John Warfield says:
>It is too bad that more people don't adopt Michael's viewpoint and ask
the question as to what kinds of issues require what kinds of displays,
and look outside the corporate catalog now and then for solutions that
really are congruent with the requirements.
Several years ago, when I worked as a Research Fellow at the Institute for
the Future, we wrote a couple of books and lots of articles about
groupware and what types of groupware are appropriate for what kinds of
team activities. One of our team, David Sibbet is a sensational process
consultant, and was always able to show a paper-based tool to replace a
technology. Our research is in the book LEADING BUSINESS TEAMS: Using
Groupware to Support TEam Effectiveness (I don't have the exact title
here). It was published by Addison-Wesley as part of the OD series in
1991.
We used a time/place taxonomy to assess which tools might be effective:
Same Place Different Place
Same Time In meetings or Permanent team rooms
in classrooms: or learning labs:
Presentation aids Collaboration bases
Copyboards such as Notes
Elec. meeting support
Different In cross distance At the desktop
Time meetings or classrooms Email/voicemail
Videoconferencing Project mngmt tools
Screen sharing Workflow
Co-authoring/editing
I hope the above came through okay. If not, let me know, and I can refer
you to the book and some articles. We also identified types of technology
that could be used for various stages of team performance. As you might
imagine, in stages of orientation and trust building, NO technology was
appropriate. However, when teams are in implementation stages, LOTS of
technology was effective. If anyone is interested, I'll dig into my files
to resurrect one summary article.
-- Alexia Martin alexiam@aol.com