The Quality of Collaboration Process Design

Despite mixed research results, the practical value of collaboration support such as Group Support Systems (GSS) and Facilitation is well established. One of the key challenges in collaboration support is the design of collaboration processess. Such design should be based on a theory on the quality of collaboration process design. The main challenge in this research is to identify the factors that impact the quality of a collaboration process design. Collaboration Engineering (CE) is an approach to designing and deploying collaboration processes for high value recurring tasks. CE intends to enable an organization to increase the quality of collaboration for a recurring mission critical task in the organization, for which ongoing facilitation support is too expensive. Instead of a professional facilitator, a practitioner supports the group based on a short training in which he learns to execute a collaboration process design made by an expert. This design should support the group in efficiently achieving its goal through a high quality collaboration process, and needs to be transferable to the practitioner. The latter implies that the design should be clear, complete, reusable, predictable and flexible. To create such designs we need to specify the factors that foster high quality collaboration, and we need to offer support for design of a transferable high quality collaboration process design. This research will elicit these factors and offer them in a CE support tool.