Managers and Collaboration Technology: a Business Perspective for Improving Management Support Systems

Over the last years managers have expanded their role in operations and nowadays they make decisions faster than in the past. Collaboration technology promises to support managers in doing so. Hence, the present situation is favorable for a redesign of management support systems (MSS) incorporating collaboration technology. To examine such technology, we consider “analyst”and “consumer”-type managers’ perspectives and cover collaboration technology for different devices. Based on findings from a literature review and arguments validated in structured manager interviews, we propose four initial design guidelines facilitating collaboration for managers: (1) Coordination: MSS should indicate the availability of other users, send read confirmations, and provide document sharing. (2) Communication: MSS should enable on-topic annotations and sending them to other users “at the push of a button.” (3) Cooperation: MSS should provide a comprehensive managerial selfservice search function. (4) Devices: For shared documents and textual annotations tablets have become managers most wanted smart device type.