Using collaboration technologies to enable industry-university course partnerships: an action research study

This paper discusses a course partnership involving Day & Zimmermann, Inc. (DZI), a large engineering and professional services company, and Temple University. The course was taught between the months of May and July of 1999 and its main goal was to teach students business process redesign concepts and techniques. These concepts and techniques were used to redesign five business processes from DZI’s information technology organization. DZI’s CIO and a senior manager, who played the key role of project manager, championed the course partnership. A Web site with bulletin boards, multimedia components and static content was used to support the partnership. The paper investigates the use of collaboration technologies in combination with communication behavior norms and face-to-face meetings and its effect on the success of the partnership.