What is E-Collaboration?Ned Kock

Texas A&M International University, USA

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EDITORIAL ESSAY

E-COLLABORATIONDEFINED

Electronic collaboration (e-collabora-tion) is operationally defined here as collabo-ration using electronic technologies amongdifferent individuals to accomplish a commontask (Kock & D’Arcy, 2002, 2001). This is abroad definition that encompasses not onlycomputer-mediated collaborative work, butalso collaborative work supported by othertypes of technologies that do not fit mostpeople’s definition of a “computer,” such asthe telephone, which is not, strictly speaking,a computer – even though some of today’stelephone devices probably have more pro-cessing power than some of the first com-

puters back in the 1940s. Another example isthe teleconferencing suite, whose main com-ponents are cameras, televisions and tele-communications devices.

The above operational definition, whichI will use as a basis to discuss other relatedissues in this article, is arguably very broad.Yet, it is probably clearer than the generalview of e-collaboration in industry, whichsome may also see as a bit unfocused. Forexample, some developers of e-collaborationtools, such as Microsoft Corp. and GrooveNetworks, emphasize their technologies’ sup-port for the conduct of electronic meetingsover the Internet. There seems to be a con-cern by those developers with offering fea-tures that make electronic meetings as simi-lar to face-to-face meetings as possible.

ABSTRACT

This article defines e-collaboration and provides a historical glimpse at how and when e-collaboration emerged. The discussion suggests that the emergence of e-collaboration had more todo with military considerations than with the solution of either organizational or broad societalproblems. It also is argued that e-collaboration, as an area of research and industrial development,is broader than what is often referred to as computer-mediated communication. The article concludeswith a discussion of six key conceptual elements of e-collaboration: (1) the collaborative task, (2)e-collaboration technology, (3) individuals involved in the collaborative task, (4) mental schemaspossessed by the individuals, (5) the physical environment surrounding the individuals, and (6) thesocial environment surrounding the individuals.

Keywords: communication media; computer-mediated communication; e-collaboration; electroniccommunication; human factors; social influences

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Industry information-technology (IT)publications, such as CIO Magazine andComputerworld, on the other hand, often tendto favor e-collaboration technologies as toolsto support business-to-business electroniccommerce and virtual supply chain manage-ment over the Web. These are business ac-tivities that arguably are substantially differ-ent from electronic meetings, both in termsof scope and main goals. The primary audi-ences of industry IT publications are IT man-agers and professionals – the consumers ofe-collaboration technologies. Given that, onecan imagine the possible misunderstandingsthat may take place when those managersand professionals get together with develop-ers’ sales representatives to discuss possiblee-collaboration technology purchases.

FIRST E-COLLABORATIONTECHNOLOGY

As far as buzzwords are concerned, “e-collaboration” is still in its infancy, even thoughthe technologies necessary to make e-col-laboration happen have been around for quitesome time. Strictly speaking, e-collaborationcould have happened as early as the mid-1800s, with the invention of the telegraph bySamuel F.B. Morse. The telegraph allowedindividuals to accomplish collaborative tasksinteracting primarily electronically. If one as-sumes that the telegraph was too cumber-some to support e-collaboration, it may bemore reasonable to argue that the birth of e-collaboration could have been soon after that,in the 1870s, with the invention of the tele-phone by Alexander Graham Bell.

Yet, for a variety of reasons, true e-collaboration had to wait many years toemerge. Did the commercialization of the firstmainframe computers in the 1950s, follow-ing the ENIAC project, help much in that re-spect? Not really, and that was not neces-sarily due to technological obstacles to de-

veloping e-collaboration systems for main-frames. The real reason seems to have beenthe cost of mainframes (Kock, 1999), whichwas then seen as too high for them to beused (a) by anyone other than very special-ized workers, who often dressed like medi-cal doctors; or (b) for anything other thanheavy data processing-intensive and/or cal-culation-intensive applications. Of course, e-collaboration was not seen as one of thoseapplications. Moreover, worker collaborationwas not a very fashionable management ideaby the time mainframes hit the market big-time in the 1960s (Kock, 2002).

