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This paper describes my research on the adoption of groupware technologies in business organizations, and their subsequent integration with individual and organizational work practices as a result of wide, sustained use. An initial study of two organizations successfully using a particular groupware technology--electronic calendars and meeting schedulers--revealed several technical, behavioral, and organizational factors that enabled initial adoption. Additional findings from this study suggested that groupware technology was integrated into work practices quite differently at each site, despite similarities in adoption patterns and other organizational features. My dissertation research will continue to elaborate the conditions that enable adoption of groupware technologies. My investigations will also explore the way electronic calendars are subsequently integrated into local work practices, and the organizational ramifications of these particular adaptations.
© 1997 Copyright on this material is held by the authors.
Groupware technology has long been heralded as a way to improve business processes and individual work practices. However, many instantiations of groupware technologies have not met expectations. Some groupware has failed to be adopted by enough individuals in an organization to make its use beneficial. Failure has been in part attributed to deployment problems where the technology was not available to those who could most benefit from it [4], or required those who would not benefit from it to adopt it [5].
Electronic calendars/on-line meeting schedulers make good groupware examples for study because they have obvious mappings to real world artifacts, putting them among the seemingly simplest groupware technologies. Additionally, a 1991 Internet-administered survey found that calendaring systems were the most available groupware technology, although they were the least used [1]. Further, information about their early use is available as a result of investigations by Ehrlich [2,3] and Grudin [5] who studied organizations, including software development companies, that failed to adopt calendaring systems.
Today there are examples where groupware--and calendaring systems in particular--are taking a strong hold. What has changed? Studies of the use of calendaring systems at two sites--Microsoft and Sun Microsystems--reported in Grudin & Palen [6] have revealed several organizational, behavioral and technical factors that enable widespread use. This study has also raised additional research issues about adaptation of groupware technologies to their organizational environments and individual work practices. Interim findings indicate that social norms and communication behaviors about meeting arranging might be influenced by the amount of information calendars reveal; that tangible artifacts can be born out of technologically-supported collaborations which in turn are useful for other purposes; and that there are potentially critical trade-offs between efficiency, information resource creation, and privacy. My dissertation research will refine and elaborate the conditions that facilitate groupware adoption, and investigate subsequent integration of groupware technology into work practices and the organizational environment.
Results from the initial study show that a set of social and technical factors and conditions supported a mostly bottom-up adoption trajectory. Individual contributors and developers were among the first to use calendaring systems, with pressure moving upward and laterally. Once secretaries adopted them, pressure was exerted in all directions. Better designed and more reliable applications had many features that appealed to individual use; this discretion led to a critical mass of users, whose subtle peer pressure propelled and subsequently maintained wider use.
Other factors contributed to wide adoption, including the presence of strong technical infrastructures comprised of technical support staff, common computer platforms, dedicated computers to virtually all employees, and organization-wide networks. Integration of the groupware applications with other desktop applications was often cited as an important feature. Coupled with a mature "behavioral infrastructure" in which employees reliably monitor and respond to e-mail, integrating calendaring systems with e-mail (to issue and receive specially-formatted meeting invitations) improves accessibility. Pressure to use the groupware was subtly delivered through e-mail mechanisms as well. Non-users would be reminded of their "contrariness" by the electronic meeting invitations that they could not optimally use. Incorporation of linguistic references to the calendaring systems into everyday conversation further entrenched the systems in organizational life.
Additional findings from this initial study have set the stage for further research at additional sites. Microsoft and Sun share similar patterns of adoption and usage levels. Responses by employees across sites about certain aspects of calendar work are remarkably similar. However, the role the calendaring systems play beyond the abstracted notions of personal information management and meeting scheduling are quite different.
