1997). Toward information exploration support for engineering designers. In S. Ganesan (Ed.) Advances in concurrent engineering —97, August 2022, Oakland, Michigan, Technomic, 1997, pp. 26–33.
Christie, A. M., Levine, L., Morris, E. J., Zubrow, D., Belton, T., Proctor, L., Cordelle, D., and Ferotin, J-E. (1996). Software process automation: Experiences from the trenches. (SEI Technical Report SEI-96-TR-013). Pittsburgh, PA.: Software Engineering Institute.
Checkland, Peter. (1999a) Systems thinking, systems practice: A 30 year retrospective. New York: John Wiley and Sons.
Checkland, Peter. (1999b). Soft systems methodology: A 30 year retrospective. New York: John Wiley and Sons.
Constantine, L. L. (1993). Work organization: Paradigms for project management and organization. Communications of the ACM 36 (10), 34–43.
Davenport, Thomas H. and Pearlson, Keri. (1998). Two cheers for the virtual office. Sloan Management Review39 (4), 51–65.
Gharajedaghi, Jamshid. (1999). Systems thinking: Managing chaos and complexity: A platform for designing business architecture Boston: Butterworth Heinemann. Grudin, Jonathan, Poltrock, Steven E., and Patterson, John F. (1996). CSCW Overview (tutorial notes). CSCW 96, Computer Supported Cooperative Work Conference, November 16–20, 1996, Boston Mass.
Handy, Charles. (1995). Trust and the virtual organization. Harvard Business Review, May-June, 40–50.
Heineman, G. T., Botsford, J. E., Caldiera, G., Kaiser, G. E., Kellner, M. I., Madhavji, N. H., (1994). Emerging technologies that support a software process life cycle. IBM Systems Journal 33 (3), 501–529.
Henry, Jane and Hartzler, Meg. (1998). Tools for virtual teams: A team fitness companion. Milwaukee, WI: ASQ Quality Press.
Isgar, Thomas. (1993). The ten minute team: 10 steps to building high performing teams. Boulder, Colorado: Seluera Press.
Kock, Ned. (1999). Process improvement and organizational learning:The role of collaboration technologies. Hershey, USA: Idea Group Publishing.
Kraut, Robert E., Miller, Mark D., and Siegel, Jane. (196). Collaboration in performance of physical tasks: Effects on outcomes and communication. In Mark S. Ackerman (Ed). Proceedings of the ACM 1996 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work,(pp. 57–66). Boston, Mass: ACM Press.
Leonard-Barton, D. (1988a). Implementation as mutual adaptation of technology and organizations. Research Policy 17,(5) (Oct.), 102–110.
Leonard-Barton, D. (1988b). Implementation characteristics of organizational innovations. Communication Research 15, 603–631.
Lipnack, J. and Stamps, J. (1997). Virtual teams: Reaching across space, time, and organizations with technology. New York: Wiley.
Lundberg, C. C. (1991). Creating and managing a vanguard organization: Design and human resources lessons from Jossey-Bass. Human Resource Management, 30 (1), 89–112.
McMaster, Michael D. (1996). The intelligence advantage; Organizing for complexity. Boston: Butterworth-Heinemann.
McMaster, Tom, Vidgen, Richard, and Wastell, David. (1998). Networks of association and due process in IS development. In Larsen, T., Levine, L., and DeGross, J. (Eds.). (1999). Information systems: Current effects and future changes. Proceedings of the Joint IFIP WG 8.2 and WG 8.6 Working Conference on Information Systems (pp. 341–357 ). Helsinki, Finland: IFIP, Laxenberg, Austria.
Mitchell, Alex and Graham, Scott. (1995). Concurrency control in CSCW systems. January 16, 1995. Unpublished paper. See http:// www.dgp.toronto.edu/people/alex/unpublished/concurrency.html
Nonaka and Takeuchi (1995). The knowledge-creating company. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Redmiles, D. (1993). Reducing the variability of programmers’ performance through explained examples. Human Factors in Computing Systems, INTERCHI ‘83 Conference Proceedings, ACM, April 1993, pp. 67–73.
Schein, Edgar H. (1999). The corporate culture survival guide: Sense and nonsense about culture change. San Francisco: CA, Jossey-Bass Publishers.
Schein, E. (1996). Three cultures of management: The key to organizational learning, Sloan Management Review, Fall, 9–20.
Schein, E. (1997). Organizational learning: What is new? Working paper, MIT Sloan School of Management. On the WWW at http://learning.mit.edu/res/wp/index.html
Sibbet, David, Drexler, Allan, and The Grove Consultants International. (1994). Graphic guide to team performance. San Francisco, CA. The Grove Consultants International.
Somers, Pat, Rudman, Carrie and Stevens, Clarke. (1997) Designing Web Interfaces for Real-time Collaboration - US WEST Advance Technologies. Presentation at the Third Conference on the Human Factors and The Web, June 12, 1997, Denver, Colorado. http://www.uswest.com /web-conference/proceedings/somers.html
Stebbins, R. A. (1993). Social world, life-style, and serious leisure: Toward a mesostructural analysis. World Leisure and Recreation 35(1), Spring 1993, 23–26.
Wellins, Richard, Schaaf, Dick and Harper Shomo, Kathy. (1994). Succeeding with teams: 101 tips that really work. Minneapolis, MN: Lakewood Books.
Wheatley, Margaret J. (1999). Leadership and the new science revised: Discovering order in a chaotic world. Berrett-Koehler Publishers.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2001 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing
About this paper
Cite this paper
Levine, L., Syzdek, G. (2001). Across the Divide: Two Organisations Form a Virtual Team and Codevelop a Product. In: Ardis, M.A., Marcolin, B.L. (eds) Diffusing Software Product and Process Innovations. TDIT 2001. IFIP — The International Federation for Information Processing, vol 59. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-35404-0_10
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-35404-0_10
Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA
Print ISBN: 978-1-4757-4975-5
Online ISBN: 978-0-387-35404-0
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive