Expectations and experiences of CSCW in an engineering environment

Existing organisational context and user expectations have a huge effect on the success of introducing CSCW technology, and should have a correspondingly strong influence on the choice and design of these tools. This paper first discusses organisational context and end-user expectations encountered in a large distributed engineering organisation planning to implement a CSCW pilot. It is demonstrated that while the organisational structure was apparently ripe for support with CSCW tools and tools existed which matched clearly expressed user requirements, potential users remained sceptical of their value. An account is then given of the pilot itself, where a range of collaborative technologies was implemented, of which the primary tool actually used was email. Reasons for this are discussed. While this organisation is, in the final analysis, unique, we hope that our conclusions will be of interest both to practitioners working in similar contexts and to CSCW researchers.