A first application of a Collaboration Maturity Model in the automotive industry

Trends like globalization and increased product and service complexity have pushed organizations to use more distributed, cross-disciplinary, cross-cultural, virtual teams. In this context, the quality of collaboration directly affects the quality of an organization's outcomes and performance. This paper reports on the first field application of a Collaboration Maturity Model (Col-MM) through an automotive industry field study. This model was empirically developed during a series of Focus Group meetings with professional collaboration experts to maximize its relevance and practical applicability. Col-MM is intended to be sufficiently generic to be applied to any type of collaboration and useable to assess the collaboration maturity of a given team holistically through self-assessments performed by practitioners. The purpose of the study reported in this paper was to apply and evaluate the use of the Col-MM in practice. The results should be of interest to academic researchers and information systems practitioners interested in collaboration maturity assessment. The research contributes to the collaboration performance and (IT) project management literature, theory and practice through a detailed case study that develops artefacts that provide evidence of proof of value and proof of use in the field.