Then the ARPANET, the precursor oftoday’s Internet, happened in the late 1960s.The ARPANET Project’s main goal was tobuild a geographically distributed network ofmainframes within the United States (U.S.)that could withstand a massive, and possiblynuclear, military attack by what was thenknown as the Soviet Union. By that time,mainframes were used in ballistics calcula-tions, without which intercontinental missileswould not be as effective in reaching theirtargets as they were expected to be. TheProject was motivated by the Cold War be-tween the U.S. and the Soviet Union, whichreached a tense stage in the early 1960s. Themain sponsor of the ARPANET Project wasthe U.S. Department of Defense.

One of the tools developed to allowARPANET users to exchange data wascalled “electronic mail” (e-mail). E-mail wasinitially perceived as a “toy” system that re-searchers involved in the ARPANET Projectused to casually interact with each other. Thisperception gave way to one that character-izes e-mail as the father (or mother) of all e-collaboration technologies (Sproull & Kiesler,1991). To the surprise of many, serious useof e-mail grew quickly, primarily as a tech-nology to support collaboration among re-searchers, university professors and students– the primary users of ARPANET while itwas in its infancy.

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So, in spite of the fact that other tech-nologies already existed that could have beenused for e-collaboration, e-mail was arguablythe first technology to be used to support e-collaborative work. Interestingly, e-mail’ssuccess as an e-collaboration technology hasyet been unmatched – at least in organiza-tional environments (college dorms do notqualify). This is somewhat surprising, givene-mail’s granddaddy status as far as e-col-laboration is concerned. Helping it hold thatenviable position is e-mail’s combination ofsimplicity, similarity to a widely used “low-tech” system (the paper-based mail system)and support for anytime-anyplace interaction.

E-COLLABORATION VS.COMPUTER-MEDIATEDCOMMUNICATION

The International Journal of e-Col-laboration, as an academic outlet, is prima-rily concerned with e-collaboration research.What I refer to in this article as “e-collabora-tion research” is in fact made up of severalresearch streams, with different names andtraditions. One such research stream is thatof computer-mediated communication(CMC), which has been traditionally con-cerned with the effects that computer me-diation has on individuals who are part ofwork groups and social communities. Onecommon theme of empirical CMC researchis the investigation of the effects of computermediation on group-related constructs by us-ing as a control condition the lack of com-puter mediation – what some prefer to sim-ply call “face-to-face interaction.”

E-collaboration is not the same as CMC.Earlier, I defined e-collaboration as collabo-ration using electronic technologies amongdifferent individuals whose goal is to accom-plish a common task. I would argue that, fol-lowing that definition, e-collaboration researchshould be seen as encompassing traditional

CMC research as well as other lines of re-search that do not necessarily rely on CMCto support collaborative tasks. One examplewould be the study of telephone-mediatedcommunication. This argument also appliesto another area of research normally referredto as computer-supported cooperative work(CSCW), for similar reasons. That is, e-col-laboration research should also be seen asencompassing traditional CSCW research.

Another distinction to point out – thatmay be seen as controversial – is that e-col-laboration may take place in situations wherethere is no communication per se, much lessCMC. Consider, for example, a Web-basede-collaboration technology that allows differ-ent employees of an insurance company toaccomplish the same collaborative task;namely, preparing a standard insurance policyfor a customer. Since we are assuming thatthe collaborative work is on a standard insur-ance policy, it is not unreasonable to picturea case in which different employees wouldelectronically input pieces of informationthrough the e-collaboration technology thatwill become part of the final product (i.e., thepolicy), without those employees actuallycommunicating any information to one an-other. In this case, the e-collaboration sys-tem would pull together different pieces ofinformation from different individuals intowhat would in the end become an insurancepolicy, and in such a way that the individualsmay not have been aware of one another.Some, of course, will argue that this is not“really” e-collaboration. But it fits our defini-tion of e-collaboration, presented earlier inthis article: “… collaboration among differ-ent individuals to accomplish a common taskusing electronic technologies.”