The differences that are most apparent between the two sites suggest that there are trade-offs between privacy, efficiency and the creation of information artifacts. For example, the two calendaring systems used at these companies reveal different amounts of information for personal calendars by default. (Although privacy defaults can be changed to emulate either configuration these systems are shipped with, over 80% of respondents in a widely distributed survey at each company said that they have not changed their defaults.) Sun calendars, by default, reveal both the appointment time and the appointment details (an "Open" configuration). Microsoft calendars, by default, only reveal busy and free times (a "Closed" configuration). These configurations afford different uses of calendars within the companies. For example, Sun employees will use other people's calendars to fill in missing information in their own calendars about a meeting location they forgot to record in their own. Conceivably, calendars can serve larger purposes than meeting arranging, and may become valuable information resources in other kinds of work practices. Further, calendars might facilitate the exchange of social and organizational knowledge in the most extreme sense, by cumulatively acting as reservoirs of information. Microsoft's default configuration cannot afford this kind of use in as comprehensive a way. However, their configuration appears to have influenced the meeting arranging communications between individuals into surprisingly efficient transactions, greatly reducing negotiation and iterative message exchange that tend to otherwise be filled with caveats, conditions and "chit chat." Particular social norms have evolved in part based on what the standard configuration affords.
While these interpretations are preliminary, the data from the initial study suggest that once adopted, adaptations of calendaring systems to work practices can differ, and may support collaboration in unexpected ways.
My dissertation work will continue to study the groupware adoption and adaptation issues raised in the initial study. At this writing, new data from a third site in the midst of deployment of a new calendaring system has been collected. Additionally, a set of candidate sites have been pooled for selection, where calendaring systems are being used to various degrees. From these, six new organizations will be selected for field study across different dimensions. New sites will use calendaring systems developed externally, so that designer's assumptions about organizational norms are not built into the applications. Sites will be split on the basis of calendar type--"Open" or "Closed"--to compare the affordances these configurations provide and their relationship to organizational adaptation. Most sites will have widespread adoption of a calendaring system across a large number of workgroups, although sites with less stable use will also be sought.
Data will be collected through a combination of ethnographic techniques including interviews (to focus on retrospective adoption issues) and careful observation of individual work and work space (to focus on adaptation issues). In some cases, surveys will be administered to large segments of an organization to verify interpretations about organization-wide practices broadly, a practice met with success in the initial study. By April 1997, I plan to have data from at least three more sites collected and initially analyzed.
While findings to date are preliminary and based on a limited number of sites, there are some early implications for designers and buyers of calendaring applications. Groupware applications like calendars/meeting schedulers usually do not receive the managerial attention that large information systems do. Groupware adoption can be discretionary, and developers would do well to design to discretionary appeal. Buyers of calendaring applications should understand the features that provide privacy and access. An organization's current communication practices and attitudes about information sharing might be better served by one design over another. While some organizations might be in a position to adapt their communication and meeting arranging practices to a groupware tool, others would best be served by fitting the tool to existing behaviors.
I thank Jonathan Grudin for his roles as advisor and collaborator, Ellen Isaacs for continued assistance, and Suzanne Schaefer for helpful comments. This work is funded by a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship awarded to the author, and an NSF Grant # IRI-9612355 awarded to Jonathan Grudin.
[1] Butterfield, J., Rathnam, S. & Whinston, A. B. (1993): Groupware perceptions and reality: An e-mail survey. Proc. 26th Annual HICSS, 208-217.
[2] Ehrlich, S. E. (1987a): Social and psychological factors influencing the design of office communication systems. Proc. CHI+GI'87, 323-329. New York: ACM.
[3] Ehrlich, S. E. (1987b). Strategies for encouraging successful adoption of office communication systems. ACM Transactions on Office Information Systems, 5, 340-357.
[4] Francik, E., Rudman, S. E., Cooper, S., & Levine, S. (1991): Putting Innovation to Work: Adoption Strategies for Multimedia Communication Systems. Communications of the ACM, 34, 12 (December).
[5] Grudin, J. (1988): Why CSCW applications fail: Problems in the design and evaluation of organizational interfaces. Proc. CSCW'88, 85-93. New York: ACM. Extended version in Office: Technology and People, 4, 3, 245-264.
[6] Grudin, J. & Palen, L: (1995) Why Groupware Succeeds: Discretion or Mandate? in European CSCW. Stockholm, Sweden.
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