Page 74 -

Q2-1 What Are the Two Key Characteristics of Collaboration?

“Mapplethorpe, my contact at Gulf Oil. He wants to know how to read the new 73
multispectral images of his flare stacks. I’m sorry, but I’ve got to call him. I’ll be back
in a few minutes.”
Felix leaves the room.
Cam looks at the two team members who are left.
“Now what?” she asks. “If we go forward, we’ll have to rediscuss everything
when Felix comes back. Maybe we should just take a break?”
Alexis shakes her head. “Cam, let’s not. It’s tough for me to get to these
meetings. I don’t have to work until tonight, so I drove down here just for this.
I’ve got to pick up Simone from day care. We haven’t done anything yet. Let’s just
ignore Felix.”
“OK, Alexis, but it isn’t easy to ignore Felix.”
The door opens and Joni walks in.
“Hi everyone! How’s it going?” she asks brightly. “Is it OK if I sit in on your
meeting?”

Chapter preview

Business is a social activity. While we often say that organizations accomplish their
strategy, they don’t. People in organizations accomplish strategy by working with other
people, almost always working in groups. People do business with people.
Over the years, technology has increasingly supported group work. In your
grandfather’s day, communication was done using letter, phone, and office
visits. Those technologies were augmented in the 1980s and 1990s with fax and
email and more recently by texting, conference calls, and videoconferencing.
Today, products such as Office 365 provide a wide array of tools to support
collaborative work.
This chapter investigates ways that information systems can support collaboration.
We begin by defining collaboration, discussing collaborative activities, and setting
criteria for successful collaboration. Next, we’ll address the kinds of work that
collaborative teams do. Then we’ll discuss requirements for collaborative information
systems and illustrate important collaborative tools for improving communication and
sharing content. After that, we’ll bring this closer to your needs today and investigate
the use of three different collaboration IS that can improve your student collaborations.
Finally, we’ll wrap up with a discussion of collaboration in 2026!

Q2-1 What Are the Two Key Characteristics

of Collaboration?

To answer this question, we must first distinguish between the terms cooperation and collaboration.
Cooperation is a group of people working together, all doing essentially the same type of work,
to accomplish a job. A group of four painters, each painting a different wall in the same room, are
working cooperatively. Similarly, a group of checkers at the grocery store or clerks at the post office
are working cooperatively to serve customers. A cooperative group can accomplish a given task
faster than an individual working alone, but the cooperative result is usually not better in quality
than the result of someone working alone.
In this text, we define collaboration as a group of people working together to achieve a
common goal via a process of feedback and iteration. Using feedback and iteration, one person will