Many of MITRE's customer organizations operate in distributed locations and/or asynchronously and find it difficult to collaborate despite having tried one or more of the large number of collaboration tools in the marketplace. With increasingly mobile workers and the accepted practices of telecommuting and flexible time, our customers and our own company are faced with the need for better collaboration support.
How can we best help them? In MITRE's Information Technology Center, we have ethnographers and human-computer interaction specialists with the skills to study work culture and work practices. We also have systems architects, technology designers, and implementers. In short, we have everyone needed to go from understanding a group's collaborative technology needs to implementing technology solutions in support of today's mobile, more flexible worker. Internally, we also have a need for different and better collaboration tools to work more closely together as a multi-faceted organization (e.g., project-related teams, communities of interest, departments, and divisions)—a situation that parallels that of many of our customers. Who better to study than ourselves?
This investigative study was designed to help us better understand current work practices, workarounds, collaboration needs and issues by applying social science techniques to characterize group work processes.
