"What Have You Done for Me Lately?" A Case Study of Barriers to Collaborative Tool Adoption in a Manufacturing Engineering Setting

This study examined a collaborative tool intervention within a geographically-distributed engineering design team in a large automobile parts manufacturing company. The intervention consisted of baseline observation and data collection to determine user requirements, followed by supported introduction of collaborative tools that matched those requirements, and then additional data collection and observation to assess the impact of the collaborative tools on team performance. Results showed that, a small proportion (1/3) of the team adopted the introduced collaborative tools, which had a positive impact on collaborative work. Furthermore, workarounds already in use within the team, such as transmitting engineering drawings as email attachments, were sufficiently successful to inhibit exploration and adoption of alternative tools – even when these tools had desirable features as described by the engineers. Findings from this study suggest that collaborative tools must be clearly superior to existing practices to merit the effort of deployment, adoption, and subsequent use, since the burden of learning and mastering a new tool in a demanding and fast-paced engineering design environment may not outweigh the perceived benefits. Practical recommendations focus on the larger role of competing demands, inertia and prior practice in implementing collaborative tools in field settings – and on the challenge of measuring the impact of collaborative tool use. As American industry continues to meet the challenges of global competition, rapid change and increasing complexity, organizations have dramatically increased the number of employees working in geographically distributed teams [1, 9, 16]. Distributed teams are critical to a global organization's success because they allow knowledge to be shared across organizational boundaries and aid in the creation of new products and services [11, 13]. Furthermore, having the option of forming geographically distributed teams offers organizations greater flexibility [17]. Specifically, globalization of manufacturing has created a growing need for product development to occur among distributed teams, driving the use of collaborative tools [20]. Collaborative product development is the process of sharing information in the design and creation of products to greatly speed manufacturing [8]. Designers, engineers, and managers must make decisions based on analysis from shared data from many sources. In fact, today's product development efforts are dominated by While geographically dispersed teams may seem an attractive solution to global organizations, they face numerous challenges to effective performance, including coordination and communication barriers. While there are many technologies to facilitate distributed work, their impact on the performance of distributed teams in manufacturing engineering settings …