Impacts of CIT: the Opportunistic User

Applications that have been a huge success in private collaboration – such as video conferencing, application sharing or social tagging systems –, have been failures in business collaboration. The benefits of Collaborative Information Technology (CIT) have been discussed in research and acknowledged by many companies for quite some time. However, the usage of such technology in business context is still surprisingly low. Explanations have been sought through the investigation of CIT in various settings. These studies have been mostly conducted in the specific context of a single CIT tool and/or task, whereas in some businesses several CIT tools are used concurrently when attempting to achieve a certain goal. In this paper we aim for a more holistic view of CIT usage by relating task, CIT functionality and its impacts. We followed a qualitative approach and conducted 10 semi-structured interviews with team leaders of collocated teams in 10 different companies. Our preliminary results show that this approach has promise to further explain the usage of CIT tools and that CITs are used opportunistically. The employee seems to rather use a few established functionalities for different tasks than substituting functionalities and therefore changing her habit, even though new functionalities might better suit a task at hand.