The above distinction is important, sothat we can have a general idea of the kindsof topics that would be acceptable for manu-scripts submitted to the International Jour-nal of e-Collaboration. Today, many tech-nologies exist that do not involve CMC but

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nonetheless are becoming increasingly impor-tant as tools for e-collaborative work. Mo-bile e-collaboration devices, from cell phonesto wireless personal digital assistants (PDAs),are good examples. Some may see thosedevices as computers, while others may not.Regardless, those devices are likely to be akey target of e-collaboration research in thenear future.

SIX KEY CONCEPTUALELEMENTS OFE-COLLABORATION

What are the main “conceptual ele-ments” that define an e-collaboration episode?This is a general question whose answer, Ibelieve, can further shed light on what e-col-laboration is (and what it is not). Moreover,identifying the key conceptual elements thatmake up e-collaboration will inevitably leadus to the identification of constructs that canbe targeted in e-collaboration research, whichis a desirable outcome for an inaugural issueof a journal that wants to establish a clearidentity.

Based on past research on e-collabo-ration, one could contend that the followingconceptual elements define e-collaboration inthe sense that changes in those elements cansignificantly change the nature of an e-col-laboration episode: (1) the collaborative task,(2) e-collaboration technology, (3) individu-als involved in the collaborative task, (4) men-tal schemas possessed by the individuals, (5)the physical environment surrounding the in-dividuals, and (6) the social environment sur-rounding the individuals. Each of these ele-ments is discussed next.

• The collaborative task. An example ofa generic collaborative task that is oftenconducted with support of e-collabora-tion technologies today is that of writing

a contract, particularly when the partiesinvolved are geographically distributed.The nature of the collaborative task (e.g.,whether it is simple or complex) can havea strong effect on its outcomes when cer-tain e-collaboration technologies are used(Zigurs & Buckland, 1998, 1999).

• The e-collaboration technology. Thiscomprises not only the communicationmedium created by the technology, butalso the technology’s features that havebeen designed to support e-collaboration.The implementation of a particular fea-ture (e.g., video streaming) in a particulartype of e-collaboration technology (e.g.,instant messaging) can have a strong ef-fect on how the technology is actually usedby a group of individuals to accomplish agiven collaborative task (DeSanctis &Poole, 1994; Poole & DeSanctis, 1990).

• Individuals involved in the collabo-rative task. This conceptual element re-fers primarily to certain characteristics ofthe individuals involved in the collabora-tive task, such as their gender and typingability (which would be relevant in text-based e-collaboration contexts). Thisconceptual element also refers to the“number” of individuals involved in the e-collaboration episode, or the size of thee-collaborative group. An individual’sgender, for example, may have a signifi-cant effect on how that individual per-ceives a particular e-collaboration tech-nology (Gefen & Straub, 1997), whichmay affect that individual’s behavior aspart of a group of e-collaborators (Kock,2001).

• Mental schemas possessed by the in-dividuals. This conceptual element re-fers to mental schemas (also referred to

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as “knowledge” or “background”; seeKock, 2004; Kock & Davison, 2003)possessed by the individuals involved inthe collaboration task, including sociallyconstructed schemas that may induce theindividuals to interpret information in aparticular way (Lee, 1994). This concep-tual element also refers to the degree ofsimilarity of the mental schemas pos-sessed by the individuals. The degree ofsimilarity among the task-related mentalschemas possessed by different individu-als engaged in a collaborative task (e.g.,whether task experts are interacting withother experts or with novices) may sig-nificantly affect the amount of cognitiveeffort required to successfully accomplishthe task using certain types of e-collabo-ration technologies (Kock, 2004).

