Challenges to Collaborative Tool Adoption in a Manufacturing Engineering Setting: A Case Study

This study examined a collaborative tool intervention within a geographically-distributed, engineering-design team in a large manufacturing company. Baseline data collection to determine user requirements was followed by deployment of collaborative tools and subsequent data collection to assess the impact of the collaborative tools on team processes. A small proportion (1/3) of the team adopted the introduced collaborative tools, and that tool use had a positive impact on collaborative work. Findings from this study suggest that collaborative tools must be clearly superior to existing practices to merit the effort of deployment, adoption, and subsequent use, since the burden of learning and mastering a new tool in a corporate environment may not outweigh the perceived benefits.