Communications of the ACM
The Psychology of Collaboration
IBM Fellow Irene Greif
Jeffrey Gluck
IBM fellow Irene Greif, the director of collaborative user experience at IBM Research, says that some of the toughest collaboration problems have little to do with technology.
Greif helped found the field of computer-supported cooperative work, which built on the work done by anthropologists studying office dynamics. The researchers found situations in which communication breaks down because there was too much automation involved.
"Mostly that happened because the automation was online, people were not involved, and personal conversations were eliminated," Greif says.
However, today's organizations link formal workflows and informal information, and there is an opportunity to act instead of just worry, she says. Moreover, social software is now connecting people in much more natural ways.
At IBM headquarters, Greif says the company takes ideas that work on the Internet and applies them to its office culture, such as Dogear, which is based on the Internet bookmark sharing site Delicious.
In the future, Greif says new collaboration tools will rely on technologies that are resilient to managerial controls.
From Technology Review
View Full Article
Abstracts Copyright © 2011 Information Inc. 
, Bethesda, Maryland, USA
No entries found