• The physical environment surround-ing the individuals. This comprises theactual tangible items that are part of theenvironment surrounding the individualsinvolved in the collaborative task, as wellas the geographical distribution of the in-dividuals. Geographically dispersed indi-viduals are more likely than co-locatedones to use e-collaboration technologiesthat are perceived as “less rich” than face-to-face interaction, and spend time andeffort adapting the features of the tech-nologies to their task-related needs(Kock, 2001; Trevino et al., 1990).

• The social environment surroundingthe individuals. This conceptual elementrefers primarily to aspects of the socialenvironment surrounding the individualsinvolved in the collaborative task that canbe characterized as being social influenceson those individuals. Those aspects mayinvolve expressed perceptions and/or

behavior by peers, managers and otherindividuals (e.g., customers) toward e-collaboration technologies. For instance,an individual’s behavior toward a particu-lar e-collaboration tool, or certain fea-tures of that tool, may be significantly in-fluenced by peer pressure (Markus,1994), which may take the form of otherindividuals heavily using the e-collabora-tion tool and expressing positive opinionsabout it. That behavior may also be sig-nificantly influenced by the position thatthe individual occupies in an organization’shierarchical management structure(Carlson & Davis, 1998).

The above discussion on key concep-tual elements has a couple of caveats. First,the list of key conceptual elements presentedis not comprehensive. There are certain ele-ments that are relevant for e-collaborationresearch not covered by the above list. Sec-ond, the conceptual elements above may be(or have been) given different names by dif-ferent researchers, or the same name but dif-ferent meanings.

Nevertheless, I hope to accomplish onemain goal by discussing the conceptual ele-ments – to provide a glimpse at the complex-ity of e-collaboration and its many behavioralfacets. Each of the conceptual elementsabove, if significantly manipulated in, say, alaboratory experiment or action researchproject (Kock, 2003), would potentially leadto variations in key variables. Among thosekey variables are two favorites of e-collabo-ration researchers: task outcome quality andtask efficiency. Task outcome quality is fre-quently assessed based on how “good” thetask “product” is, often in terms of customerperceptions. Task efficiency is usually as-sessed based on how much time and/or costis involved in accomplishing the task.

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CONCLUSION

The field of e-collaboration has a prom-ising future, in terms of both academic re-search and commercial software develop-ment. As an area of academic research, e-collaboration has flourished since the 1980sand particularly the 1990s, which led to theneed for new publications outlets – a needthat the International Journal of e-Collabo-ration tries to address by its very existence.As an area of commercial software devel-opment, e-collaboration is likely to benefitfrom a critical assessment of how it can beapplied to the benefit of individuals, organi-zations and society – a need that the Inter-national Journal of e-Collaboration willtry to address in the future by encouragingand disseminating the results of applied re-search on e-collaboration.

In this article, I provided an operationaldefinition of e-collaboration and a historicalglimpse at how and when e-collaborationemerged. I also argued that e-collaboration,as an area of research and industrial devel-opment, is broader than CMC – an argumentthat also applies to CSCW. Finally, I discussedkey conceptual elements in connection withe-collaboration that I hope will provide a rela-tively easy-to-understand conceptual basis forfuture research design and implementation.While the conceptual elements discussedhave consistently been targeted individuallyin past research, rarely have interaction ef-fects among those conceptual elements beeninvestigated. There are tremendous researchopportunities and challenges (mostly meth-odological) for researchers who decide toconduct research projects addressing thoseinteraction effects.

The view that I propose here of e-col-laboration is hopefully focused enough to al-low for a clear understanding of what typesof articles the audience of the InternationalJournal of e-Collaboration should expect

to see published in the future. At the sametime, I hope that such a view of e-collabora-tion is comprehensive enough to leave roomfor likely technological developments that arenot seen today as enabling e-collaboration,but that may be seen as doing so in a not-so-distant future. One such likely developmentis that of virtual reality applications (Briggs,2002) and their increasing use to support e-collaborative work. Other related technologi-cal developments are likely to arrive in otherareas, such as wearable computing andspeech recognition, with significant impactson how e-collaboration takes place in thecontext of certain collaborative tasks (Parenteet al., forthcoming).

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