Beyond GSS: Fitting Collaboration Technology to a Given Work Practice

Collaboration has become a critical success factor for many organizations. Collaboration is however not without challenges. Free riding, dominance, group think or hidden agendas are but a few phenomena in group work that make it a non straight effort. In addition, tools and technology that supports collaboration exists in a variety of shapes from complex group support systems (GSS) to simple boxes with cards and pencils. GSS often only offer a limited set of tools with a limited set of configurable features. Organizations, however, face an unlimited variety of problems with an unlimited variety of structures. In this article, we present a component-based groupware approach that goes beyond current GSS and allows collaboration engineers to fit the collaboration technology to a given work practice. We illustrate the feasibility of our approach by reporting on first experiences on supporting a requirements engineering work practice.