Collaboration engineering: Designing repeatable processes for high-value collaborative tasks

By collaborating people can accomplish more than they could as separate individuals. Yet, achieving effective team collaboration remains a challenge. Organizations struggle to make collaboration work. They often resort to implementing technologies, while experiences show that technology alone seldom is the answer. Collaboration processes need to be explicitly designed structured and managed to maximize the focus of purposeful effort. This is at the heart of a new area of research: Collaboration Engineering - designing recurring collaboration processes that can be transferred to groups that can be self-sustaining in these processes using collaboration techniques and technology. Through a number of action research studies with a host of organizations we developed a Collaboration Engineering design approach. This paper presents and illustrates this approach in terms of its way of thinking, working, modeling and controlling. Finally, an agenda for future research is defined.